The Performance Of Your Muscle Car Depends On A Number Of Factors

Posted by David C. Atkin in Friday, February 5th 2010

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This article will refer to the classic muscle cars, the new breed is much easier to get the performance out of, in this article I’ll talk about tuning, suspension, engine, transmission, and rear end for better performance for your car in general, not just the engine.

Performance isn’t something that most car guys take lightly, we always like to have the biggest, fastest, and quickest car on the road, along with the body, and paint modifications we like to build a one of a kind car, something that doesn’t look, or perform like any other car.

We all like to be able to run a quick quarter mile, along with being able to carve the corners at the same time, I’ll be the first to say that middle ground is hard to achieve, usually quarter male cars are built to go in a straight line very quickly, but the deign of there suspension doesn’t make for good handling.

For a car to carve the corners it’s best for it to remain low to the ground, and as wide as possible, not to mention the more rubber you put to the pavement, the better your handling is going to be, usually on a quarter mile car you want to transfer as much weight to the rear of the car as possible.

By the same token if you want to carve the corners you need a good even weight distribution to keep the car form sliding off of the road while you accelerate through the corners, you don’t want the rear of the car to bear down and pull your front tires off of the ground.

You can see here that there really is no way to get a comfortable medium, a place in between where it does both things very well, this is just one man’s opinion, but I’d say the best way to go is to set it up for the corners, and if you want to go drag racing just do it on the handling suspension.

The next thing that I’m going to discuss is braking, this is a very important parts of your performance car, brakes will either stop you from dying, or they will allow you to die, this is why I can’t tell you enough not to try to save money on your brake system.

You should set your car up with a good three, or four piston caliper on all four wheels, this is likely to save your life at some point in time, go with a name brand like Brembo, or Wilwood, you can’t go wrong with either of these brands, I know they are not cheap, but they will keep you alive.

Make sure that the brake system matches your choice of calipers, because if they don’t there is no point to put the high quality brakes on your car, most of the bake companies carry kits so you can be sure that all of the components in the system match perfectly.

Now you’ll need a rear end to match the rest of what you have done, at this time you really need to think about it, will this car spend a lot of time on the street, or is it mostly a race car, and if it is mostly a race car, what kind of racing do you like the most.

Most people want to drive their car on the city streets, let’s face it, where else are you going to go show your street prowess off, if street is the main use for the car I’d say absolutely no full POSI rear ends, they really aren’t the best idea for street use.

If you plan to be able to hit the high way every once in a while, you should not put a gear lower then 4.10, even at that you’ll end up running you engine pretty hard at 60 MPH, I’d say a good all around gear is about a 3.73 ratio, it works great on the high way, or the city streets.

I’ll continue this in my next article, we’ll get down to the engine, and transmission, it will more then likely be about the same length as this article, I hope it helps some of you with you questions about the performance of your cars.

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