I watched the video and was going to say, well, in those days they filmed things with a hand-cranked potato, so maybe the audio quality is as iffy as the video... but recently I've heard that after a certain number of years, Google/YouTube is dialing back the the resolution on videos, which I think stinks.
Factory exhaust sure might help with that Cadillac video being a quieter video, too.
Back in olden days (1990's) our sports car club loved the VHS tape of Ruf's "Yellow Bird" at the Nurburgring. We watched it once per year, at a winter gathering. (A Ruf is like a Porsche, very much, but better in many little ways, and built in Mr. Ruf's workshop.) This video had plenty of drama, between the tire squeal, the engine noise, the engine being in a silly place -- and most of all, the driver being a rally driver and wanting to drive in oversteer whenever he could. He's a very busy driver!
This was before car culture around the world got obsessed with oversteer. And this car was part of the dawn of "yes, that much power, at all times" for those who want to put the tail out that way. This video, and the Cadillac video, seem like a real car on a road course. That 919 video seems like a spaceship by comparison.
Lots of lap times for this track at this Wikipedia entry:
en.wikipedia.org
I liked the last section the most:
@Squankum, funny you mention "Factory exhaust." when I was looking for a Cadillac CTS-V many were in rust belt or west coast states. On Mothers Day 2016 we were at our son's home and he mentioned that if he had the money he would buy a restored Chevelle SS 454 like the one in the
John Wick movie. On the drive home in the PT Cruiser Liane told me to go buy the Cadillac. A Google search the following day revealed a 2011 CTS-V with 11,700 miles on it located 6 miles from our house. Inspecting the car I noticed it had an Airaid cold air intake and axle-back Corsa exhaust. Those mods might have turned away a purist but I looked at it as $2,300 I wouldn't have to spend. I did spend $347 for a Diablosport tuner and installed a 93-octane tune. Turns out the intake and exhaust were a popular upgrade:
The driver of that Yellow Bird Ruf Porsche did a lot of micro steering on the course. When I participated in closed course races with the Corvette club back in the '80s, our fastest drivers were very smooth and rarely twisted the steering wheel like that. It seemed like the Ruf driver was trying to upset the car. I didn't know the Ruf turbo cars used the narrower body for its aerodynamic advantage. Very interesting.
All this talk about turbo'd 4 cylinders and it's reminding me of the turbo'd 3 cylinders that I was encountering during my car shopping. I just couldn't imagine a 3 cylinder that's turbo'd to last very long. No matter what my wife said about the interior of the buick encore, I just couldn't feel comfortable buying a car with a 1.3L 3 cylinder turbo. But, then here we are talking about 4 cylinder cars breaking into the 200 mph range and running hard at the track for a long period of time. Maybe I'm just narrow minded and have the mind of a caveman.
Cody, the parts that go into a turbo engine are usually different from the naturally aspirated ones. The engine in my '04 PT Cruiser has a whole bunch of parts that are stronger. The rods are forged with full floating pins, the coated pistons are cooled with oil squirters and the heads have special exhaust valves just to name three. Our first turbo was a 1986 Dodge 600 convertible, followed by a 1989 Chrysler LeBaron convertible and now an '04 PT Cruiser. The ECUs on the first two were primitive and very hard to modify but Chrysler offered a Stage I ECU upgrade that can be tuned quite easily. All I did with mine was a Diablosport 93-octane tune. If you do oil changes at or before the interval specified in the 'severe duty' description, I think turbo engines hold up just fine.
I was resistant to buying a turbo 4, but my Escape sold me. It tows 3500 lbs, goes into 3 digits very easily, and still averages about 30mpg.
Kay, I'm glad to hear you are a convert. I recently discovered my 2004 turbo PT Cruiser engine doesn't have EGR on it, I'm assuming because it met the emission goals without it. I also discovered Chrysler got the PT Cruiser classified as a light truck to help it's fleet CAFE numbers.
I agree on the concern about the life of these 3 and 4 cylinder cars being sold today. I think we will see in about 5+ years how they hold up in day to day driving. I have a Volvo V90 CC with the 2 liter 4 that has a supercharger and a turbo to achieve 316 HP and is very spritely in traffic. I was told it uses the diesel block so hopefully it holds up long term. Before that I had a Mercedes with the 4 cylinder diesel that produced 369 pounds/ft. of torque and it was very capable of keeping up with most anything on the highway. It is a shame that VW ruined them for everyone. If the march to EVs continues, perhaps none of this will matter, just not for me, I think EVs are in their very early stages of the battery technology and many will be stuck with obsolete batteries long before the car wears out. Many are finding that their insurance rates are extreme for the car and for homeowner's insurance due to battery fires. The push to save the planet is not without costs! Sorry for the diversion....
Gil, the auto manufacturers have been using turbos for a long time, with GM sticking its toe in the game 61 years ago. Swedish manufacturers have been using them for almost that long and I haven't heard they are a weak link. I don't have to worry about an EV burning our house down while Liane is alive. The idea of plugging the car into a charging station at a Turnpike rest stop is a deal breaker for her. I'm also with you on the battery issue and I wonder if Australia's move into hydrogen powered vehicles will pan out. Thirty years ago they made taxis switch from gasoline to LPG resulting in a fair number of people switching their personal vehicles to LPG.
Twenty years ago I was hearing some guy at the auto parts store saying the same thing about 4 cylinder cars, why, they're just overstressed, obviously, a car with 6 or 8 cylinders will have its engine last longer. I don't know how many 20+ year-old Hondas* you have to see on the streets and not grasp it, but it's about the quality. Any company can screw up any number of cylinders, and some companies screw up more than others.
Which gets us to the GM 1.3L turbo... from what little I've heard, that's one to avoid. I've noticed lately that the small Buick now has a 1.
2L motor. It's entirely possibly whatever GM bungled on this motor, they have since fixed. (My skepticism about such scrambling by car companies is "get back to me in 7 years or so and we'll know if your fix fixed...")
There were a few three-cylinder cars on the streets of the USA more than a generation ago, they were Suzukis/Geos. In naturally aspirated form, miserable. In the rare turbo version, kinda fun!
Alas, the scramble for fuel economy... and horsepower! makes for a constant pace of change and so many manufacturers can have trouble building something that just plain works forever. Also, we're making no progress on building "owner that checks the oil level, keeps up with losses, and doesn't cheap out on oil quality."
Here's a four-cylinder turbo of yore that just plain worked forever:
https://www.pistonheads.com/news/general-pistonheads/million-mile-saab-heads-for-museum/15599
_________
* Not much salt where I am. You never know what you'll see. Except a Ford EXP/Mercury LN7. I've gone a long, long time without seeing one of those. But a 70's Ford Maverick? Sure.
@Squankum, Liane is one of those people. She thinks a powerful V8 lasts longer than a wimpy one because it doesn't work as hard or something like that. No argument from me, it's how we ended up with a 4-barrel 400ci 350HP GTO instead of a 2-barrel 350ci 265HP GTO in 1968. I do agree that bean counters controlling engine design is a problem. Efficient and powerful small engines can be made to last but saving pennies on crankshafts, rods and pistons can cost you in the end.
I do remember the cars of my youth rarely making it past 100,000 miles without a rebuild or at least a valve job. Using re-filtered oil didn't help.
I had Saabs in the 60s and early 70s, the 3 cylinder, two stroke versions, they were great, had front wheel drive before it became the norm. They ran great, a lot of fun to drive and went most anywhere. Can't say that about a lot of what is being sold today. We won't know about reliability for a few more years. Honda and Toyota will likely fare better than most.
Gil, my state trooper neighbor in New York had a two-stroke 3-cylinder Saab 93 that he used to commute between Poughkeepsie and Albany when he was going for a masters in criminology. It never let him down, regardless of how much snow or ice on the road. It was in the '60s when you could put studs in your winter tires.
One of the most interesting things in the Yellow Bird video is that Stefan Rozer looks to simply be out for a casual sunday drive. No helmet, fire suit, or even racing shoes. Just jeans and a t-shirt.
The wheel work, frantic and extreme, but somehow precise, is amazing when compared to the aerial shots sowing the car swinging mostly smoothly back and forth. Of course steering with your right foot is always fun, and that car has the power to weight ratio to rotate by just merely
thinking about turning. I have an original VHS.
The 2018+
SCR was, and is my ultimate grail car. Singers are lovely, but I'll have a Ruf 10 times over if given the chance / choice. If I ever win the lotto...
Bob, the whole MPH/KPH thing is weird. It is fun to say you've driven 217 though (in a borrowed ****** RS Cosworth).
When I lived in England (what's up with metric everywhere but MPH???) we'd occasionally ferry to the continent and A) be using KPH, and B) be on the wrong side of the car. My wife and I had to get full British driving licenses for company cars. The instructor was great, he said we knew how to drive; he was there to teach us how to pass the driving test which is
much more stringent than here in America. I got 'nicked doing the ton' once in England. It was early on a Sunday morning on a deserted motorway (freeway, A12) well outside of any populace area. The magistrate made me out to be a bigger criminal than Jack the Ripper. At 30 MPH over, I deserved the ticket and fine.
Mark, I suspect that frantic wheel work was necessary to constantly test how close to the limit the rear traction was. Every article I've ever read about spirited driving a Porsche warned about how quickly it went from sticking to spinning.
My dream cars have always been modest. My phenomenal luck doesn't extend to lotteries, which I understand require some kind of investment, so a used Corvette or CTS-V have been my speed. At $40K, the used CTS-V felt like "The Big One" because it was more than double the price of our first home and two-thirds the price of the second.
I had a similar experience in Australia. When I showed up for the driving test they had to re-schedule me because they needed a full hour to be sure I wouldn't be a road hazard. At the end of the hour we returned to the office and was told my driving was flawless. Expecting a temporary slip, I was told it would take a few minutes. The guy started shuffling through a huge pile of applications and muttering to himself. "Missing left leg... Missing right arm... Missing right leg... Ahhh yes, missing left arm." He told me I would need an otherwise illegal knob on the steering wheel and the e-brake on my brand new Camry would have to be moved from the center console to the right side of the driver seat. When I asked where to get this stuff done he told me to contact "The ******* Center." When those people sent me to an auto shop for the e-brake move, I was told the only e-brake that would work was from a '50s era Holden and would cost $800. I chose to do the right thing and left the e-brake where it was. I had mentioned to the test person that upon losing the brakes the last thing I would do was let go of the steering wheel to fumble with a 40-year-old brake handle. I was caught speeding (80 KPH in a 50KPH zone) and the cop was kind enough to make the ticket out for 65 KPH so it was only a A$130 fine.
“I got 'nicked doing the ton' once in England. It was early on a Sunday morning on a deserted motorway (freeway, A12)”
Anything over a ton, is instant ban now a days.
A12, crickey I’ve been up and down more times than I care to think about, East London to Suffolk.
Steve
Steve, I always worry about being at the front of the line or the only car on the road. I was doing 125 KPH in the center lane on the M6 but plenty of cars were passing me. Liane got pretty excited when she saw my speed but calmed down when I explained it was only kilometers.
Looks like an interesting conversation and I’ll try to catch up later.
Just dropping in to wish Bob and Liane a merry Christmas and here’s to another good year above dirt in 2024.
Drives, Merry Christmas and a Happy Green Side 2024 to you as well.
That reminds me, a long, long time ago (1960's) Denis Jenkinson was loaned a Ford GT-40 to drive on the public roads for a week. And yes, he went over 100 mph.
The shape of things that must come When Eric Broadley's Lola coupe, with Ford V8 engine mounted amidships behind the cockpit; appeared at the 1963 Racing Car Show I was…
www.motorsportmagazine.com
I notice te author complaining about Monday traffic limiting his speed to 125 m.p.h. There's all kinds of crazy stories of NASCAR drivers in rental cars as well.
On Thursday morning June 1964, British rally driver Jack Sears reached 185 mph on the M1 motorway. Tabloids at the time had a field day, citing this as dangerous driving. From 22nd December 1965, the UK government trialed a 70mph limit on all motorways.
Coincidence, I think not.
What was he driving?
AC Cobra, testing for Le Mans
Steve
Steve, I didn' feel unsafe at speed on the Motorways. I was driving a '96 Ford Mondeo Estate with the V6 so we were in a battleship compared to the other cars on the road.
Hello Bob, hope all is well and Merry Christmas!
Have a KPH speedo in my 1968 VW Bus. Always fun to say I was going 110 all the way here.
Been driving a Bus long enough I know my MPH speed by the sound. Also 50mph is straight up on the speedo, 80kmh now. 50mph is redline in 3rd and if you did some balancing in the build, it'll squeak a bit higher.
I always said; When it wont go any faster... shift.
@vwpieces, Merry Christmas to you!
The digital dashes on the Corvette and Cadillac lets me switch the dashes to metric but then I can't be sure the oil pressure or temperature is OK. The engine note is a pretty good gauge for me as well. I've been driving my current cars for 32, 19 and 7 years so I know how fast two are going. The Cadillac is so quiet it's hard to tell sometimes.
