Goodbye to Pontiac: The End of an Era for American Muscle Cars

[Ivan Seeking]

Pontiac is being phased out.
http://chattahbox.com/business/2009/02/19/gm-to-stop-sales-of-saturn-and-pontiac-brands/

From a time when the muscle car was king.

http://www.highperformancepontiac.com/features/hppp_0702_01_z+1970_pontiac_gto_pro_street+cruising.jpg

 

[lisab]

Yes but for some reason, they kept crashing into things.

 

[turbo]

Holy cow! Two superchargers, one on top of another? Seems a little much.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Holy cow! Two superchargers, one on top of another? Seems a little much.

Technically that is a supercharger and a superdupercharger.

 

[turbo]

Technically that is a supercharger and a superdupercharger.

Glad to get the precise engineering wording.

 

[Evo]

I have the next to the last Pontiac Firebird made, 2001, the Evo child wanted it, then had a love/hate relationship with it. Thanks to the dealership, the engine was ruined (they pretended to not realize oil wasn't getting to the engine despite the number of times I had it towed in).

I'm replacing the engine, I get people looking me up from the VIN on the dash and making me offers for it quite often. Should be a classic someday. (I hope). It had all of the bells and whistles.

 

[offtheleft]

i wonder if that effects visibility.

one blower is enough i think... power is easy. traction is the problem. same issue i have with my car lol

 

[Ivan Seeking]

In spite of my dedication to issues of the environment and energy, I really LOVED muscle cars. One of my first cars was a Buick with a 440 cubic inch engine. I could spin the tires for the better part of a block!

There was one guy across the street who built a muscle car. He worked on it evenings and weekends for two years and spent a small fortune in the process. In addition to an emaculate paint job and body work, he put a monster of an engine in this thing... He also installed N2O injection. Having finally finished it late on a Friday night, he got up early on Saturday so that he could make a trial run on the freeway when there was little to no traffic. At something like 6AM he jumped on the freeway and took it up to 80mph or so. Then, after about ten minutes he kicked in the N2O injection. A moment later he was aware of the rear end coming around but remembers little beyond that. The car was totaled. It had not been insured yet.

 

[Proton Soup]

that's a drag car. only good for one thing, dang fast in a straight line. that's why it's got big slicks on the back and skinny tires up front. visibility is not a problem.

 

[offtheleft]

i got a nice muscle car for you ;)

i have plenty more. i grew up around this stuff, i LOVE it. still prefer 4/6 cyl engines with a sophisticated TT setup. or, turbo and supercharger ;)

 

[Ivan Seeking]

i got a nice muscle car for you ;)

Is that yours? Beautiful! Tell us all about it.

 

[offtheleft]

Is that yours? Beautiful! Tell us all about it.

nooooo, it aint mine. i wish i could afford a 2million dollar custom built challenger. i have a whole bunch of custom protouring cars. that just happened to be my favorite!

i drive a supercharged cobalt. nothing special. haha

 

[turbo]

My buddy has a 340 Duster, and has been the national champion in his class a couple of times. He's just a mill-worker who spends all his spare time tweaking his ride. Back when he and I got acquainted, he was divorced and living in a trailer, and he was constantly borrowing my Dremel tools, etc, to work on his engines. Eventually, he got situated well enough to buy the tools that he needed, arrange for modified parts to be shot-peened to harden them, and get custom-machining (crank-balancing, etc) done by a machine-shop owned by a guy who eventually became a friend of mine (entirely unrelated - we both collected Winchester lever-actions) and whose business was centered around rebuilding engines for commercial fishermen.

Google on "Steve Clukey" to see what he's been up to. His Duster is still at 340 ci displacement and is producing at least 700 HP. Aside from running aviation fuel instead of pump-gas, there is nothing exotic going on. Lots of head-work, tweaking of intake manifolds, etc. I found out from him 20+ years ago that if you want to move masses of air and fuel into an engine very quickly, the intakes need to be rough enough to induce micro-turbulence along the boundaries so that the turbulence acted like bearings to speed the mass of the flow to the engine. Not bad for a guy with a high-school education.

 

[Mgt3]

Google on "Steve Clukey" to see what he's been up to. His Duster is still at 340 ci displacement and is producing at least 700 HP. Aside from running aviation fuel instead of pump-gas, there is nothing exotic going on. Lots of head-work, tweaking of intake manifolds, etc.

How does he manage to run aviation fuel in a spark ignition engine?

 

[Astronuc]

How does he manage to run aviation fuel in a spark ignition engine?

I believe turbo is referring to avgas which has higher octane rating than commercial automobile gasoline. Avgas is type of gasoline, and is used in aircraft piston engines, as opposed to kerosene based aviation fuel which is used in turbines.

 

[mgb_phys]

Is the point of these cars to look impressive or for street racing?
Wouldn't a Mitsubishi Evo / Subaru WRX with a 2.5L 350-400hp engine, AWD and sports suspension go faster for less money?

Or am I completely failing to get the point?

 

[Mgt3]

Is the point of these cars to look impressive or for street racing?
Wouldn't a Mitsubishi Evo / Subaru WRX with a 2.5L 350-400hp engine, AWD and sports suspension go faster for less money?

Or am I completely failing to get the point?

Are you referring to a car like the dual supercharged Pontiac? Cars like that are used to compete in bracket racing. They typically make between 1,000 and 2,500 horsepower and run between 6 and 8 seconds in the quarter mile. It's a completely different category of racing with plenty of money to be made.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

physics trivia: Why do race cars use wide rear tires?

Note the equation for friction.

 

[confinement]

physics trivia: Why do race cars use wide rear tires?

Note the equation for friction.

Answer: It is only an idealization that friction is independent of surface area. That model works well for Billy pushing blocks with a force of 40 Newtons, but not very well for an air-inflated rubber tire generating over 10^4 Newtons of static friction.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Answer: It is only an idealization that friction is independent of surface area. That model works well for Billy pushing blocks with a force of 40 Newtons, but not very well for an air-inflated rubber tire generating over 10^4 Newtons of static friction.

How is it different? I don't see a range cited on the equations for friction.

 

[Proton Soup]

well, what you really want is static friction, not kinetic friction.

 

[confinement]

How is it different? I don't see a range cited on the equations for friction.

If someone cited Hooke's law without any qualification, would that mean that it applies universally to all springs? Of course not.

Notice that the equations of friction do not apply to sticky tape, that is, they are only a good model for simple materials without stickiness. But there is stickiness between air-inflated rubber tires and racing tracks!

 

[turbo]

My buddy Steve runs huge slicks on his Duster and keeps them at no more than 4 psi most of the time to maximize the area of the contact patch. He had run smaller slicks for a while, but his quarter-mile times were inconsistent once he got the engine, tranny, and rear end hopped up to the point where the tires would break away and he would burn out at the line. Once he made the switch, he started pulling huge wheel-stands off the line and had to switch to front shocks with an extreme extension:compression ratio to avoid bottoming out and smashing his oil pan.

 

[turbo]

If someone cited Hooke's law without any qualification, would that mean that it applies universally to all springs? Of course not.

Notice that the equations of friction do not apply to sticky tape, that is, they are only a good model for simple materials without stickiness. But there is stickiness between air-inflated rubber tires and racing tracks!

And the stickiness increases exponentially when there are funny-cars and rails running at the meet, because they apply traction compound to the starting area.

 

[Moonbear]

i got a nice muscle car for you ;)

i have plenty more. i grew up around this stuff, i LOVE it. still prefer 4/6 cyl engines with a sophisticated TT setup. or, turbo and supercharger ;)

I always think of those as "granny" cars. My grandmother had a Duster, some light green color. When she totalled that car, I think it was a red Dodge Daytona she got after that.

I'm glad to see them cutting car lines though. It's ridiculous to keep selling all those crap cars nobody wants. The old Pontiac's might have been worth having in their hey day, but they're pieces of junk nowadays. Saturns have always been pieces of junk. I don't really know how they ever got off the ground with Saturns in the first place. I only knew one person who ever owned one, and it was one of the worst cars I've ever been in, and had no lifespan whatsoever. I guess they appealed to people who didn't like negotiating car prices, because that seemed to be the whole gimmick, that they didn't negotiate, which never seemed like much of a selling point to me (I guess I'm a better haggler than that).

 

[Ivan Seeking]

If someone cited Hooke's law without any qualification, would that mean that it applies universally to all springs? Of course not.

Notice that the equations of friction do not apply to sticky tape, that is, they are only a good model for simple materials without stickiness. But there is stickiness between air-inflated rubber tires and racing tracks!

Why do race cars use wide tires?
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=56486

 

[Ivan Seeking]

I always think of those as "granny" cars.

That was the sudden realization that I had when I first got my driver's license: Granny had a hot car! My grandfather was a mechanic who liked big engines. And back in those days, the bigger the better!

 

[offtheleft]

Is the point of these cars to look impressive or for street racing?
Wouldn't a Mitsubishi Evo / Subaru WRX with a 2.5L 350-400hp engine, AWD and sports suspension go faster for less money?

Or am I completely failing to get the point?

its for novelty, man. my car would walk passed an evo or an sti. but, for an evo: enjoy replacing the clutch every 25-30k miles. their tranny is WEAK as hell. and one of the biggest cop magnets EVER. an sti: some thing breaks, good luck affording the fix. and good luck affording the built to get any where near 400+ hp. to get passed that youll need to rebuild the engine completely and get at least a dominator 3 or a gt35r turbo. it would probably cost over 17k without labor. only thing those cars have on a drag strip is the AWD. but get a flat or anything of the sort and have fun dealing with the drive train ware and the cost to fix it.

as for those nice muscle cars/custom built pro touring cars. it would probably never see a drag strip. probably never sees a road. theyre for looks, aws, novelty and respect. because those cars could probably do a 9 second pass.

my car will probably do a low 13 second pass on street tires. toyo proxies t1r to be specific. but, I am aimed at taking turns. and, if you want to make power, rock the highways and put a ripple in the Earth with enouth torque to jump start a dead planet.

HAP stg3 R32: 400 AWHP / 500 AWtorque.
or... a toyota supra. half of them have over 800 rwhp theses days and could see 200+ on a daily basis.


to answer your question in another way. no, its not cheaper to make anything fast. dealing with a huge V8 or a high output inline (or in the sti's case H) four cylinder. especially new "muscle cars"

the pontiac G8 comes stockwith something like 400 HP. the new GTO. any non ford mustang: cobra, roush, saleen. all close to 12 second cars stock. add some cooling mods and upgrade the forced induction and youre set.

it all costs money and in no way is it cheap at all.

 

[mgb_phys]

These are for drag races then, not circuits or just speeding?

 

[Cyrus]

GOOOOOOOOOOOOOODDD RIDDANCE!

I absolutely hate how Pontiac ruined their name brand of classic muscle cars with ugly trash for the last 15+ years. I hope they don't come back.

BARF

http://www.carforums.net/reviews/makes/pictures/pontiac12.jpg

BARFFFFF

http://z.about.com/d/cars/1/0/I/S/2007_pontiac_solstice_gxp.jpg

VOMITTT

GARBAGE

MY EYES!

http://image.motortrend.com/f/editorial/the-good-the-bad-the-ugly/8441157+cr1+re0+ar1/2008-pontiac-g6-gxp.jpg

Why won't you die?

http://www.automotiveblogger.net/wp-content/uploads/2006/12/pontiac_aztec.jpg

Go away pontiac, pleaseeee.



...hey look a REAL car!

http://www.bmw.com/com/en/newvehicles/mseries/m3coupe/2007/allfacts/design/_shared/img/aerodynamic.jpg