Indholdsfortegnelse for July 1985 i MotorTrend

SHOWROOM STOCK. As most enthusiastics know—and as many in the general public are learning—showroom stock race cars are quite close to ordinary cars in dealer showrooms. According to the Sports Car Club of America (SCCA), few modifications are permitted other than the installation of racing safety equipment. Likewise, the tires of showroom stock race cars may be regular production products available to the public at tire retailers. Special compound tires can be used, but it is not the practice of BFGoodrich to do so. The only modification to T/A Radials is the standard racing procedure of shaving them to about ½ normal tread depth for dry race tracks. This is of benefit to you, because the tires we race are the tires you buy. INCREASING POPULARITY. Showroom stock racing is…

New Alfa to U.S. According to Alfa’s Public Relations Manager Dr. Franco Perugia, the new Alfa Romeo type 75 “is the cornerstone of our new philosophy.” This car will be exported to the U.S. beginning in April 1986. The 75 model, so called to celebrate Alfa’s 75th anniversary, follows close behind the 90 model and shares its 98.9-in. wheelbase. Released in Europe at the end of May 1985, the 75 has a range of five engines driving the de Dion-suspended rear wheels, with the top-range motor being the GTV’s 2.5-liter V-6. By the time the car makes it to the U.S., the engine will be punched out to a full 3.0 liters. The Alfa marque has been through a major identity crisis in Europe in the past seven years and…

Suggesting Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry has an “uncanny instinct for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory,” one of the MITI’s closest American allies, the American International Automobile Dealers Association, was the first to bemoan the announcement that the voluntary restraint agreement (VRA) with the U.S. would continue, but exports of cars to this country would be increased by 25 percent. That is 450,000 more cars, or a total of 2.3 million a year—considered by many industry analysts to be near maximum production capacity for Japan. “The announcement and its timing could not have been better calculated to make everyone angry,” said AIADA President Robert McElwaine. “It represents a total misreading of American attitudes on trade.” True enough. Already angry that President Reagan had dropped the VRA…

Usually, in the background story of a car’s development, its manufacture and origins are minor elements to the car itself. But in this story, the car as a driving machine sort of fades from the foreground and the industrial machinations that brought it to life dominate the scene. For all intents and purposes, we’ve seen this car before. It’s a Corolla through and through, with just enough Chevy added to qualify it for citizenship in Chevrolet showrooms. If you hear anything familiar in the following discussion, it’s because anything that’s already been said about the Corolla applies to the Nova as well. Stop me if you’ve heard it before. The car Chevy calls the Nova is the same car Toyota calls the Sprinter in Japan. It is essentially a 4-door…

This head-to-head confrontation is critical to the mental health of all Red-Blooded American Males (RBAMs). Ranks right up there with periodic doses of baseball, apple pie, Mom, and letters from home. What we’ve got here are the two American GT cars. There are other pretenders to this lofty All-American GT perch, but RBAMs don’t drive cars that spin their front tires. RBAMs also drive V-8s, right? Whoops, not so clear on that one. The V-8 still has its seductive qualities, but it uses too much fuel to produce that wonderful torque. Which is why RBAMs are showing up these days behind smaller engines producing just as much power at higher efficiencies: V-6s, inline fours, turbocharging, intercooling, electronic engine management, direct port injection, and four valves per cylinder are all means…

Somebody once said that you should never take stock market tips from a broker who drives a ‘57 DeSoto. That advice may or may not be worthwhile, but it does vividly point out the importance of packaging. The ‘85 Chevrolet X-11 turns in performance numbers that could make some highly touted European sedans blush, and the X-11 does it for thousands of dollars less, but, oh, the box it comes in! Sad to say, the Chevrolet product lacks the polish and pizzazz to put it in a league with similarly sized European machinery. This is an X-car, friends, and despite the warm glow of its performance numbers, the X-11 has a long way to go to shed the negatives of its much-recalled predecessors. That’s a shame, because as it sits…

On the day the Geneva Show opened to the public, Common Market ministers held an 11-hour debate on exhaust emission standards throughout the community. Predictably, it broke up without a decision as the French, led by Renault, and the British interests argued against catalyzers for small cars. It still appears the Germans, Austrians, and Swiss will set their own standards from 1988 and isolate their car buyers from the rest of the Market members. It’s a sign of the times that motor shows, once the domain of manufacturers and stylists, should be dominated by the topic of emissions, something that is now taken for granted in America and Japan. To many Europeans, the subject is about as appealing as a discussion of digestive processes, and as welcome as AIDS, but…

Intercooled has become one of those dime-store automotive buzzwords the American car-buying public associates with ultra-high performance, regardless of their ability to fully comprehend the subject. If it’s intercooled, or turbocharged, or fuel-injected, or has a double overhead cam or four valves per cylinder, it must be the hot setup. If it has all of the above, it’s a Saab. Although intercooling, as a fully functional concept, has been around since Day One of turbocharger technology, it has recently come into vogue as the savior of all that is true and good with the art of supercompressing an engine’s intake charge. Packaged and promoted by auto makers as the next logical refinement for the thinking man’s muscle car, it is high-concept designer horsepower for the enlightened street racer. Hell, it’s…

GM’s Catch-up Cars from Buick and Olds Less than prudent GM engineers recently were caught with their corporate pants down when one of our hidden lensmen spotted a pair of H-body coupes undergoing valet parking trials at a Tucson, Arizona, motel. The H-bodies, in both Buick LeSabre and Oldsmobile Delta 88 forms, replace the rear-wheel-drive B-cars that currently use the same names. Based on the front-wheeldrive C-models (Buick Electra and Olds 98), the new offerings will be propelled by a port-injected 3.0-liter 90° V-6 of Buick manufacture. Both Buick and Olds versions will be available with an extra-cost 3.8-liter version of the base V-6. While both H-bodies will share the basic suspension geometry with the C-cars, chassis tuning will be different for Buick and Olds offerings. In base form, we’d…

Ford, continuing to make Merkur a franchise name, rather than simply a model imported from Europe, will add the newly introduced European Scorpio sedan next year to the existing XR4TL Ford replaced the traditional Granada with the Granada Scorpio. Although the familiar name remains, philosophically the new car is a completely different entity. According to Walter Hayes, Ford chief, “The old Granada market has now gone away. The demand is for more sophisticated and stylish cars in that segment.” The Granada Scorpio has the Teves ABS braking system as standard equipment and will be exported to the U.S. with the 2.9-liter V-6 engine. The Scorpio is expected to appear in America in April 1986. —Michael Cotton…

William James Lectures and Essays, 1879 In between writing about philosophy and inventing psychology, the good Dr. James hit on a pretty sound way to appreciate Italian exoticars. Mathematics and poetry, passion and balance, excitement and restraint, engineering and aesthetics: The Italian fantasy marques, more than any other car builders, capture that harmony, that interplay, that marriage of diverse and divergent impulses. And therein lies the marvel. Unflawed engineering by itself is no big deal; any good German operation can give you that. But for automotive design that grabs you by the adrenal glands and ties you up in your own heartstrings, look to the land of Michelangelo. And of Enzo Ferrari. It borders on cliche to speak of Ferrari GT cars as Latin passion rendered in steel and aluminum.…

All generalizations are unreliable, including this one. Certainly it is unsafe to attempt any generalizations about Ferrari 12-cylinder engines: There have been far too many of them, and not very many of any of them. One might as well try to herd cats. One thing may safely be stated: Ferraris would not be the same without them. Put any other engine in a Ferrari and there is an immediate loss of class, of purity, of face, and of faith. Ask any Dino owner. Real Ferraris have 12-cylinder engines, and have had them ever since 1947. Why? Ferrari once said it was because he admired the Packard Twin Six, but he was probably just being tactful. The Packard was, after all, out of production by then; it would never have done…

It offers a full 25 more horsepower with equal fuel efficiency. It’s as quick and fast, but more throttle-responsive and much more fun to drive. It’s the LB9 Tuned Port Injection (TPI) IROC-Z with a take-it-or-leave-it 4-speed automatic, and it’s definitely a match for the carbureted 5-speed manual IROC-Z. If nothing else, the LB9 engine is a graphic example of how fuel efficiency and power output need not be mutually exclusive, and how, through the application of more precise air/fuel management, design engineers can effect gains in both without the traditional reciprocal tradeoffs. The objective of the TPI project was fuel efficiency, aimed specifically at off-setting the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) gas-guzzler tax on Chevy’s small-block V-8 engine family through 1986. To achieve this, design engineers first went to…

If the frustrating curse of too many choices raises hackles on the back of the neck, triggers hyperventilation, shortness of breath, eruptions of stress-related acne, and jags of uncontrollable hiccups, do not read this article. What we’re dealing with here is an extraordinary exercise in the closely related fine arts of Informed DecisionMaking and Priority Identification. In the broadest sense, it is an evaluation of three 4-door sport sedans in the highly competitive $15,000-$20,000 price range. Specifically, and to make things as difficult as possible, they are the front-wheel-drive Cadillac Cimarron V-6, the rear-wheeldrive 4-cylinder BMW 318i, and the all-wheel-drive 5-cylinder Audi 4000S Quattro; three decidedly dissimilar cars aimed point blank—from every conceivable angle—at the same demographic market. The Cimarron had never quite lived up to its flag-waving promise of…

Phil Hill and Peter Collins won the first big race of 1958 in-what else-a Ferrari Testa Roesa. It was 12 hours around the old airport circuit outside of Sebring. Florida. Twelve hours of the smell of citrus blossoms and rubber smoke, of hot oil and exhaust smoke and campfires. the sound of the ripping Ferrari 12s and painfully loud Porsche Spyd-ers, team tactics, amateurs, professionals. Ferrari 250TRs were one-two with a 1.6-liter Porsche 3rd, a respectful half-dozen laps behind the second Testa Roesa. The car that Hill and Collins used was factory entered. It differed from the “customer” cars in a number of ways, most important, de Dion rear suspension. But it shared all those bits that meant “Ferrari” in those days-knockoff Borrani wheels, independent front suspension with A-arms and…

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A less than sneaky driving schedule on the part of a gang of Cadillac development engineers, combined with the cunning of covert lensman Jim Dunne, has produced this unofficial spy photo of next year’s Seville. Developed concurrently with the upcoming GM E-bodies (Cad Eldo/Buick Riv/Olds Toro), the Seville shares most mechanical components. That means the high-zoot 4-door will be powered by Caddy’s own all-aluminum 4.1-liter V-8 positioned transversely between the front wheels. As is the case with the Eldorado, the Seville—dubbed the K-body at GM—will use the Hydra-Matic division’s THM 440 4-speed automatic trans-mission as the only available gearbox. Suspension is by coil-sprung MacPherson struts at the front, with struts used again in the rear. In an effort to minimize intrusion of the suspension geometry in the trunk, the space-robbing…

“It’s so way-out that it can even afford to dispense with a clean line. Perhaps one of the greatest gifts of Italian style is the ability to give outward and visible expression to a vehicle’s innermost technical and functional features, or, if you will, its heart.” Nuccio BertoneFounderCarrozzeria Bertone SpA “It has an effective, functional exterior with a lot of personality. But the sculptural shaping of the side air intakes is too complicated. The interior is pleasant overall, but from an ergonomic standpoint, it still needs work.” Bjorn EnvallChief StylistSaab-Scania AB “The handling of the air intakes on the sides makes the Testarossa look like a huge toy. The whole thing looks like it’s half Formula One car and half sports car. Overall, the race car influence in the design…

1. Detroit. Ralph Nader threatens to stop race with an injunction. 2. Michigan Upper Peninsula. Merkur 1—deer 0. 3. Houghton, Michigan. Miss a turn and head off into blank sections of road map. Collect 1700 penalty points. 4. North Dakota. Blizzard. 5. Montana, 1-94. Baldwin collects $75 ticket for doing 68 mph in snow. 6. Benihana Rolls-Royce spins the entire length of Montana. 7. Glendive, Montana. Detour. Half the field retires to a motel. 8. Glacier National Park. Cop blows tire chasing “Ice King” Baldwin. Stopped twice for friendly “chat” with highway police. 9. Portland. First real food since Detroit. 10. Medford. Regret first real food since Detroit. 11. Sears Point. Change tires, do one lap of track, spill coffee. 12. Santa Cruz. Gas station of the living dead. 13.…

There are those who would have you believe that Saab automobiles are strange, weird, otherworldly. While it is true that since the company added automobiles to its list of offerings back in 1947, Saabs have always had a certain, uh… distinctive quality to their exteriors, there’s nothing weird about what’s going on beneath those Swedish steel panels. Gratifying, yes. Endearing, yes. Even stimulating. But weird? No way. While there are still certain members of this staff who have trouble seeing beauty in the unmistakable contours of the Saab 900 Turbo, no one here argues with its credentials as an outstanding road car. We have been drawn steadily toward this collective opinion in our encounters with various Saab test cars over the years. And we’ve been confirmed in it as a…

As a basis for racing, the notion of Showroom Stock is hardly anything new. The Sports Car Club of America points to 1972 as the year of genesis for SS racers, but it really goes back to the dawn years of the club itself, just after World War Two, when the first clubbies gathered for joyous afternoons of haybale bashing in their MG-TCs, Allards, Alfas, Rileys, etc. It’s no exaggeration to say that SCCA was Showroom Stock before Showroom Stock was cool, and that everything else owes its existence to those elitist few who felt they had something to prove. Nevertheless, it would be a big mistake to think that the Showroom Stock racing phenomena of this season aren’t different from everything that’s gone down before. And we ain’t just…

Prost Coasts in Formula One Opener It wasn’t quite a carbon copy of last year’s Rout in Rio. But Alain Prost’s second consecutive Brazilian GP victory for Team McLaren in the first round of the 1985 F1 championship brought back some decidedly unsettling memories for a good many of the competitors. McLaren’s overall performance during the weekend left little doubt that F1’s reigning superpower has maintained its competitive edge. But several teams showed moments of brilliance that indicate the title chase will be considerably less one-sided than last year’s abject blowout. Just as it had in 1984, attrition took a heavy toll in the contest, abetted by 100°-plus heat reputed to be the worst in the history of the Grand Prix. The DNF list included 12 of the 25 starters,…