One of my personal favorites when it comes to automobiles in general are the sleepers. You know, the cars that look perfectly normal but have a ridiculously oversize engine stuffed under the hood. Or a redonkulous blower/turbo/supercharger. Nitrous. JATO. That sort of thing. With that said, here's one similar to a car a friend owned:
1971 Oldsmobile Cutlass S. His was tan, with a black vinyl top. Rather than the stock Olds mag wheels, it had plain aluminum hubcaps and whitewall tires, too. Under the hood, though, was an Olds Rocket 350. A respectable 325 horsepower (remember, the holy grail for muscle cars at the time was a 1:1 cubic inch to horsepower rating) gave the "S" way more power than it needed.
And the power hit the rear wheels by way of a Hurst Dual Gate shifter, sometimes called the "His and Hers". Park, Reverse and Neutral were standard, but then the shifter split. On one side (the "Hers", remember this was still the 1960s when it rolled out) was the standard D-2-1 configuration that required no input from the driver. On the other side, pre-dating "autostick" type transmissions by several decades, was a 1-2-3 configuration that required the car be placed in "1" at a stop, then manually shifted into second and third.
We were out one night and my buddy had had a couple too many, so he let me drive his Cutlass. It had transmission problems and wouldn't shift right, so he advised me to take it out on the highway and floor it - this often solved the problem. I hit 90 MPH (the statute of limitations on speeding should be up, right?) and backed off, thinking that the car had finally shifted out of second and into third.
He chided me, because the car had only shifted into second gear at that point...
That is all.
4 comments:
The new Oldsmobiles are in early this year. :D
Yep, they didn't shift to third till about 120, or the plastic timing gear let go... :-)
For many years the wife had a '67 Chev II 4dr she had asked for. Big deal, you say? Yeah, well the previous owner had stuffed the engine and drive train from a '69 SS impala into it and included a Hurst "His/Hers shifter as well. All I did was add an Edelbrock manifold and a dual exhaust and step back. Had the original tu-tone paint job redone as well. Serious sleeper; she had more fun with that car...
Neighbour had an Olds 442. Of all the cars he owned (and there are many), that one was seriously off limits to his boys.
murgatr
Pharm.Tech RDC'06
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