We Can Make Classic Cars Outperform Today's "SuperCars": Why Not Vintage Audio?

Tom Bailey’s "street legal" ’69 Camaro ran a best of 6.73 @ 210.83 MPH in the 1/4 mile last year at Hot Rod’s Drag Week, and he drove the car home. The Bugatti Chiron runs a (very impressive) 9.4 @ 158 MPH in the same distance. Using the 1/4 mile to 1/8 calculator, the Camaro clicked off 4.2 seconds @ 160 MPH at the 1/8th mile mark compared to the Bugatti’s 5.9 @ 128 MPH. This puts the Camaro a minimum of 1.7 seconds ahead when the Bugatti reached this point. Calculating the speed and distance of the Camaro at 160 MPH, that’s approximately 250 feet per second x 1.7 seconds or 425 feet ahead at the half way point. This is a conservative number based on the fact that when the Bugatti reached this point the Camaro would have been traveling much faster than it did at the 1/8 mile mark. At the 1/4 mark, the Camaro was traveling 210.83 MPH or about 316.25 feet per second. Approximately the length of a football field every second. The Camaro reached the 1/4 mile mark less than one second after the Bugatti reached the 1/8 mile mark. Therefore, it appears that a "2 football field lead" is a plausible claim. I might be a few centimeters off, but I think the estimate is pretty close.

Nice  example.  Tom's Camaro is a beast.  I have been into classic cars and hot rods since the 90s and always got a kick out of how much faster a well built hot rod is than whatever the current supercar is.  Supercars just aren't that fast on the drag strip, especially considering the cost.  It's pretty easy to build something faster for a fraction of the cost.  Tom's Camaro is an extreme example.  You can do it far easier and cheaper with just about any vehicle.

@jallan 

"New semiconductor designs, new capacitor designs, new precision resistors, new wire designs, better understanding of micro phonics and vibration control, etc. etc."

I totally agree with that statement.  How much of this technology can be embraced and migrated into older (vintage) equipment?

@waytoomuchstuff - Don’t get me wrong, I would take a Lola chassis mascarading as a 60’s Ford GT40. But it is not like they have figured out how to make cars a whole lot lighter, and while some improvements in braking materials have happened… the physics of the cars is largely unchanged.
Yeah we have more electronics in cars now, and other things like regenerative braking. But there is a steering wheel, brakes, throttle and usually a clutch and gearbox.

And in HiFi electronics it is somewhat more easy, as there is no skill that needs to harness the equipment. One pretty much cables it up, and it is ready to go.

It is not like amp only needs to do a 1/4 or 1/8th mile. They need enough power to drive the speakers, and more than that is not going to make the stereo better. Once it is too loud to listen to, then it is loud enough.

The aftermarket stuff is relegated to power conditioning, cables, and on the terms of things that work there are also room treatments and DSP approaches.

I am putting the cables and power conditioners into the fuzzy dice category, where they look cool, but do not make the things perform better most of the time.

@audition__audio 

"In no way can older cars compete with the newer "super" cars. Same, I say, with audio although the difference in this realm is not as great as in the automotive."

You are correct, sir.  My comments relate only to the (measurable) performance improvements in aftermarket add-ons/mods, not so much vehicles in their raw, factory trim.  My use of "Supercars" is simply to set a caliper for comparison, and not inteneded to diminish the crediblity of that class of vehicles.  Nice reference to audio in your statement.  I have to agree with you on that one, too.

@ketchup Yep, Tom's Camaro is brutal.

 A little story:

A stock-appearing early Nova showed up at our local track (St. Louis area).  2-tone, white over black, baby moons.  Everything fit under the factory wheel wells.  The car was so cute you just wanted to walk over and pinch it.

It quietly made it's way thru the staging lanes and into the burnout box.  I was thinking that he was there making a tribute to the car -- to have documentation that he actually took it to the drag strip to hang on the wall.  The light turned green, and he launched it.  8.60s at 160 MPH.  The moral of the story here is that "Bugatti performance" can be had with something that looks more like a grocery-getter than a race car with the right engineering and aftermarket parts.  Twin turbos help, too.

Thanks for the comments.