Old Road Tests.....Again

I read Road tests of new cars in Motor Trend, Car and Driver, Road and Track, as well as Hot Rod, Car Craft, and Popular Hot Rodding. These should be taken as a baseline of what a given car is capable of-not gospel on performance. You really have to take the vintage road tests with a grain of salt for two reasons.    #1. A lot of the time the factories sent "Ringers".  A few examples-after 45 years-Jim Wangers finally admitted what we already knew-Car and Driver's May 1964 GTO test car that ran a blistering 4.6 second 0-60 time and a 13.1 second 1/4 mile time ( on 7.75-14 bias-plys smoking halfway down the track! ) was a ringer. Royal Pontiac had pulled the 389 and replaced it with a blueprinted 421. In 1969 when Chrysler introduced the 440 Six-Pack option they advertised that their Road Runner prototype ran "Very low 13s and very high 12s" in testing. Except the car's engine had been "brought to the top of specifications" and had a 4-speed, 4.30 gears and drag slicks, and the "Professional Driver" was Pro Stock drag racing champion Ronnie Sox!!  Do you think maybe a showroom example with street tires and 3.54 gears, piloted by "Joe Average" would run a just a TAD slower than the 4.30 geared, dyno-tuned, drag-slicked test mule piloted by a pro race car driver??  You think??  In 1973-the SD-455 Trans-Am blew everyone away. Hot Rod tested one that ran a blistering 13.54 in the 1/4, and Road and Track recorded a 13.75. If you look at the pictures and read the liscence plate-it's the same car. This "Prototype" had the regular "455" emblems on the shaker hood scoop, not the "SD-455" emblems of later production models. Further, the engine wasn't certified or available to the public until April or May.  This was because they had trouble passing emissions with the Ram Air IV cam, and the EGR valve function was questioned by the EPA. To make them legal Pontiac changed the EGR valves, and swapped in the milder Ram Air III cam, which caused them to change the horsepower rating from 310 to 290-although we all know an RAIV cam in a 455 is worth way more than 20 hp, and although these Road tests appeared in the April and May issues of these magazines, the tests were done months before-in January. The test car had the illegal EGR valve, and the illegal RAIV cam. Then Hot Rod opened the shaker scoop, re-jetted the carb, re-curved the distributor, added a shift kit in the trans, and added M&H "Street Slicks " which resulted in a blistering 13.15 e.t.  No surprise that the production examples for 1974 ran "only" low 14s. To this day-no one knows what happened to the badass '73 prototype. Some say a GM executive bought it, others say it was crushed after it's "Rock Star" magazine test tour. I mentioned before the Red and Silver 1973 Olds 442 that Motor Trend tested that in their "1973 Performance Car Preview" that blew the doors off a 454 Corvette, a 455 Trans-Am, and a 440 Dodge Charger, respectively. The Olds engineers grinned and said it had been "mildly massaged". "Mildly Massaged" turned out to mean a W30 cam, a 2,800 rpm Hurst "Shotgun" torque converter and swapping the standard 2.73:1 gearset for a 3.42:1.   # 2. Like I just said-a lot of the time the magazines modified the cars. The '69 Z/28 that Car Craft said ran a 13.11 had headers, slicks, traction bars, and 4.56:1 gears!! Think that might run a little quicker than a stocker with iron manifolds, street tires and 3.73s?  Hot Rod did the same with a 340 'Cuda-headers, slicks, and a Hurst shifter. This kind of crap continued until the present day. Car Craft boasted that their "Stock" '91 Mustang GT test car ran a blistering 14.19 e.t.  "Stock" except for the K&N airbox, swapping the 3.08 gears for 3.55s and swapping the 225/60VR15 radials for 235/60R15 M&H drag radials. Car&Driver's 1994 Mitsubishi 3000GTVR4 than ran a blistering 13.7 e.t.  accomplished this by the engineers disabling the rev limiter, disabling the knock sensor, filling the tank with 104 octane racing gas, lowering the tire pressure to 15 psi , and having the "professional driver" drop the clutch at 6,200 rpm and powershift at 7,000 which grenaded the $5769 transaxle after two runs. A neighbor of mine that had one was shocked when my Hurst / Olds showed him it's taillights one day, and when he later took it to the drags and ran a 14.58. Pretty quick for a 3830 lb all-wheel-drive car, but nowhere near 13.70's that Mitsubishi advertised. Besides the "stealth" modifications you have to be sure your comparing apples to apples. A friend with a "Macho T/A" was surprised when his 403 Olds, automatic, 2.56:1 geared model ran "only" a 15.62 in the 1/4. He thought it should have ran a 14.29 like Hot Rod's 400 Pontiac, 4-speed, 3.42:1 geared test car!!  Read carefully before you start spouting these old test results!  Mastermind