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Muscle Car America, the new Muscle Car Informational
website that will be available soon. Here at Muscle Car America we
will be featuring all the hot cars of the past from the Mopar muscle
machines Challenger, GTX, Roadrunner and Barracuda to the beautiful power
of the Ford and Chevy Muscle cars. Featuring the Boss 429, Chevelle,
Nova's, Shelby Cobras, 57 Chevys, Camaros, Impalas, Corvettes and not to
forget the Javelin, Olds 442, Pontiac Firebirds, Trans Ams, Buick Skylark,
and any other car that we will be adding information on.
Muscle cars are high-performance automobiles
made primarily in Detroit from 1964 to 1974. Car manufacturers placed
large V8 engines in mid-sized cars, giving them quite startling (and, for
their size, inefficient) performance and setting off intense competition
between manufacturers to produce the most powerful and extreme machine.
The 1973 OPEC oil embargo, stricter air pollution laws and insurance
premiums killed most muscle car models, though they are actively collected
and restored. Although auto makers such as Chrysler had occasionally
experimented with placing a high performance V-8 in a lighter mid-size
platform, and full-size cars such as the Ford Galaxie and Chevrolet Impala
had high-performance models, Pontiac usually gets credit for starting the
muscle car trend with its Pontiac GTO, based on the rather more pedestrian
Pontiac Tempest.
Spearheaded by Pontiac division president John De Lorean,
the GTO proved far more popular than expected, and inspired a host of
imitations and a general trend towards performance, both in the true
'muscle car' class of intermediate vehicles, and also the smaller pony
cars like the Ford Mustang, Plymouth Barracuda and AMC AMX, and more
luxurious and expensive vehicles such as the Buick Riviera.
However, a large part of the appeal behind muscle cars was that they were
mostly inexpensive models young drivers could afford. For instance,
Chevrolet placed an extremely large 396 cubic inch (6.5 Liter) engine in
its compact Nova. In today's terms this would be equivalent to attempting
to make a Chevy Prizm with a Corvette motor (though the performance gains
would be vastly different in such a project today as smaller, modern
engines can use newer technology to produce vastly more power than their
same-sized counterparts from the muscle car era). Mopar also had several
low-cost models, such as the Dodge Super Bee and Plymouth Road Runner.
Between 1964 and 1970, Detroit auto makers were in competition for the
bragging rights to the most powerful motor. Power numbers generally hit
their peak in 1970; the Chevelle SS 454 from that year is generally
considered to have had the highest advertised output, producing 450
horsepower (336 kW) from a 454 cubic inch (7.4 Liter) engine. By 1971,
muscle cars began to fall out of favor and disappear, with one of the last
muscle car holdouts being Pontiac's Trans Am 1973 and 1974 SD455 model
(while the SD455 was considered the last muscle car, the Trans Am
nameplate continued until 2002).
Although the muscle cars' legendary speed on the straight-away was
unmatched, most had primitive brakes and suspension (compared with modern
vehicles and also European sports cars of the time), and tires which were
inadequate to handle the acceleration and speeds the engines made capable.
These inadequacies have all been to some degree addressed by after-market
suppliers, of course. As defined by
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Muscle Car America and Internet Directory an Information Resource COMING
SOON!
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and the American Muscle Collectors, Muscle Car Parts and Restoration
Services.
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