Part I. The Crash. On December 4, 2007, on a cold (but not snowy) evening, I left work and drove down the road to go home. Turning a curve, the car spun out, and crashed backwards through the woods (I was acquitted of “failure to maintain control” due to my own pro se representation). The driver’s side window was completely destroyed, the driver’s side door banged up enough to prevent it opening (see pic above), and various other body panels also suffered their fair share of damage. The passenger side tie rod end was busted, meaning the car is neither steerable nor drivable, though it fires right up on all 8 poorly injected cylinders.
The insurance company, sending out a special adjuster who divides a car’s fair market value by half and issues a check for that, and yanking rental car coverage before it had even issued that pathetically inadequate check, was happy to rip me off and reward me for 15 years of loyalty. So I had to go down to Woodbridge, to a large used car auction dealership, and snatch the first cheapo econobox that wasn’t a total piece of shit.
Part II. The 1995 Plymouth Neon. Actually, the car is pretty nice. Smurf blue, fairly clean grey interior, automatic transmission, with working air conditioning and 4 wheel antilock brakes. It had no stereo, so I had to get a nice one from Crutchfield, a Pioneer CD player with one of those incredibly cool but equally distracting blue screen displays. I installed it myself, aside from some help from Myer-Emco because the factory harness refused to supply a constant 12 volt power supply. I also got floor mats with the embroidered “Plymouth” logo, as the car didn’t even have any mats. But the car passed inspection with just a new fog light and cleaning up the headlights, and passed emissions with flying colors.
Part III. Formula vs. Neon. Hmm. 5.7L OHV V8 vs. 2.0L SOHC I4. 300 horsepower and 350 lb-ft of torque vs. 134 HP and about 120 lb-ft of torque. Black on black vs. blue on grey. RWD vs. FWD. WS6 performance suspension on 245/50ZR16 tires, vs. go-cart suspension on 185/65R14 tires. Although the Neon is lighter, it doesn’t handle nearly as well as the Formula, and it has a cheap, small, fragile tin can feel to it which doesn’t inspire any sense of safety or security – despite the anti-lock brakes, which work as though the brakes are failing, not working properly thanks to higher technology than the older brakes on the Formula. In all these categories the Formula is definitely superior.
But in two categories, which you can probably guess, the Neon triumphs: INSURANCE went down by almost 50%, from $140/month to $80 a month (for a code 10 Neon vs. a code 20 Firebird Formula) and FUEL ECONOMY jumped dramatically, from 13 mpg in the Formula to 24 mpg in the Neon. Instead of filling up every 3 days with 93 octane gas, it’s every week with 87 octane. The econobox does have its advantages.
I did do some research, and discovered that performance parts are available for this Neon. Header (as in ONE), cat-back exhaust, SOHC camshafts from Crane and Zex, and a few other parts. But it’s not nearly as much as for the Formula and even with all those parts thrown in together, the HP would still be only something like 180, well short of the 240 HP the Formula had in stock condition, never mind the modified condition it’s in now. Perform the same modifications on a V8 and you’d be seeing twice the overall output, in a car that’s only 50% heavier. There’s a reason hot rodders have preferred V8 muscle cars for so long. These stupid rice racers and import/compact tuner crowds act as though they invented a hobby which didn’t exist in any real sense before 1998 or so (for their crappy excuse for performance cars) – whereas Edelbrock was modifying the Camaro as soon as it came out in 1967 and Hot Rod has been published since 1948. Bootleggers had been souping up their Model Ts and Deuces (first mass-produced V8, Ford in 1932…first small-block Chevy V8, 1955) long before Toyota, Honda and Nissan were out of their automotive diapers. Hoorah for “Fast & Furious 2” for showing us some REAL cars: the Yenko Camaro (’69 w/a 427) and a ’70 Hemi Challenger.
Fortunately, the Formula isn’t dead, it’s merely resting in a lot down in Stafford. Someday, it might rise from the ashes like its namesake. We’ll have to see. But at least in the meantime I have the Smurf-blue Neon to drive.
No comments:
Post a Comment