Automotif DXLVI...

1983 was a big year for Ford's Mustang for several reasons. 

It received its first big styling refresh since the Fox body Third Generation pony car had debuted in 1979. In addition to revised taillights and other trim and interior details, the snout was revised, with a slimmer grille and better aero, giving a claimed ~2% reduction in drag.

Not content to cede the droptop renaissance to GM and Chrysler, the convertible Mustang returned after a decade-long hiatus. Ford performed the roof-ectomy in-house, rather than farming the work out to ASC. Initially only offered on the Mustang GLX, it was joined mid-year by a ragtop GT. Despite their high price premium over a hardtop 'Stang, convertible sales wildly exceeded the manufacturer's expectations. (GT hatchbacks started at $9,300 while base price for a GT convertible was $13,479, or the equivalent of $42,600 in 2024 dollars.)

Finally, the GT version saw big performance gains. The 302 Windsor V-8 under the hood saw the previous year's 2-barrel carb replaced by a genuine Holley 4-barrel, while the exhaust system was reworked for better flow, including a more efficient catalytic converter. As a bonus, the previous 4-speed overdrive manual, with its awkward, widely-spaced gear ratios, was replaced by a 5-speed Borg Warner T5.

The results were impressive, with an 11.5% horsepower bump over the previous year (157 to 175 SAE net). Car & Driver tested an '83 hardtop GT and recorded a zero to sixty time of 7.0 seconds and a 15.4 quarter at 90 mph. The 5.0L H.O. pushed that new aero snout through the air all the way to 125 miles per hour, too. The Medium Charcoal GT convertible in the picture would have been a few ticks more sluggish due to the added weight of the stiffening added to keep the chassis flex to a tolerable minimum.

It was a pretty clear statement from Ford that the Malaise Era was done in Dearborn.

The one in the photo was captured in July of 2022 using a Canon EOS-1D Mark III and an EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS zoom lens.

Meme Dump...

Automotif DXLV...

The two big automotive buzzwords in '73 were "economy" and "safety". Since 1966 a host of mandatory improvements in automotive safety and security had been mandated in the United States. Mandatory seatbelts (lap belts in '66, supplemented by mandatory shoulder harnesses for front seat passengers in '68), padded dashes, collapsible steering columns, side marker lights, headrests, and other modern features all became the norm during this era. 

There were also rules introduced to reduce burgeoning insurance costs from crash damage and theft. Steering columns that locked when the car was turned off and the elimination of exterior hood releases cut down on theft, while bumpers that could withstand a 5mph impact were mandated. At the same time, clean air standards were imposed, and the disorienting effects of the '73 Oil Embargo made fuel economy a priority.

Into this environment Malcolm Bricklin introduced a new sports car: The SV-1. A nod to the times, the name stood for "Safety Vehicle", but that was an odd choice of moniker. While the massive bumpers... the front one made it look like a flounder getting its mouth washed out with soap ...were claimed to keep the vehicle from experiencing any structural damage at impacts up to 12mph, there weren't any notable improvements in protection for the occupants.

It wan't much in tune with the fuel economy vibe of the times, either. While the project had originally started with the intent to produce a simple, lightweight car powered by an Opel 4-cylinder, the final result was the 1974 SV-1, powered by an American Motors-sourced 360 cubic inch V-8.

The structure was of a laminate of color-impregnated acrylic resin over fiberglass for the body panels, all bolted to a steel rolling chassis, similar to the later Pontiac Fiero. Like the Fiero, it was not particularly svelte for its size, worsened by the lump of a V-8 and AMC-rebranded Torqueflite 727 automatic transmission or four-speed Borg-Warner T10.

For 1975, the engine and transmission were replaced with a Ford 351 Windsor V-8 and FMX 3-speed automatic transmission, with no manual option. (Bricklin defended this by saying that manual gearboxes didn't promote safety, which was also the claimed reason for the lack of a cigarette lighter or ashtrays.)

The 351 smog motor, with its 2-barrel carb and 8.0:1 compression ratio, wheezed out only 175 SAE net horsepower, so it had its work cut out for it hauling 3,560 pounds of plastic and steel. Car & Driver eked out an 8.6 second zero-to-sixty run with their test car and managed a 16.6 second quarter mile at 84 mph through the traps. Maximum recorded top speed was 118 mph. Observed fuel economy was 12-15 miles per gallon, which made one glad for the 21 gallon tank, no doubt.

Adding insult to injury, MSRP for 1975 had ballooned to $9,780 ($57,225 in 2024 money), almost fifteen hundred bucks more than a comparably-equipped Corvette.

"Ah," you say, "But the Corvette doesn't have those nifty gullwing doors!"

No, no it does not. The Bricklin's doors were power operated, each with their own hydraulic ram originally designed to operate a convertible top. Raising them in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot no doubt would draw a crowd of gawkers.

Both door rams were driven by a single pump and, while both doors could be raised and lowered at the same time, there was no interlock to keep you and your passenger from trying to raise one door while lowering the other. If you did that, you'd brick the pump, and be trapped in the car until you pulled the pivot pin out of the ram where it connects to the door and then try and do an overhead press with the 90-pound door while slithering out of the car and not dropping the door on yourself while doing so. You'd also have to do that CrossFit exercise if the car lost battery power while you were in it.

The interior exhibited the not quite ready for prime time vibe that plagues extremely low production volume cars, especially from startups. Combine all the downchecks with slews of problems at the factory in Saint John, New Brunswick, and it's not a surprise that Bricklin production ceased with the 1976 model year.

This one was photographed in Enfield, New Hampshire in June of 2022 using a Canon EOS 5Ds and EF 24-105mm f/4L IS.

(Cross-Posted at Cars Gone By.)

Miscellaneous Linkery...

• "I'm not saying they were right or anything, but their tanks sure were cool..."


• Don't poke the author. It's rude.


• Resilient Wheat


• 1969 Camaro RS/Z28

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Whupped.

Spent a week in Akron doing work with 4" schedule 40 PVC pipe in an office building at night after the employees had gone home, and then drove the four and a half hours home yesterday and I am just absolutely whupped. I'll probably be hearing sawzalls cutting pipe and drills coring concrete in my head for days.

It was good to get home to Bobbi and the cats and my own bed, though.

Today's gonna be a rest & recuperation day while I catch up on some promised writing.

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Automotif DXLIV...

Triumph's Spitfire was launched in the early Sixties as a competitor for the Austin-Healey Sprite. Like the Sprite, it was a teeny little thing. Unlike the Sprite, it was a little more plush, with features that made it more suitable as a daily driver.

It was what the British call a "drophead coupe", rather than a true roadster, meaning it had a permanently-attached folding convertible top. Rather than detachable side curtains, it had actual roll-up windows. And it had an actual trunk (or "boot"), which the first generation of Sprites had lacked.

Originally equipped with the 1,147cc four from the Triumph Herald, the motor in the Spitfire swole up until the the final variant's 1,493cc.

The U.S. version of the 91 cubic inch motor had a 7.5:1 compression ratio and sipped gas through a single Zenith Stromberg carb. Horsepower was rated at 53 SAE net, and that meant that performance was...modest. Road & Track clocked a zero-to-sixty run of 15.4 seconds and a 94 mph top speed.

If I'm not mistaken, the grotesque 5 mph front bumper and slim rear bumper tag this Leyland White Triumph Spitfire 1500 as a 1973 model. It was photographed in September of 2016 with a Nikon Coolpix P7000.
 

Automotif DXLIII...

Like its crosstown arch rival from Dearborn, the fourth generation of the GM F-body Camaro/Firebird twins was actually more of a very heavy refresh of the previous generation than a clean sheet of paper reboot. If you park a '92 and a '93 next to each other and look at the line of the C-pillar and the hatchback, it really becomes obvious.

The new refresh had some very important upgrades, though, and the most important was a transmission tunnel capacious enough for a more modern manual transmission, namely the 6-speed Borg Warner T-56, which had originally been developed to live behind the brawny 488 cubic inch V-10 in the Dodge Viper.

This was important because the previous 3rd Gen cars were saddled with the Borg Warner T5 5-speed and that meant that the rowdiest motors could only be had with slushboxes, since the T-5 wasn't up to the torque of the 5.7L 'Vette motor.

For the Fourth Gen cars, though, the 305 V-8 was gone. You could get a base Firebird secretarymobile with a 3.4L V-6, or you could get a Formula or Trans Am with a hairy-chested LT1 350 V-8 Corvette motor.

1998 saw a mid-cycle styling refresh for the Firebird. The Trans Am got a more aggro-looking snout, vents on the front fenders, and now the motor choices were the GM corporate 3800 V-6 200hp for base Firebirds and the 5.7L LS1 'Vette motor for the Formula and Trans Am.

Packaged for the F-body, the LS1 was rated at 305 horsepower, or 320 if you checked the box for the WS6 package, with its functional cold air "Ram Air" intake.

Car & Driver tested a 1999 30th Anniversary WS6 Trans Am convertible and ripped off a 5.3 second zero-to-sixty and a 13.9 second at 104 mph quarter mile run on its way to a 163mph top speed. These would have been impressive supercar numbers just a decade earlier and the Fourth Gen F-bodies remain some of the most performance bang for the minimum wage buck on the used car market to this day.

This one was photographed in September of 2024 with an Olympus OM-D E-M1X and Panasonic 12-60mm f/2.8-4 zoom lens.

It's been how long?

I just realized the other day that I've had the Mustang for five years now, which is the second longest I've ever owned a car, after the Z3. (In a few weeks I'll have owned the Bimmer for twenty three years.)

I had the Porsche 924S from... let's see... late '94 to late '96? I got that '75 Granada in '90 and sold it in '93? So whatever's in third place is a very distant third. 

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Calm Your Tits...

First the orcas, now this...

Animals are getting uppity in Europe. First we had orcas attacking yachts off the coast of the Iberian peninsula, now there are eagle attacks in Scandinavia...

In the most recent attack, a 20-month old girl was playing outside a farm in Orkland, a small municipality in the south, on Saturday when the eagle came “out of the blue” and clawed her.

The girl’s father, who was not there during the attack, told Norwegian broadcaster NRK that the mother and a neighbor raced to fight the eagle. The raptor attacked three times before it was killed when hit with a piece of wood, Folkestad said.

Automotif DXLII...

There are two automotive phenomena in play with today's ride: The Indy 500 Pace Car, and the Indy 500 Official Car.

First, there's the Pace Car. Pace Cars have mostly been convertibles, but more importantly, the Pace Car needed to be able to be able to perform the chores of the actual pace car in the race. During the Malaise Era, this resulted in actual Pace Cars that were heavily modified to be up to the high speeds involved, and those modifications were not applied to the replica Pace Cars sold for the street. As an example, the actual '83 Riviera convertible Pace Cars for the track (there were two built) had 4.3L twin-turbo intercooled V-6 motors that pumped out more than 400 horsepower and were in no way remotely street legal.

Then there are the Official Cars, which are used in 500 Festival events and parades leading up to the race and in the festivities on race day. Frequently these are the same make and model as the Pace Car, but not necessarily. In 1983, they were, though: Riviera convertibles.

Of the Official Cars that Buick provided to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway that year, sixty were white Riviera convertibles with maroon interiors, making these somewhat rarer than the 502 Pace Car Riviera XX replicas.

This one was snapped in September of 2024 using an Olympus OM-D E-M1X and Panasonic 12-60mm f/2.8-4 zoom lens.

Super New

The more mature a technology is, the harder it is to release a really jaw-dropping product:

So even if the engineers manage to improve an already near-perfect model, the new camera will not really be all that different.

That is exactly what happened in case of the Nikon D6: Like the D5, it still is a lighting-fast camera, it still has incredible high ISO performance and it still is indestructible. On top of that, the autofocus was improved significantly, but no one really took note of that, as the D5 was already practically infallible.

It is important to understand that major breakthroughs in physical engineering are far less likely to happen and if they do happen, they often go relatively unnoticed.

Always keep the Pareto-principle in mind: An improvement of 20% requires 80% of total development resources and is neither needed nor noticed by 80% of all users.

Meme Dump...

A penny saved is a pain in the ass.

People save pennies, but don't spend them. They pile up in coffee cans and pickle jars around the country and once in a blue moon someone gets arsed to roll all theirs and take them to the bank, or go dump the jar in a CoinStar machine.

So the government has to keep minting a jillion of the things so that retailers can make change for every purchase which totals up to a number that doesn't end in a 0 or 5. It costs three cents to make a penny. We're flushing money down the toilet and we've known it for almost my entire life.

But when it comes time to get serious about eliminating the penny, the legislature and the Treasury Department, and the general public make like that Spiderman meme.

The one thing I do know is that there's a particular flavor of conservative who absolutely lose their tiny little minds anytime you change anything about the money.

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Automotif DXLI...

I've been trying to get a shot of this mirror-wrapped Maserati Ghibli fo-evah, and finally got some good ones.

Automotif DXL...

1970 was a watershed year for Buick's Electra model. It was the last year of the third generation of the model, which had launched as a '65. Further, it was the final appearance of an Electra convertible in showrooms.

It was the first year of Buick's newest iteration of its big block V-8, the 455, created by boring out the older Buick 430 V-8. It was also the last year of high-compression motors under the hood of Electras. The 455 in this Burnished Saddle Iridescent 1970 Electra 225 Limited convertible had a 10.0:1 compression ratio and was rated at 360 SAE gross horsepower, but for 1971 it would be reduced to 8.5:1 so that it could run on regular pump gas, giving it a horsepower haircut to 315 SAE gross.

1970 would also be the last year for finned aluminum brake drums on all four corners on the Electra. The 1971 model year would see power front discs appear as standard equipment up front on the big Buick.

What was unchanged for 1970 was size. The 1970 Electra 225 Limited still stretched a hair longer than 225" between the bumpers and pressed down on the earth with just shy of 4500 pounds of road-hugging weight.

It still showed off the classic Buick styling elements, too. On the front fenders are the four Ventiports proclaiming its status as a top-of-the-line Buick, and stretching down the flanks is a chrome styling line echoing the classic Sweepspear.

This one was photographed in August of 2024 with an Olympus OM-D E-M1X and a Panasonic 12-60mm f/2.8-4 zoom lens.

Hey, Look!

Always be learning!

The first few times at the range with a handgun are a real big deal for most folks, and you’re likely to imprint pretty strongly on the first pistols you tried, the words of wisdom from your dad/cop friend/whoever took you to the range that first time and the coaching from the instructor at your first concealed-carry class.

For most people, that’s about as far as it goes. Shooting isn’t a hobby, nor are guns a lifestyle for most firearm owners. They’ll get to the range a couple times a year, maybe, and 20 years from now they’ll still be shooting the same way they were when they started out. They may retain some of the basics, or they may not.

The fact that you’re reading my column in this magazine indicates that you’re probably a little more into shooting than the statistically most common handgun owner. Like the music enthusiast who seeks out new bands to listen to, you’re probably more open to broadening your shooting horizons than Joe and Suzy Average. Perhaps you seek out coaching from different instructors in order to learn new techniques. I know I do.

Haven't we seen this movie?

Interesting choice of words for its headline from The Economist, there. I'd say this is pretty well-charted territory, actually.

The elections in the two states in the former East Germany were being closely watched in Berlin as a measure of the rising strength of extremist parties, left and right, as well as of the weakening position of the centrist parties that make up the current federal coalition. It was the first time since the Nazi era that a far-right party had won a state election.

The returns were seen as a worrying indicator of the health and future of German democracy, and they were likely to intensify a quandary over whether and how mainstream parties can isolate extremists and keep them from entering government.

Well...

Automotif DXXXIX...

The second generation of the Toyota Camry, dubbed the V20 internally, launched in the North American market in autumn of '86 as a 1987 model. Available as either a sedan or a wagon, and in base, DX, and LE trim levels, the Japanese-built sedans were soon joined by ones built at Toyota's new U.S. manufacturing plant in Georgetown, Kentucky. All Camry wagons sold in the American market were imported from Japan, however.

This Dark Blue '88 DX wagon could have been equipped with either Toyota's 3S-FE 2.0L inline four, rated at 115 SAE net horsepower, or the 156hp 2VZ-FE 2.5L DOHC 24V V-6. While a five speed manual was theoretically available, manual wagons were already vanishingly rare by '88, so this one's likely sporting a 4-speed automatic, but one never knows. I'd do bad, wrong things for a longroof Camry with a stick.

Despite being dull as dishwater, these things were phenomenons of reliability, doing as much as any other model to help establish Toyota's reputation in the US for boring longevity. The fact that this 36-year-old car is still out there tooling around as a daily driver attests to that fact with a positively Camry-esque blend of blandness and eloquence.

When the rats and cockroaches are doing drive-bys on each other in the post-apocalyptic wastelands with Glocks and AKs, they'll be driving Camrys like this one.

This one was photographed with an Olympus OM-D E-M1X and Panasonic 12-60mm f/2.8-4 in August of 2024.

Yowza

How in the heck can it be September already? It was April only five minutes ago!

Time has gotten so wonky since March of 2020. Things that feel like they happened just the other day actually happened a year and a half ago. Meanwhile, the last three weeks of this election season have dragged on for months.

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