The Collector
As a kid, I recall, a guy told me how they came up with the speed limits for US highways. Back in the early 1950s they would take average folks out for a ride in a typical American car of the period, throw a towel over the speedometer, increase the speed and then say: ‘Tell me when you feel uncomfortable.’ At somewhere between 60 and 70mph, most people thought ‘Well, that feels fast enough’. I don’t know how true that story is, but it seems to make sense.
I thought of that the other day while I was driving my Corvette Stingray split-window with fuel injection. With the then-new and exotic fuel system and 360 horsepower, this was the one to have. My Stingray is just as it left the factory in ’63. As I approached 70mph the car felt as if we were going much faster. Thinking my speedometer was off, I checked the GPS on my phone, and we were going exactly 70, yet the car felt skittish. I felt like those people in the 1950s with the towel over the dashboard, thinking: yeah, 70mph feels fast enough.
Remember, downforce was yet to be an issue, and designers had to fight tooth and nail with marketing for any new kind of aerodynamics. I remember reading how Zora Arkus-Duntov tried to convince Bill Mitchell to replace the fake grille on the Stingray hood with real vents so the air could flow through, keeping the front from lifting. But to no avail. ‘Too expensive,’ he was told.
It’s amazing how far we’ve come. In 2005 we took a Porsche Carrera GT to Talladega with David Donohue to try to set some records. We even had Porsche engineering legend Norbert Singer set up the car for us. With every 1mph over 190 mph, the car got twitchier and twitchier. As the tyres began to wear, I felt the back of the car moving around more and more in the corners.
I kept my input minimal. Coming down the back straight, I got a signal to slow down. I foolishly lifted my foot off the pedal too quickly and the front and rear of the car switched places. About eight times.
Somebody once told me ‘You’ll always hit what you’re looking at,’ so every time I saw the wall coming towards me, I jerked my head and the steering wheel the opposite way. I got lucky and kept the car in the centre of the track. No damage except four flat-spotted tyres.
