A question for "Mike 996"

It does but that looks to be in the 71-73 model year range which is when horsepower ratings were lowered due to lower compression motors and emissions among other things.

 

Ive had a lot of Mopars, sixpack and hemi cars and back then a muscle car was defined by the power to weight ratio and the poo pooers would say a 340 challenger wasnt a muscle car because it was a small block car, not enough power etc. By 72-74 (like the car in your pic) a 440 couldnt pull the skin off a rice pudding so maybe its all relative but Ill say no in this case. Reason being Pontiac still managed to produce the 455 SD transam in 73 and it was a fast car.

 

71 was still good with mopars. 72 they went down the crapper. No more hemi and or six packs and zero compression.

 

Back in the days this was not a muscle car anymore. It is today for the youngers who don't really know but like Newman said 71 was the last year.

BTW if you look closely the engine nameplate has been replaced. It was a 400 engine.

 

Hi Neo...What Rob and Newman said!

Beginning in 1972, forget it - from that point on, "Muscle cars" were living on their reputation, not their performance due to emissions/HP restrictions that were a result of government and insurance requirements.

And yes, the 340 Mopar in the right body was definitely a muscle car. I did a lot of drag racing (building/driving)in the 70's with purpose-built Super Stock class cars (all Mopars - SSF 1971 Dodge Challenger, SSAA '68 426 Hemi Barracuda, SSB 426 max wedge 1965 Dodge Coronet) and a "drive to the track," switch tires to slicks" 1968 340 Barracuda. The Barracuda was able to stay exactly even down the track with a stock 440 6-bbl Road Runner that had a lot more HP. So, as we all know, it's power to weight, not just power.

 

It could be that someone has since fitted a 440 motor into it and added the bonnet badge (if they have though, it doesn't excuse them from not polishing the badge area first before fitting the new badge!)

 

sheit,7.5 liters of displacement and still cannot pull the skin off a rice pudding.

 

Well, as noted, it's all about power to weight. The STOCK 68 Hemi Barracuda could produce 10.3 second at 130MPH 1/4 mile times/trap speed off the showroom floor. Admittedly, that was a special order car and there were only about 50 actually made but it was "as delivered" from Mopar (Plymouth) and anybody could order one. Those cars are now doing the 1/4 in the low 8's at well over 150 MPH though many now are clones since an original will bring well over a million bucks. To paraphrase the old saw, "Mopar made 50 1968 Hemi Barracudas, of which only 125 remain!

 

Yes, but still the 5th digit of the VIN will not match the engine. Many G code(318) Cuda and Challenger have been built as 440 or Hemi but they are still 318 cars for me.

When I was young someone I knew had a very nice black and white 4 speed pistol grip Road runner 440. Many years later I discovered his car was only a 318 car that he had the 440 stripes installed on it when he bought it new. I was very sad that day.

 

Frankly, if I seriously was looking for an old muscle car, there's no way I'd look for an original. I'd buy a '70 318 B'Cuda or Challenger and either "clone" it to a Hemi with a crate motor or to an AAR 340 Cuda or Trans AM Challenger, again with a crate motor. I don't care anything about "original," and if you remember, almost NOBODY left their new muscle car stock. It was normal to, at a minimum, change the manifold/carb and replace the oem exhaust with headers. Back then there were no "original" muscle cars!

I drove a brand new 69 Plymouth RR 440 6-pack home and, with 36 miles on the car, immediately changed the pistons from the stock 10.5:1 compression to 12:1 as well as replacing the intake manifold and adding headers. Stuff like that was pretty common back then. Nobody would be "seen" in a stock, oem muscle car!

 

Right Mike!

And no one would buy a convertible muscle car either due to the extra weight, except possibly for the Doctor's wife.

 

LOL, Yep!

And speaking of extra weight, we NEVER drove around locally with more than 1/4 tank of fuel.

Ah, those were the days…when I actually WAS filling the car with gas on a trip and I hollered at a gas station attendant in New Mexico about the ridiculous price he was charging for premium…35 cents/gallon. I was used to 28-30 cents at home (Texas).

 

They still made muscle cars in the late 70's......okay a little aftermarket massage.
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"They still made muscle cars in the late 70's......okay a little aftermarket massage."

Considerable messaging was in order... the "big motor" (302 CID V8) available in the 1979 Mustang produced 140 HP. The quickest/fastest "muscle car" of that era was a truck! Yep, the Dodge "little Red Truck" with a screaming 225 HP was the fastest US vehicle from 0-100 MPH. How pitiful is that?

 

And it's amazing. Even this kind of car looks somehow small compared to the modern stuff in front of and behind.

Best Regards
Martin

 

Those horrible E7 cylinder heads. When I was building my 5.0 in college I swapped to AFR heads. Without changing the exhaust intake or cam, I gained 80+ hp. Since then I have done the whole engine and it last dyno'd at 412. This was a dozen years ago. Not bad for a street driven 302. The new coyote is pushing 425 in stock form. All the parts $$$ and hours building just to keep pace with a factory built car of the modern era.

 

It was a great time to be a kid growing up in the 60's. At ten years old in 1960 things really started to change, of course it started in the 50's.

Hot rod magazines with candy apple red cars and customs were what made us kids go "wow!".

Growing up in Studio City California was remarkable for a kid. We started making our own skate boards and tearing up the mountains above the film studios and San Fernando Valley below.

I remember seeing my first Mustang on the freeway, an orange coupe and I was knocked out.

As a teen it was outrageous, Corvettes, Mustang 350's, Barracudas and anything you could make go very fast. Street racers, cruising Sunset Blvd. on summer nights or any night with music coming from every car, Hendrix, Doors, especially Cream and chasing girls.

Then the beach, back to cruising, and the occasional illegal drag race @ Big Alley or Riverside Drive.

Fantastic.

My world changed when I saw a open Ferrari tear up Riverside raceway with all the rpm's it needed.

Yes life was good.

 

But that was no ordinary run of the mill hemi.

The typical 2X4 carbed hemi that came from the factory with most cars was a pig that couldn't get out of its own way. I rode in a few (Charger R/T and Challenger/'Cuda), and raced against several, back in the early 1970s. They were typically low 14s in street trim, with a few dropping into the high 13s.

Doug

 

Just going to drop this here, shamelessly grabbed off the net. It explains the HP delta and ratings along with the reasons at the time. I have an old Chiltons manual from I think 1972 or so that also goes into detail about the drop and gross vs net and actually has net power ratings for some of the pre '71 engines.

Understanding Gross vs. Net Horsepower Ratings

There are a lot of misunderstandings among car enthusiasts and historians about vintage horsepower ratings. It's easy to assume from a casual glance at ads or spec sheets that even quite ordinary American family sedans of the sixties were overwhelmingly powerful, with 300 horsepower or more, and yet by 1975, many of those same cars were down to 150 hp or less. When asked the reason for the huge difference, gearheads tend to shake their heads and mutter about emissions controls and anemic, low-octane unleaded gasoline -- which is true, but only partly.

What complicates the issue and makes apples-to-apples comparisons difficult is the fact that those pre-smog horsepower ratings were not calculated in the same way as modern engines. "A horsepower is a horsepower, right?" you say. While a horsepower, pre-smog or post, remains 746 watts (or 750, for metric horsepower), the way that output was measured has changed quite a bit.

Before 1972, most American engines were rated under the methodology laid out in Society of American Engineers (SAE) standards J245 and J1995, which calculated the output of a 'bare' engine on a test stand with no accessories, optimal ignition timing, free-flowing exhaust headers (no mufflers), with a correction factor for standard atmospheric conditions.

What does all that mean? The engine in your car is burdened with various engine-driven accessories, ranging from the engine's own oil and water pumps and generator/alternator to the power steering pump and air conditioning compressor, each of which consumes a certain amount of power. An engine in a passenger car also has mufflers and an exhaust system designed for quiet operation, rather than low back pressure, ignition is retarded to prevent detonation with pump gasoline, and the carburetor(s) or fuel injection system are aimed at fuel economy and driveability, not maximum power. The gross rating reflects none of these losses; it represents an engine's theoretical maximum output under ideal conditions, not how much power it actually produces when installed in a car.

As an example, Chevrolet's original small-block V8, which bowed for 1955, had a gross rating of 162 hp (121 kW) at 4400 rpm with a 8.0 compression ratio and a single two-barrel carburetor. Motor Life magazine reported in December 1954 that the factory quoted a net output of 137 hp (102 kW).

Nothing in those SAE standards actually said that the calculated horsepower could be whatever the marketing department wanted it to be, but it might as well have, because that was what happened. If Chevrolet advertised 195 gross horsepower (145 kW) for its standard V8, for example, it was not difficult for Ford engineers to tweak their calculations to justify a rating of 200 hp (149 kW) for their standard engine.

Until the mid-fifties, the gap between gross horsepower and as-installed output was not vast, but by the end of the decade advertised horsepower ratings far outstripped usable power. Significant inflation was clearly taking place, sometimes to the tune of 25-30%.

By the mid-sixties, it was also not uncommon for power ratings to be deliberately understated. For example, in 1965, Chevrolet released the 396 cu. in. (6.5 L) TurboJet V8 as an option for Corvettes, rated at 425 gross horsepower (317 kW). The following year, the engine was bored to 427 cubic inches (7.0 L), but its power rating remained suspiciously unchanged. (Indeed, some early GM promotional material credited the 427 with 450 gross horsepower (336 kW).) GM imposed corporate rules limiting all their cars except the Corvette to a maximum of one gross horsepower (0.75 kW) per 10 pounds (4.5 kg) of curb weight, leading to curious non sequiters like rating Pontiac's 3,300-pound (1,500-kg) Firebird at 325 hp (242 kW), while the identical engine in a 3,600-pound (1,635-kg) GTO claimed 360 hp (269 kW).

1966 Chevrolet Corvette Sting Ray 427 engine air cleaner
This is a 1966 Corvette 427 (7.0 L) L72 engine. Early literature credited the L72 with 450 hp (336 kW) at 6,400 rpm, but this as quickly amended to 425 hp (317 kW) at 5,600 -- the same horsepower as the previous year's 396 cu. in. (6.5L) L78. Contemporary reviewers were highly skeptical.

Why would a manufacturer underrate their engines? Particularly at GM, the most conservative of the automakers, there was real fear of the growing safety lobby, which already thought the amount of power the auto industry offered in its cars was uneemly. In that climate, advertising a 500-horsepower (373-kW) Corvette or 400-horsepower (298 kW) GTO seemed like asking for trouble. Insurance was also becoming an issue, with a growing number of insurance companies levying prohibitive surcharges on very powerful cars (or simply refusing to offer coverage at all).

Another concern was racing. Eligibility for different drag strip classes was based on power-to-weight ratio, calculated using advertised horsepower and shipping weight. If an engine produced more power than its rating, it would have a competitive advantage. This type of underrating was at best an open secret. Testing a Pontiac GTO Judge equipped with the $390 Ram Air IV engine, for example, Car Life magazine noted that the division's own executives freely admitted the 370 hp (276 kW) gross rating was purely a fiction to satisfy insurance companies and their corporate superiors. As a result, racing officials frequently "factored" underrated engines for the purposes of classification; Chrysler's very strong 340 cu. in. (5.6 L) engine, for example, carried a conservative 275 hp (205 kW) rating from the factory, but the NHRA treated it as a 325-hp (242-kW) engine for racing purposes.

Between inflation and deliberate underrating, by 1970, the relationship between advertised gross horsepower and actual power was at best nebulous. The gross ratings served a variety of political and marketing purposes, but they were far from useful as a realistic measure of engine output.

Starting in 1971, manufacturers began to lower compression ratios and de-tune their engines to prepare for the advent of unleaded gasoline. Both the early emission-control systems (air-injection pumps, exhaust gas recirculation) and the reduced compression ratios made engines perceptibly less powerful, whether those losses were reflected in the gross power ratings or not.

Faced with this reality, along with the pressures of the safety and environmental lobby, domestic manufacturers decided it was time to abandon the gross rating system. In its place they adopted the SAE net rating methodology, described by SAE standard J1349. "Net" horsepower ratings are still made with the engine on a test stand, but with stock ignition timing, carburetion, exhaust, and accessories -- in short, a closer approximation of how much power an engine produces as actually installed in the car. (SAE net horespower does NOT, contrary to some assumptions, measure horsepower at the drive wheels; both gross and net ratings are at the flywheel, and don't reflect power losses in the drivetrain.)

The result of the new rating system was a dramatic drop in advertised power. The Cadillac Eldorado's mammoth 500 cu. in. (8.2L) V-8, for instance, dropped from 400 gross horsepower (298 kW) in 1970 to 360 gross horsepower (269 kW) in 1971, a drop of about 10%. The rated horsepower of the 1972 version was only 235 net horsepower (175 kW), even though the engine itself was basically unchanged. (Although GM did not quote a net horsepower rating for the higher-compression 1970 engine, it was probably 275-285 hp (205-213 kW).) On paper, though, output had been cut by 35%.

Because of the vagaries of the old gross standards, there is no precise formula for converting gross to net or vice versa. Some 1971 engines carried both gross and net ratings, but for earlier or later years, the best you can do is make an approximation based on state of tune and real-world performance testing.

Why was this change made? The most obvious reason was as an inexpensive PR gesture; overnight, the carmakers made it clear that they were no longer offering irresponsible levels of horsepower, without making any expensive engineering changes whatsoever. Beyond that, the switch in ratings made it easier for salesmen to obfuscate the actual loss of power caused by reduced compression and smog control hardware -- useful when trying to explain to a customer why the 1972 Cadillac he's looking at seems to have 40% less power than the 1970 he's trading in.

By the end of the decade, the big drops in horsepower were no longer just on paper. For example, Pontiac's 455, which as late as 1973 had produced a conservative 310 net horsepower (231 kW), could muster only 200 (149 kW) by the time it faded out in 1976. Ford's 4.9 L V8, which had made as much as 306 gross horsepower (228 kW) in the sixties, had plummeted by 1979 to less than 140 net horsepower (104 kW).

While the late sixties were a golden age of horsepower compared to the late seventies or early eighties, the differences weren't quite as vast as they appear at first blush. A '67 Impala with the 396, rated 325 gross horsepower (242 kW), probably had something like 220 net horsepower (164 kW) in pure stock form -- decent, but no muscle car.

The net rating system was used until 2005, when the SAE issued standard J2723, eliminating a number of loopholes in the existing methodology and requiring an independent observer present when the ratings are measured. Under these new "SAE-certified output" guidelines, some engines ended up with lower ratings (Toyota's 1MZ-FE engine, the 3.0L V-6 in the previous-generation Camry, dropped from 210 to 190 hp (157 to 142 kW) under the new system), while a few actually rose (Cadillac's supercharged Northstar went from 440 to 469 hp (328 to 350 kW). The engines were not actually altered in any way -- the testing methodology had just changed. The new rating method is voluntary, but most, if not all, manufacturers now use it for their U.S.-market cars.

Most European manufacturers, incidentally, rate power under the DIN (Deustches Institut für Normung, German Institute for Standardization) methodology, sometimes also quoting metric horsepower rather than English. Japanese companies in the home market use JIS (Japanese Industrial Standards) rules, which are similar to DIN. The DIN standards haven't changed that much over the years, so if you find old road tests quoting output in DIN-rated horsepower, those numbers are much more comparable to modern ratings than contemporary SAE numbers. Modern DIN, JIS, and SAE-certified ratings for an identical engine tend to vary slightly, but the distinction is not huge -- perhaps 1-2% -- and owes more to the difference between metric and English horsepower. (A metric horsepower, often abbreviated PS, is about 736 watts, whereas an English horsepower is 746 W).

 

All the above is correct as far as it goes, BUT...

Simply look at the 1/4 mile times, and especially the trap speeds, for the same cars/engines/gearing before/after 1972 for how engines were affected

Here's an example:

1971 Plymouth Cuda 340
340ci/275hp, 4spd, 3.55, 0-60 - n/a, 1/4 mile - 14.18 @ 100.33mph

1972 Plymouth Barracuda
340ci/240hp, 4spd, 3.55, 0-60 - 6.9, 1/4 mile - 15.50 @ 91.70mph

That's a HUGE ACTUAL HP hit which has nothing to do with gross/net ratings. If the difference in the stated HP was just the fact that the manufacturers had to state Net instead of Gross HP, the HP "numbers" would be lower (as they are in that example) but the actual performance of the vehicles should have been the same. That difference in trap speed equates to roughly 50 (yes, FIFTY) less HP available at the rear wheels of the 72 model as opposed to the 71 with the same engine…

 

I don't claim to be a MOPAR guru, but I believe 1972 was the first year for EGR valves which caused a leaning of fuel mixture and possible detrimental redesign of intake manifolds which could account for the reduction in trap speed and equivalent 50 HP loss.

 

Bruno:

My tatie, who lived in Paris, had a 1968 Cougar with a 428 in it. She drove it all over France well into the mid 70s when she let it go. I still remember that car, leather seats, auto trans, and could definitely pull the crust off your Crème Brûlée.