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I know I'm a newb...uhhhh duh. Yeah, I think I know that. But being about cars, this forum's a blast from the past for me. I'm 52 years old, and your priorites change. I didn't think they would, but they did, and they do. I'm an old fart - I toll around in my F-150 and throw groceries on the back of it. Old.
BUT, Get ready to cuss and curse me - my hotrod as a teenager was a VW BUG. The standard 40-horse aluminum bug block was just too easy to modify without doing any drilling and cutting. You could bolt on oversized cylinder heads, get a stroker crank that barely cleared the block, put in a 6K street cam (as opposed to the stock VW 4K cam), install dual port heads and a couple of 48 IDA Weber carbs, and away you go. Gene Berg tuned headers were a requirement to let it all get out. A 200 mm VW bus clutch fit inside the stock bell housing - you could rev it to the sky and dump it to come out of the hole, and it would tear your head off if you weren't ready.
Presto. 150 HP versus 40. Serious HP to weight ratio. The thing would pull the front wheels off of the ground coming out of the hole. We'd race between the stoplights back when there was no traffic. I outran Corvettes and all sorts of muscle cars in the short distance. Little did they know, if we went a quarter mile, they'd eat my lunch. But we didn't race that far, so it wasn't at all about top end. All those years ago. Hot rods came in all shapes and sizes.
I wonder - being out of touch with all of it- is there any street car now that you can more than triple the horsepower with bolt ons, without cutting the engine block?
BUT, Get ready to cuss and curse me - my hotrod as a teenager was a VW BUG. The standard 40-horse aluminum bug block was just too easy to modify without doing any drilling and cutting. You could bolt on oversized cylinder heads, get a stroker crank that barely cleared the block, put in a 6K street cam (as opposed to the stock VW 4K cam), install dual port heads and a couple of 48 IDA Weber carbs, and away you go. Gene Berg tuned headers were a requirement to let it all get out. A 200 mm VW bus clutch fit inside the stock bell housing - you could rev it to the sky and dump it to come out of the hole, and it would tear your head off if you weren't ready.
Presto. 150 HP versus 40. Serious HP to weight ratio. The thing would pull the front wheels off of the ground coming out of the hole. We'd race between the stoplights back when there was no traffic. I outran Corvettes and all sorts of muscle cars in the short distance. Little did they know, if we went a quarter mile, they'd eat my lunch. But we didn't race that far, so it wasn't at all about top end. All those years ago. Hot rods came in all shapes and sizes.
I wonder - being out of touch with all of it- is there any street car now that you can more than triple the horsepower with bolt ons, without cutting the engine block?
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