10 wimpiest muscle cars ever

http://autos.yahoo.com/news/10-wimpiest-muscle-cars-ever.html?page=all

Just a fun read.

 

Fun, yet disheartening that some of those cars are labeled as muscle cars.

 

x2

Those are are sport, compact, and pony cars.
The Mirada is the only one that's even close to being musclecar size.
Everybody wants to be in the musclecar club, I've had to put up with those people wanting their Cramaros, Furbirds and Rustangs to be in car show classes with real musclecars (like my GTO) for years.

 

hmmm,, I must be blind as a freakin' bat !!!!

I look'd at da article and didn't see no muscle cars ..

 

I loved my X-11...when it ran...


The X-11's reliability is one of the reasons I bought my 89 OCC, which despite being gutless was reliable as the sun and towed like a champ.

 

i still would like to see the little fireball that would be a king cobra with a new 5.0 and 6 speed in it!

 

when I look at that crappy article I pause to reflect, oh nevermind that is why it is on a site called Yahoo! What a clown.

 

A good read indeed! It seems a sign of the 80's that how it looked was far more important than how it performed...much like the girls I went out with in that era.

 

Not to defend the article but those of us born in the early '70's missed the Muscle Car era and only knew about them if we grew up in a house with a person into cars. My first memory of a car was my dad's '69 Road Runner with a 383 4-speed. So these cars muscle or not are what were passed on for us to believe were muscle cars and give me a better understanding of why my dad was always trying to make more power with our cars because they had none. That had to be hard to go from cars with plenty of power to cars that my riding lawnmower makes more power than!

I do remember growing up as a young boy and it didn't get much cooler than a Nova with Crager's and N-50's on the back, then a few short years later a tercel showed up with a Nova name plate

 

They have a very odd choice of 'muscle' cars, that is for sure. The very odd thing is that they are comparing outputs of these to the models sold in the 60s, without doing the conversion for gross versus net ratings. Funny thing, too, about that King Cobra. It may only have had 134 horses (that is the figure published by Ford), it had so much torque it would move quite nicely since the car was so light. Free up the exhaust, gain 25 horsepower, and that little thing would scoot quite well indeed. The 74 GTO doesn't deserve the criticism, either. Again, a fairly light car, with a decently worked on 350, and that would go very well, too. Neither of these, though is a muscle car. Too small. Oh, well. It's Yahoo, what do you expect? Accuracy is too much to ask.

 

A lot of what they said about these supposed 'failed muscle cars' can be said about most any car of that period. Horsepower was down, reliability was down. Most of what you saw was all 'show', no 'go'.

 

A friend of my wife had a 76 Mustang II blocking up her drive way.one of those notchback mustangs with a V6.She told my wife 100 bucks nothing wrong with the car. When I got there I had to deal with the husband and the price went to 200.I should have left but my wife wanted the car so I dug it out of the snow gave it a jump paid him and left. Well let me tell you I hated that car, I didnt even like its look.One week later actually 6 days later the transmission goes with my wife driving it.1200 dollars later and about another 2 weeks the rear end packs it in. The tranny guy gave me a break and fixed it for 400.OK now I have way to much money in this car that I hate more than any car before.In the mean time I go out and buy my wife a 76 impala wagon and put the Mustang for sale.I was asking 1500 and I never got 1 call. A good friend of ours a single Mom living in poverty desperate for cheap transportation couldnt afford to buy the car so I gave it to her with about 6 months of insurance still valid.That car after I fixed it went problem free for about 8 years.She ended up selling it to a friend and I seen that car all over town for years. But man did I hate that car it was gutless

 

Just to pick at a nit, that Nova would have been a Corolla. I always found it a bit tacky when car companies recycled a name for use on a car nothing like the original.

The biggest problem with the article is that there were not really any muscle cars left in that era. What they are showing are sport coupes which have never really required bulging biceps to be respected (e.g. Triumph GT6, Lotus Europa etc).

A couple of the listed cars such as the Mustang II and 3 Generation Camaro/FB are decent sport coupes and with a bit of tweaking can be very good indeed. Certainly they had the potential for much better handling than any of the true muscle cars.

mike

 

Is it wrong that I would take any of those cars, except the DMC. I owned a 77 Mustang II with a 302 and had the exact opposite experience than you, 66mopar. I bought it for $200 from a buddy. It had a different carb, headers and dual exhaust. It ran great. I couldn't kill it. I was young and beat the living crap out of it. It would burn oil and I would add used oil from oil changes from the company truck I was driving. It was named the Red Baron and the name was sprayed painted across the rear hatch. I took out countless barricades after a Judas Priest concert in Miami. I also hooked up a smoke screen to it using a windsheild washer resevoir filled with ATF and a tube to to the carb. An accident took it out and a passerby shouted, "The Red Baron got shot down!"