That Sixty Something in the Muscle Car

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It took a whole lot of skill to drive the cars of yesteryear.

If you are sixty today, you've probably been driving for about forty five years.  You probably began your driving career with cars built in the early sixties, maybe even the Fifties or Forties.     

Cars were slightly different then.

We didn’t have Radial Tires.  If we were really lucky, we had tubeless bias-ply tires.  Yet older tires had rubber tubes in them to hold in the air.  Those old rubber shoes didn’t have quite the grip that today’s tires do.  They didn’t steer very well.  They got a lot of flats.  They blew out just every so often.

Power steering?  We didn’t start to really see that exciting option until around the middle sixties – and even then it was an expensive option.  Oh, and of course the steering was still usually “recirculating ball.”  Rack and pinion?  Practically unheard of.

Yeah, we did have vacuum assisted windshield wipers (when they worked) but McPhearson Struts?  More of a Seventies type of thing.  You were happy if your early suspension system kept you upright while you were standing still – much less at fifty miles an hour!

You could get loose (skid sideways) in half a heartbeat and if you did, the slightest wrong twitch on the steering wheel would put you upside down hanging from your seatbelt.  Oops, almost forgot.  Didn’t have them either.  Well, actually some cars did.  Simple lap belts were an option.  Airbags?  What a concept!


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Speaking of transmissions (were we?) – most cars were standard shift.  Automatics were starting to happen then but they too, were expensive options.  Most cars came with a third pedal — which needed to be pushed, in order to shift gears with something called a gear shift.  You needed at least a basic understanding of how a transmission works, to even pass your drivers test.  Today we have countless drivers who have never even seen a clutch pedal.  They get in the car, put it in Drive – and off it goes.

But horsepower?  We had gobs of it.  Not too much in the early fifties but by the time the sixties had rolled around, Detroit had discovered that “bigger was better” and “faster was funner”.  “Big-blocks” with a couple of four barrel Hollies (remember carburetors?) were definitely cool.  We had plenty of horsepower if we wanted it – and often even if we didn’t.  She was fine, that “409”.

Gas Mileage?  Not a problem either, with gas at 5 cents a gallon or so.  Pushing the pedal on the old muscle cars could really siphon gas out of the tank but you pulled up to the pump with a five dollar bill and got change back.  (Oh, and the attendant washed your windows while the tank was filling).

Now even back then, we had slow drivers and fast drivers, but the operative word – was “drivers.”  Those old buggies were very unforgiving and if you didn’t know how to drive them you could easily find yourself in a ditch on the side of the road.

If you were running four hundred horsepower in one of those old lovelies, you really had to know how to drive.  That ditch took on a whole different meaning if you hit it at a hundred or so!

Knowing how to downshift for control, steer into a skid, pump the air out of your brake lines, or control the car during a tire blow out weren’t optional driving skills.  They were mandatory.  There was no electronic traction control to do it for you.

If you were a slow driver, you still needed to know how to shift – just to get the car up to forty or so.  If you were a “go fast” type, you really had to understand that clutch pedal, gear shift relationship thing.  Missing a shift at 6,000 RPM was – well?  Let’s just say embarrassing!

The “go fast” in the muscle car also cared about little things like knowing how to load up his nervous suspension system, or perhaps keeping those not so sticky tires somewhere in the general vicinity of the road.  Going “kinda’ airborne” wasn’t all that uncommon, what with old shock absorbers and leaf springs doing ninety five or better.  If you hit a bump in the road you sort of wanted to know how to bring it in for a safe landing.

When you see that Senior on the Service road, you might want to pause for a moment and think about what she learned to “drive” on.

When you see that Sixty-something moseying along in that muscle car?  He still appreciates performance, perhaps even more when it’s "power under control".  Might not want to under estimate the ole’ hot-rodder though.  He probably has instinctive driving skills — you never even dreamed of.

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Posted by Frank Miller at 3/14/2008 8:32 AM
Categories: Driving Experience, Know your Machine, Driving Skills

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