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Original Message
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| Not FE but what a diff. a rear makes..True story |
| By David B. - 01/13/2003 4:19:49 PM; IP 208.17.229.201 |
A little background here..
I am selling/trading my 1966 Mustang Sprint Hardtop to a friend on mine. He will be redoing it and since it has brand new tires, I put on the tires from the other 1966 I have so "fallout" from the body shop won't damage the new tires. The tires I put on are Dunlop's with about 15,000 miles on them. When on my other Sprint (parts car), I hade some fun and couldn't really spin them up too much with the 200/C4/2.83 combo it had.
Over the weekend I took the "good one" out of the garage to replace Christmas decorations in the garage loft (where auto part belong if you ask me). I dumped in 5 gallons of fresh regular into the almost empty tank and let the car run for about 45 minutes on the cold clear day. It hadn't been given a run in many months. In the past, any time it came out, we (the hole family) would pile in and we would go for a nice family cruise somewhere and I never stomped into it. This weekend, no one wanted to go anywhere so I figured I'd take it for a beating…I mean drive, myself.
I left the driveway, making a right and stomped the gas to the floor. The right rear tire smoked up instantly and the car left a stretch of rubber in excess of 100 feet. The ensuing clouds of smoke traveling, not so innocently, across my neighbor's lawn. I figured I started on sand or something and the tires must have vulcanized in storage since the other car would never have indulged me with such a macho treat.
I stopped a little further down the road in front of a farm/nursery and rationalized that "power-braking" the little coupe would kill two birds with one stone. It would heat up (and ware off) the vulcanized outer surface of the tires and rid the rear drums of the unwanted surface rust…yea right!
To my surprise, it power-braked impressively, melting the right rear until it got sticky enough for the left rear to start up and the rear of the car drifted like a windshield wiper on the crown of the road. Where is a good set of staging lights when you need them?
I proceeded up the road to my parent's house to enthrall my 70-year-old parents with a stripe on the road in front of their house. I stopped and backed up into the middle of the road in front of their driveway. I put it back into drive and stomped away…Nothing…It left like a slug. I looked down and realized I had put the "dual range" C4 into the notch just back of neutral. This starts the car off in second gear. I stopped again, backing a couple of hundred feet to my parent's driveway. This time I placed the shifter in the second position behind drive before placing my foot firmly in the pile of the carpeting. The car launched fairly hard for a six and left a 30+ foot long rubber trail from the right rear tire. Wow..I was impressed. Why did this car "move" when the other did not? The cars were almost identical in every way except for color and rust content. Ahh..the big difference here is the axle ratio. The "parts" car had the 2.83:1 open rear and the "good" car has a 3.20:1 open rear.
Never under estimate the effect of a good axle ratio (and good cold, dense, air).
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This thread, so far...
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