Tuesday, June 23, 2009

The New Era of Muscle Cars?


Muscle cars have evolved a lot over the years. The days of ground pounding monsters getting 6 or 8 mpg are gone, and a new age of muscle cars, and muscle car performance parts has arrived. The muscle cars nowadays are more powerful, more reliable, and get much better fuel economy. And the ones that are modded, now that's a different story.

Back in the day, if you had a hopped up muscle car, the power was incredible, but it wasn't very streetable. Nowadays you can make some minor modifications that will boost power noticeably and give you that little bit of extra power, without making it less streetable. Of course there's tons of things today that can be done to the modern muscle cars that will boost power significantly and make them run rough. The difference today is that there are options. On most of the muscle cars today, a simple cold air intake, tuner, and exhaust system will go a long way. a minimum of 60 additional horsepower without running rough, and several more miles per gallon on fuel economy. Which means you can actually drive it.

I recently met up with a turbo charger company here locally that has a unique set up for their turbo chargers. The company is STS Turbo. The are called remote mount turbo chargers. Also referred to as rear mount turbo chargers. The car that I experienced this system on was a 2003 corvette Z06. The turbos went in place of the mufflers, and the air filters mounted back by the rear tires. You then have charger pipes that carry the air back up to the intake of the engine. This corvette, running a moderate boost level was achieving 580 hp at the rear wheels. that was on a stock motor, no other modifications had been made to make it hold the extra power.

This corvette picked up tons of power, and if the motor were to be built to hold the extra power, the boost could be turned up higher and the car could have achieved about 750 horse power at the rear tires, and that's with the base turbos that came with the kit. One of the other astonishing things though was that the twin turbo set up added a significant amount of fuel economy when it was driven conservatively. Some of the people running the sts twin turbo kits are getting mid to high 30's in the miles per gallon. A muscle car that gets awesome gas mileage and has crazy power. STS makes their remote mount turbo kits for the Mustangs, Corvettes, Camaros, and all the hemi cars, as well as many other vehicle applications. Times really have changed.

The Mustang Performance Parts & Corvette Performance Parts have been the big changers in the muscle car aftermarket- Dan

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