By Gene Grant
But check out the 2006 retro Dodge Challenger, with a gaudy 425 horsepower hemi V-8 and a standing-still attitude that looks as if it wants to eat something.
Ladies, you and I have to have a chat about your men.
Take a peek over the paper at the poor schlub. He is in serious trouble.
If he was anywhere from his mid-teens to late 20s around the year 1970, he's toast. There's a rumble in the distance and, much like the animals in the South Pacific that bolted inland hours before the tsunami, only certain species can hear it.
It's horsepower. The muscle car is back, and the bad news for you is that he's going to want one.
Let me explain. In the late '60s and early '70s - in the days before the first, second, third and fourth oil crises - auto manufacturers thrived on a simple credo: "Win on Sunday, sell on Monday." When race-car drivers, especially drag racers, won a big race, it translated into young men storming the dealership doors the next day.
I had a 1969 Buick Skylark, never considered one of the killer cars of the era, but it was a rocket. This car had an insane horsepower-to-weight ratio that makes me wonder why I'm still on the planet. I smoked many a Mustang, Camaro or whatever you wanted to run, buddy. Summer was here, and the time was right for racing in the street.
Life was sweet. Fifty-three cents a gallon will do that. Then, Jimmy Carter was elected president.
Flash forward to last week's annual Detroit auto show. It seems as if a decision was made in the Motor City's collective design cubicle. If this most prideful of domestic industries is driving off a cliff, it's going out with the hammer down, one hand on the Hurst shifter and the other on the three-spoked steering wheel of a killer replica from its most glorious of glory days.
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Source: The Albuquerque Tribune
By Gene Grant
Tribune Columnist
January 19, 2006
