The Evolution of the American Muscle Car

The muscle car is primarily seen as an American car type, but why is that?  Today I want to take a look at the evolution of the American muscle car.

If you want to understand why the muscle car evolved into something that was pretty much just for going into a straight line, you need to look at much of the American landscape and road network.

I live in Minnesota, which is in the upper part of the midwest.  The roads here are pretty straight.  I have been to other parts of the country, and a lot of the roads there are the same, long straight stretches and gentle turns.

In fact, around here, most of the curves are freeway on and off ramps, at least the ones that are smooth enough to drive fast on.  When you have a situation where there isn’t much for corners that need to be dealt with at any speed, why worry about how well a car takes a corner?

And not having much for corners makes sense.  When you figure that the total area of the United States is nearly that of all of Europe, that is a lot of area to cover with roads.  And since they are all in the same country, so you have what could be the same road covering 1000’s of miles.

All that means that the auto makers designed their cars to drive in a straight line comfortably.  As time went on, and with the engine advances in the late 40’s and into the 50’s, more power was added for more relaxed cruising.  And also better passing, since most of the roads back then were two lane roads, so power to pass was important.

You can probably see where this is going, the manufacturers adding more and more power, without adding much more importance on turning, except for a few models that were aimed at road racing (such as the Camaro Z/28 and the Mustang Boss 302).

Compare that to Europe, where many of the roads started out years (or centuries or more) ago as walking paths, and before that, they were probably game trails.  The thing to understand about game trails, is they are not straight.  They twist and turn in a way that actually makes it easier to walk on, since they don’t have the advantage of heavy machinery to smooth things out for them.

That means that many of the roads in Europe twist and turn to follow the landscape, instead of plowing straight through it.  That also means that the cars evolved differently as well.  In Europe, they had more sports cars, that were good at turning corners, and maybe not so good in straight lines as the norm, since that is what their roads were.

I am not saying one is better than the other, since if I have a 1,000 mile road trip, it is nice to be able to hop on a long stretch of interstate and cruise down the road.  But it is more fun on a short trip to drive on a twisty road.  Another thing, it keeps you more involved and focused even on a long drive to have to negotiate corners and do more than just drive straight.  But that also gets tiring on long drives.

I like a mix of both types, and mixing both gives a more pleasant enjoyable drive in my eyes.

And if you look at the current crop of muscle cars (The Mustang, Camaro and Challenger) they are a mix of both worlds.  They have power levels that were only available to race cars during the original muscle car era, and they can turn corners as well.

Will they out corner a Lotus?  Of course not, but they are still a lot more than just going in a straight line like the original muscle cars.  But they are able to run with them in a straight line, and with some of them, like the GT500 Mustang, will outrun all but the ones that were sold as pretty much race only, such as the 1968 Hemi Dart and others like it.

So now we have a mixing of the best of both worlds.  If you like it or not, muscle cars that can go around corners appear to be here to stay, so why not enjoy it.


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *