Placebo Performance

"Old elephants limp off to the hills to die; old Americans go out to the highways and drive themselves to death with huge cars."—Hunter S. Thompson


Times have changed and, then again, in some ways they haven't. Used to be that the first word in performance for any American had eight cylinders and swilled 15-cent-a-gallon gasoline like, well, 15-cent gas. The heavier the car was, and the longer the trunk, the better. All that massive weight and the huge overhangs kept the tires stuck to the pavement a little better, lest the prodigious torque broke the rubber free and spun them into flaming balls of goo.

Downsizing
"There is no replacement for displacement" was the motto for people trying to go fast, and for the automakers that fed the desire. It worked for a while, but soon we started to think we might be running out of fuel. Prices went up. All of the sudden you could buy a 10-year-old '67 big-block Corvette for about $2500. (Of course, lately musclecars have become collectibles, but that's another story.)


Somewhere in the 1970s regular people who were not communists, journalists or jazz musicians decided that just because a car was small did not mean it couldn't be fun, too. Japan was showing us what the Europeans already knew. We found small, fast and fun cars that didn't cost big bucks. It seemed like everything in the automotive industry was changing. Front-wheel-drive drag racers? Impossible. But the 1980s proved us wrong again.

Show Vs. Go
However, as we stated at the outset, not everything changes. Some of the old rules that we applied to those old, big drag racers still apply today with fleet-footed Japanese and European imports. Some of the things stated here may sound sacrilegious to some of the younger generations, but this article is about going fast, not looking fast.