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Last night on Top Gear the Vauxhall Holden Monaro was deemed deeply desirable. A 5.7l V8, rear-wheel-drive muscle car, coming out in the UK for around £33K ... It was doing 60 at 1500 revs ... I've driven cars that would stall trying to do any speed at revs that low ...
Not ideal for town driving, admittedly, but for petrol-heads living in the city, who only drive when they've got long distances to cover ... (They also liked the S-Type R, but it cost about 10K more. The evil Chrysler 300C Hemi was judged a near miss, due to poor ride and iffy brakes.)
Not ideal for town driving, admittedly, but for petrol-heads living in the city, who only drive when they've got long distances to cover ... (They also liked the S-Type R, but it cost about 10K more. The evil Chrysler 300C Hemi was judged a near miss, due to poor ride and iffy brakes.)
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Clarkson ate his own hair. Rar!
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http://www.cadillac.com/cadillacjsp/models/gallery.jsp?model=sixteen§ion=photoExt&df=y
Only a concept.... at the moment.
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Then again, I quite liked the "New Edge" concept Lincoln - all sharp edges and shiny blackness.
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All the good looking cars seem to be coming from the States these days though, Euroboxes (supercars apart) are all so bland! It's amazing what a bit of American excess does to the girly-looking Merc SLK, f'rinstance - there's a Chrysler Crossfire in the car park next to our offices and it looks like it's doing 120 standing still!
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Need.
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I'd still rather have an HSV though, mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
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Back in t'owd days - about 30 years ago - there were some really heavy duty pieces of kit from Oz. The Great Race down there was the Bathurst 500, a mad saloon car race around the side of a ruddy great mountain in NSW. The circuit is something like a cross between a goat-track and a roller-coaster, with all sorts of crests, blind bends, sudden drops and the odd implausibly long straight - it's quick and bloody frightening to watch races from there!
Holden and Ford both wanted to win it, because it was the key to a big sector of the market - and 'cos it was run to production-based saloon car they had to sell some pretty outlandish kit to homologate it for racing.
Ford concentrated on the Falcon, which was about the size of a Granada here, but had a range of wacky engines up to a 350ci (5.7l) full-blooded Mustang-based V8. This was a genuine 150mph four-door family saloon, when you think that your average Eurobox was barely good for the ton at that point..... there's a wonderful early-70s pic of one of them hurtling through the outback at an obscene speed, a great image of Aussie motoring.
Holden's answer to this was the Torana XU-1, which was effectively a Vauxhall Viva HB (call it 1200cc in Britain!) with a ruddy great 3.3l straight-six in it, the thinking being that a slightly smaller and nimbler car than the Falcon might be the thing to have round the Mountain...
in time of course the Torana grew up and got a slightly bigger body.... and a 5.7 V8 ;)
Aussie touring car racing is still mad, five-litre Ford Falcons vs Holden Commodores, driver rivalries that have been running for 30-odd years, and plenty of paint-trading.
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Such footage I've seen from Mt. Panorama just pisses on any UK racing. (With the possible exception of Irish rallying)
I vaguely recall that there was a SA version of the Grandad with a V8 motor. One of those would be fun to keep.
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The Beeb used to show Bathurst every year in the 80s (for a while the Europeans went there regularly, so as well as the Aussie heavy metal there were works BMW 635s and Tom Walkinshaw's Jag XJSs, weird stuff like Eggenberger's turbo Volvo 240s (imagine a Vogon Constructor Ship on wheels...) and then the RS500s...) but there were so many baccy ads around the circuit, on the cars, painted on the dashboards, and even scrolling around the screen, that they stopped. Bloody brilliant, especially with the hysterically funny local commentary.
They showed it a couple of times when the Aussies were trying Super Touring for a couple of years, but whingeing little 2l repmobiles didn't look right round the mountain!
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(When are Rover going to find a use for that V8-powered RWD version of the 75? :)
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Homologation
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In Melbourne I was nearly run over by trams and had people in the left lane turning right directly in front of me! Melbourne is full of insane drivers. I was lucky to make it out alive.
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But you must admit, they're not insane on the level of Sydney taxi drivers.
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Thats what I was thinking.... I mean, they have box turns FFS!!!!!!
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The Cadillac CTS-V is a pretty serious piece of kit - it's done so well in the local version of touring-car racing in the States (against Audis and BMWs and the like) that they're forcing it into GTs next year to compete with the likes of the Corvette and the Porsche 911. Which it'll probably beat.
And the Mercury Marauder (only available in black) combines crap 70s American car barge-like handling with entirely too much power: 300+ bhp as standard (call it the thick end of 500 by the time you've put a supercharger in) -- leaves a trail of burning rubber and soiled pants behind it everywhere it goes and looks splendidly sinister. Too deadly to even think about competing with. ;)
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The wildest were from the era when NASCAR allowed wings - some really weird stuff got out on the road, like the Plymouth Superbird....
Note - this has not been Barried up - that's how it left the factory ;)
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Still like the Charger R/S covered lamps, though ... but then I suspect that chunky and brutish is more my style than those streamlined ones.
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I love the line from Fawlty Towers "Was the motorway not wide enough for you? Many of the English cars have steering wheels."
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Of course the odds of my ever being allowed to own one are vanishingly small, Laurelei is already dubious of me in the 2.5l V6 Mondeo. In fact oddly enough I probably have more chance of getting a TVR Tuscan (assuming I ever have any money for such things), as Laurelei thinks they look wonderfull (which they do).
The Monaro, mate!
The 1968 Holdens were "HK" whether they were Monaro, Premier or Special. In 1992, when I was with my first husband, we bought a HK Special for $50 that still ran and had a red engine (better than the greys). But the floor pan was rusted out (common in old Holdens) and so it stayed on the front lawn until we separated and I arranged for it to be towed away *sob*
In Australia you're either a Holden Person or a Ford Person - on top of all the other friction between my first hubby and I was that he was a Ford Person and I was a Holden Person ;-)
Re: The Monaro, mate!
Not the Kingswood!
In Australia there was a popular comedy series in the 70s called Kingswood Country about a dysfunctional family in the 'burbs, a precursor to Kath and Kim, but sillier. At that time, the Kingswood, like Ford's Falcon, was *the* Dad car. The father would exclaim "not the Kingswood!" when anybody wanted to borrow it, and it became an Australian catchphrase :-)
It may have only cost AU $50, and because I was on my Ls and it was unroadworthy I only drove it up and down the driveway, but the HK was the only car I've every had, and I miss it!