Like time, performance is a relative quality. It had one very distinct meaning back in the halcyon days of musclecars, when you could stroll on down to your local dealer and drive out in a hemi-’Cuda or L-88 Vette. Today, its taken on quite another connotation. But in this era of substantially lowered expectations and massive downsizing programs one thing hasn’t changed much: Americans still have an appetite for cars that respond to the call of a heavy right foot.
In the mid- to late-Sixties, we experienced a period of admitted overkill. Detroit gave us the baddest of the bad—a truly nasty group of 400-plus-horsepower street panzers whose straight-line acceleration bordered on the absolutely brutal. Its a new ballgame now. Hard-line anti-pollution laws, increasingly stringent CAFE requirements, and 29-cent-a-liter gasoline have…
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MotorTrend (Digital) - 1 Issue, November 1979