Godfrey DiGiorgi wrote on 7/14/19 7:25 PM:
As a car guy most of my life, I have a certain nostalgia for when it was fun. It isn't any more, not for me at least except on rare occasion. I drive less and less because it's just too irritating to drive much any more, and foresee the day when I sell my nice car and buy some utility vehicle for the absolute necessities of transporting stuff that is impractical to carry on bicycle or public transport only.
The sort of fun that you can have with cars has definitely changed. The modifications that you can make with a daily driver are much more limited in many ways, but you can buy a Honda Civic with more horsepower than the Corvette my dad had just before I was born, and he had checked every performance option off the list.
Cars for driving on the street with upwards of 500 hp are not rare. You can pick up a Dodge Hellcat with 800 hp for $72k, or about $12k in 1973 dollars.
Since these cars are fresh off the showroom floor, not only do they have more horsepower than cars did 30, 40, 50 years ago, they also handle better, are safer and get better gas mileage, for less than it would cost to upgrade a base model to that performance.
When I started driving a bit over 40 years ago, I pretty much had carte blanche on the local mountain roads, there were only a few that were patrolled and the cops didn't have radar. Plus, traffic was lighter. These days if you want a fun, clean, run over hwy 9 or bear creek you pretty much need to do it between 9 and 10 am on a weekday.
On the bright side, 32 years ago, there weren't a lot of opportunities to take a daily driver out on the racetrack, unless you belonged to certain marque clubs. If you wanted to drive on the track, around here anyways, you pretty much had your choice of building an SCCA racecar.
These days you can go to most tracks, almost any week, for a track day, in your daily driver for between $200 and $400. Once your skills have developed to a certain level, you can go out in the advanced, open passing, groups and drive pretty much as hard and fast as most people would want.
If you don't want to risk your car on the track, accidents at track days are rare, but they do happen, there are plenty of opportunities to rent track prepared cars.
It's not that you can't have fun with a car anymore, it's just different fun, and in many ways, much more fun than what was available 35-40 years ago.
-- Larry Colen [email protected] http://red4est.com/lrc https://www.flickr.com/photos/ellarsee/collections/72157612824732477/ -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
