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we should be nice.. there are honda owners here.. :)

"wait till that VTEC kicks in though, dude!"

Waiting, waiting...

Hold
On,
Not
Done
Accelerating

:)

wait till that VTEC kicks in though, dude!

Yup, that's another thing the 90s started. Horsepower wars, let's take an anemic 4 banger and spin it up to 8000 RPM so the horsepower number looks good!. Then we'll slap a HP/Liter number on there and make people think the engine is actually more efficient.

those V8s had a hell of a lot more potential and an assload more torque than a Saturn though.
rebuild the motor with modern parts (new pistons and rods, manifold, larger carb, new aluminum large flow heads, electronic MSD ignition, pointless distributor, etc) and lop off the emmissions controls like the old school cats, and you'll have a car that's a lot more venerable.
These are things anyone performance oriented did to the car as soon as they got it home anyway though, even then.

edelbrock manifold, holley carbs, headers, new pipes, gutted cats, freeflow mufflers, new heads, etc.. those tricks have been around longer than the cars themselves.

Mithrandir wrote:ewww wtf trans ams only have 160 hp? top speed of 107? my damn current v6 is faster than that!!!, excuse me, i have to go cry....

a good saturn S*2 with a few boltons could do better then that, heh.

an Elise even weighs in at 2000lbs, and makes a whopping 190bhp

handles well due to balance, but still.. look at how small that car is. a 53 porsche roadster was larger (think James Dean's "Little Bastard") and weighed 1300lbs

Really we've seen a gas mileage decline since the 80s. The cars weren't as powerful, but they were a whole lot lighter than your average family sedan and many were more aerodynamic. All we've done over the last 20 years or so has been to get equivalent or slightly worse gas mileage, but with more power. If we could make todays cars lighter, it would be a different story, fuel economy and performance would improve. General rule of thumb is that in a car over 2000 lbs, every 100 lb increase is worth roughly 1/2 MPG. My 93 Toyota Camry weighed more than Kikis Charger does, and made about 1/3 the power. I averaged 22 mpg with around 75% of that being highway. Not the worst gas mileage, but I purchased it expecting gas mileage for commuting and it didn't deliver. As much as the car sucked it should at least give decent gas mileage. Recent compact cars now are nearly 3000 lbs on average, Your average midsize/large sedan can approach 4000 lbs, and in many cases exceed that, light duty full size trucks can weigh around 6000 lbs when equipped. Mainly due to satisfying crash tests and insurance companies.

my charger + 108 octane = pure bliss

man I'd love to run dome pistons and high compression. heh
or even 8:1 compression and a nice 8-71 roots on that 500.2cid motor. mad max eat your heart out hehe

yeah I recall leaded and unleaded at pumps.. having to pull up to the right pump to get gas haha I also remember going to Korea in the late 70s where everything was leaded and having to cut the cat off of our car to drive it there.. then finding out that leaded gas pumps used a larger nozzle so we had to adapt the unleaded gas port on the car to take leaded gas pumps over there hahaha what a pain.

now I'm running a poked and stroked 440 from '66 that runs 11:1 compression with aluminum heads. I can get by with 93 octane but 100 octane plane fuel does a lot better at the strip

iron duke....i didnt think anyone here would recognize that term so i left it out.....thanks for letting me know im not the only one here who was around in the 70's......i had a 78 camaro for my first car and you could still get leaded gas back then and that was all i put in....it called for unleaded but with all the emissions shit ripped off of it and the engine work done to it i just couldnt put unleaded in it...