Muscle with Hustle

In last week's twelve-hour endurance race at Sebring, Fla., the one-two finish of the fast new Porsche prototypes was almost a foregone conclusion. But the performance of ex-Road Racing Champion Roger Penske's Chevrolet Camaros, which placed third and fourth, was a startling surprise. The Camaro, after all, is a standard road car, not a finely tuned racer. Penske's entries were no run-of-the-showroom models, to be sure; at a cost approaching $25,000 apiece, each machine had been modified for racing with the addition of everything from a souped-up 440-h.p. engine to disk brakes on all four wheels. Yet the cars merely mirrored, albeit on a grand scale, a burgeoning off-track trend toward faster road cars--and Ralph Nader be damned.

To tap the growing market for high-performance "street iron," triggered by the introduction of the Ford Mustang in 1964, Detroit is offering an increasingly wide array of hot intermediate-sized "muscle" cars, and an even wider range of optional extras designed to make them hotter still. At the International Auto Show in Manhattan last week, the muscle cars were there in force, from Plymouth's Road Runner to Pontiac's Firebird, and they made an obvious hit with visitors. Says Ray Brock, publisher of Hot Rod magazine: "The high-performance buff can now literally 'build' his own individualized machine right on the showroom floor." Among the fastest of the new hybrids:

>Plymouth's Road Runner, a stripped-down version of the Satellite, which, with the addition of the dome-shaped 426-cu.-in. "Hemi" engine,* covers the quarter mile in a blistering 13.5 sec. from a standing start, hits a top speed of 107 m.p.h. "Beep-beep" goes the horn, duplicating the sound made by the cartoon character, as a warning to slowpokes that the Road Runner is on its way. Cost: $3,610.

> Ford's Carroll Shelby Cobra GT-500, a modified Mustang with heavy-duty suspension and transmission, hood scoops that ram extra air directly into the carburetors, and a new 428-cu.-in. engine that will be available next month on Ford's Mustang, Torino and Cyclone and Mercury's Cougar as well. Padded roll bars and shoulder harnesses are standard on the Shelby Cobra, as well they might be: the $4,200 car winds up to 150 m.p.h.

>American Motors' AMX, a $3,245 sports coupe on the market for less than a month. A 290-cu.-in. engine is standard, but another $123 rates a 390-cu.-in. replacement. Testing an extra-powered AMX, Land Speed Record Holder Craig Breedlove got the car up to 170 m.p.h.

Not for All. Among the options, the switch to a bigger engine is basic, though it adds from $400 to $800 to the cost of the car. Also popular: decorative features such as racing stripes, special identifying fender emblems and "spoilers"--vertical flaps that put pressure on the rear wheels to prevent spin-outs but are largely nonfunctional at highway speeds. All told, muscle buffs last year spent some $500 million on optional high-performance equipment--despite the fact that the cars greatly exceed speeds that are safe and/or legal on most U.S. highways. Nor does the price of the excess power end with the cost of the equipment. Gas mileage drops to ten miles per gallon or less. Wide-track racing tires, now virtually de rigueur, cost 30% more than conventional treads and wear out sooner.

But the main reason that the muscle cars are not for everyone is that they are downright difficult for most motorists to drive. One case in point: the Los Angeles father who borrowed his son's red-hot Mercury Cougar, promptly^ got a ticket for going 50 m.p.h. in a 35 m.p.h.-zone--in low gear--then stalled so badly on the freeway that it took him three hours to make the ten mile trip home. Witness also the experience of Hertz, which bought 1,000 of the original Shelby Carroll Cobra GT-350s two years ago. Customers were quickly disillusioned when the cars with jazzy, "four on the floor" stick shifts overheated and stalled in traffic--the engines have to idle at 1,500 to 2,000 r.p.m. just to keep running--and Hertz has turned them back in. Hertz's entire muscle fleet is equipped with easier-to-drive, automatic transmission.

* A more accurate measure of performance than rated horsepower, engine displacement, reckoned in cubic inches, is the combined volume of the cylinders.

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