Why no 'date this girl' threads? ok....

Toecutter · Post by **Toecutter** » Fri Sep 12, 2003 12:56 am

You've never heard of the 3800? GM's been making it for decades, and started turbocharging it back in '78 with the Turbo Regal.

What's really disturbing, is the fact a 25th Anniversary Pontiac Trans Am with the turbocharged 3.8L V6 puts out more horsepower and torque than an equivalent Camaro Z28 with the TPI 350 small block (280 hp compared to 245 hp, respectively).

Here's a website that will give you all the info you will need:

http://www.musclecarclub.com/musclecars ... onal.shtml

The '04 GTO is just a rebadged and smog-legal version of the Holden Monaro coupe, which has been produced by Australia for decades, since the musclecar era never died out from gas shortages down there (and is continuously fueled by the "Mad Max" movies, the only real contribution the Australians have to the civilized world, short of Paul Hogan and Steve Irwin).

While powered by the LS1 V8 (the Gen III Chevy small block, as used in the last years of the Camaro/Firebird), it's just a cheap importing trick for GM execs to not bother with the R&D to bring back the GTO in all it's glory.

I still think it would have been awesome if GM engineers would clean up their build quality (which has been suffering since 1968), making cars that would hold up, rather than follow the Jap "engineering" style of loading up cars with overpriced chunks of plastic and electronics that fail within the first two months of use.

If they were really smart, they'd bring back the Judge as well, and offer a tri-throttle-body manifold, to mimic the style, performance, and crisp throttle response of the tri-power setup that made the 389 so impressive. Hell, they could have even made a smog-exempt (non-California models only) GTO using the Hilborn mechanical fuel injection!

What made the GTO great in the first place, was John DeLorean's idea of taking a '63 Tempest, and tuning the car for performance with higher-quality aftermarket hardware off the production line (Muncie 4-speed shifters, etc). Once you're just willing to crank out a re-badged product, using crappy parts, with a hp:displacement ratio of less than 1:1, it's time to call the musclecar era expired.

Nestorath69 · Post by **Nestorath69** » Fri Sep 12, 2003 6:11 pm

Sociopathic tendencies... I suppose... ha ha ha....

)v(ajin Koji · Post by **)v(ajin Koji** » Sat Sep 13, 2003 3:34 pm

i'm not a schizo! yes i am, no i'm not! look guys you wanna tae this outside? Shut up! i'm trying to sleep here!

Toecutter · Post by **Toecutter** » Mon Sep 15, 2003 9:05 pm

Hey, stop trying to make the rest of us anti-social musclecar nuts sound crazy! We can do just fine by ourselves!

As for me, I checked my sanity just today, and I'm still hanging in there (regardless of how my gun-nut behavior sounds).

Savia · Post by **Savia** » Tue Sep 16, 2003 11:07 am

)v(ajin Koji wrote:i'm not a schizo! yes i am, no i'm not! look guys you wanna tae this outside? Shut up! i'm trying to sleep here!

As if I needed any more reasons not to go to Essex, ever.