[455TA]

Originally Posted by mgarblik

It's rare that I find myself on this side of a discussion, but stock in showroom form, the new muscle cars will destroy even the very best of the old muscle cars in a drag race or top speed. I have in my basement virtually every issue of Motor Trend, Car and Driver, Cars Magazine, Hot Rod, Car Craft and others from the late 1950's to around 1982. Looking through all of them from time to time, it was very rare for a stock muscle car from the era we love to break into the 13's. Some did, but not many. Most of the GTO's through the era ran 14.2-15.0 ET's depending on equipment. A really good Ram Air IV, 13.7-13.8. SD-455's 13.60 and that was damn fast for 1973. The really fun road tests to look at are the hemi cars. They simply run all over the place. As slow as 15.3-15.5 ET's because they were so hard to tune, to 13.5-13.8 for really good ones. Same with Big Block Chevy's. I have literally hundreds of these tests and only a Yenko or Super Duty 421, or ThunderBolt or cars like that were in the 12's or quicker. And the average person couldn't just walk into a new car dealer and buy one, you had to have connections. Today, there are dozens of new cars that will run in the high 13's and are just ordinary passenger cars or SUV's. 12 second new cars are fewer, but there are plenty of them available for anyone with a checkbook and come in all brands, shapes and sizes.
I dearly love my old muscle cars and the hobby and love to see an old school muscle car take out a new one. But I can't deny the fact that a stock V-6 Honda Accord will probably outrun a 64-65 GTO 389 4bbl. automatic. I don't like it, but I can at least understand it. Technology marches forward.

Technology is always going to win eventually, so we have to adapt and use technology to our advantage, Like I have. I went to Fuel Injection and Aluminum heads, etc. Improvise, adapt, and overcome. Newer cars come with all that from the factory, so whats to say we can't use it too. And spend less than they do buying the new car and adding mods to it. They walk into a dealer, spend 50K on the new car, run a 12.8 or so, get mad thats its not faster, and they start modding them, so now you have a 60-70K car with a payment to boot. I have around 6k in my engine, 1k in transmission, another 800 bucks in the rear end, and various other stuff to go along with it all, I'm nowhere near what they spend and I stomp them at the track majority of the time.