|
First twin cam cross flow Hemi was 1907. (Welch I think the name was).
Chevy had a OHV 4 cylinder with no valve cover in 1925. Small cups drip fed the rockers. You had to fill the cups every 100 miles.
Chevy 6 was ohv from something like 1932. Still used babbit mains in the early 50s.
Consider the ancient tech NASCAR "stock cars" (what a laugh) getting close to 6 MPG at 180.
Alfa built a grand prix car in 1950 based on their mid 30s straight 8 design. It was two 45cubic inch, 4 cylinder blocks bolted nose to nose. One crank ran the two stage blower, the other ran the car. All accessories were gear driven from the crank with no fan belts to fall apart at close to 10k RPM.
90 cubic inches, 390 horsepower, and 2 MPG.
The first operational car built by Benz, had an overhead valve and a side valve (1886, I have the Franklin mint model).
Whats new is the computational capability and almost instant response of electronic controls and the ability to read engine parameters at amazing data transfer rates.
My 59 Vette would cruise at 100 MPH at 4 k RPM. The manual steering and manual drum brakes were an adventure at those speeds, but it would still go 70 MPH around an Interstate cloverleaf.
The front suspension was standard 53 chevy, without any rubber bushings anywhere.
I commonly drove back road curves at double the posted (yellow sign) speed limit and still got 22 MPG, without even thinking about hypermiling.
Engine and wide ratio M22 were out of a 71 Z28. Carb was a 600 Holley. Tires were Goodyear Polyglass.
Even my 37 Ford was a great handling car with 5 inch wide radials. This was with the original Flathead V8 and cable operated mechanical brakes, and it got 20 MPG even though it was redlined at 3800 RPM and 82 MPH, which I did in the car when it was 67 years old and still had the 4 original brake cables.
The 37 Coupe weighed 2500 pounds and had a 231 CI V8. It would pull in high gear from 350 RPM. You checked the idle speed by letting it idle in high gear at 7 MPH and 350 RPM.
regards
Mech
|