How awful they were...I'll give you they aren't the best Mustang off that lot, that's a given, but they aren't awful. I can think of many cars out there much, much worse.
And I can pull up many period road tests that lamented that not only did Ford ruin what had been a decent handling car (even before they put an engine it wasn't designed to accept which ruined the weight distribution even more), but they did so in a way that made it hopelessly inept at competing with even the Chevrolet Monza, nevermind the F-bodies. And you've seen many of them already.
I will stop you right there. Yes, it does. It has a very big impact. You can't possibly sit there and tell me that if I took one car that had X amount of horsepower and is Y heavy, and clocked a top speed of 140mph, and then took the same car and gave it Z weight (significantly more) and left the power, the the top speed wouldn't be lower?
Yes I can, because it so happens to be the truth. Weight affects rolling resistance, which has a tertiary effect
at best compared to horsepower and drag (drag being frontal area and coefficient of drag); two things that the Pinto II has serious issues with.
Here's a good post explaning just how little of an impact it has.
Really, because I'm reading here that an SD-455 Trans Am will do 165mph.
Billy Bob's Pontiac Emporium isn't a source. Period tests of the car are on the other hand, even allowing for the fact that that was an era when companies still provided blatant ringers (a practice that didn't die down until the fiasco that happened with the Citation), pegged it as the fastest car you could buy in the country made here. Faster than the Corvette, certainly. It did over 30 less than that.
Even a bit of forethought should make it obvious that the increasingly smog strangled 70's Trans Am, no matter how much more effort Pontiac put into it over the years than Chevrolet did with the Camaro, how many pinstripes were put on or how much patriotic fervor you put behind it, was not going to be only a few mph slower than the fastest cars you could buy
period in the 1970s.
When you consider that stock Foxes will do 138 without issue (they start getting jumpy though), I'd say 145 is entirely doable if not higher, and has been done. I was in the car when it happened. You are also forgetting it's not the original engine, but one out of a 1984 Fox (not that it matters anyway, smae engine).
Oh. So other than the 40 extra horsepower, what's the difference?
So what? The V8 will pull a lot harder, stronger and longer than that measly pile of poop.
So what? I dunno. It was
your video.
Even still. The change in drag coefficient isn't extremely significant from one car or another, believe it or not.
The later restyled Fox, much like the SVO before it, is going to be well under .40.
.36 for the base model and LX hatchback, in fact. You could gussy up a Pinto II to look like a Superbird and it wouldn't come
close to that. Even assuming the niky's .44 is correct (which I
highly doubt, because that so happens to be the number that the original 1979 Fox body had, and there's no way Ford spent all that time in the wind tunnel with the Fox to come out with something just as poor), a difference of nearly a tenth is
huge. And the difference gets exponentially bigger the faster you go.
Tire size, transmission and axle gearing will tell you what RPM the engine is revving at what MPH. It makes power at 4,000 and torque at 2,200. With a factory 2.79 highway ratio and either 4 speed or 3 speed it would have to spin to 4,800 to get to 130, and that's not exactly hard to get it to spin that high (800rpm higher), wether it makes a ton of power or not. With a 3.55 ratio it would spin 1,000 higher. Top speed on this car is entirely dependant on your axle ratio. Torque still gets applied, but not nearly as quickly as say the 3.55 gears. That's why people swap them for acceleration.
120 mph would require it spinning at 4,500. Still totally doable.
The fact that RPM continues to exist before the fuel cutoff has no bearing on whether or not the car is capable of accelerating beyond the power peak when you are already in the highest gear going near the top speed of the car. Even being at the power peak doesn't mean that the car can continue accelerating if the power is too little.
Except you aren't replacing anything to gain power. You are using entirely stock parts. It is still 100% stock. I don't consider anything a "mod" until you start replacing parts, and considering how the factory themselves did this on engines DURING the production run of the II, I'd say it's not a mod at all.
The Fox Body went into production with a 140 horsepower V8. It went out of production with largely the same engine making 235 horsepower. And yet if I was to take one of those 1979 cars and convert the engine to the exact specifications of a 1993 SVT Cobra, you're going to claim that the car is still stock because the same parts were eventually used in that way 14 years later?
You are assuming wrong. How about you build one before claiming I'm spreading false information?
How about you actually read a post that tries to explain where you are incorrect with some measure of understanding before you continue to spread false information?
I love how you guys make it sound so god awful when the previous 71-73 cars that had the same 302 were actually slower by 2 full seconds and hardly made any changes to the engine itself, but somehow it sucks because Mii. That makes no sense. Thats like saying all 302s suck. No. They just dropped the big blocks for the II.
The fact that the 1973 Mustang was even worse than the Mustang II doesn't have any bearing for this discussion. Outside of the truly dedicated Gone in 60 Second enthusiast you won't get too many people lining up to defend the those gunboats either.
Not exactly a hard feat to accomplish. Any engine will wind up past it's peak power.
So why is the ability to rev to less than 5000 rpm being treated as an achievement?
I'm not saying it has a ton of horsepower...it doesn't. Never has.
No. You're simply repeating the same handful of untrue statements (I'm guessing) passed around some sort of 5.0 forums, and then ignoring anything and everything (be it mathematical formulas, period road tests, technical manuals and even statements from the people who designed the cars,) so you can stick with your insistence that the incorrect information holds some sort of merit. The Pinto II would not go 130 mph. It did not have the power to do it. It was not underrated from the factory by 30% (because it
was that slow in acceleration too). Literally nothing about the performance of the car when it was new and being tested supports the ideas; and the closest you can get to supporting them is that a car with more power and a far more aerodynamic shape is capable of more.
So again.
at the 120 mph speedometer in the Mustang II.
