Antique miniature pool table

ShootingArts said:
I never lost a street race with the Mustang. There was only one car on the street in the area I would have ducked, there was a black Ford with the 735HP Nascar single overhead cam 427 in it. That engine and the other factories reaction to it is what caused NASCAR to shut down the factories.

This was a hemi engine, Chrysler actually made every component to put out a double overhead cam 426 hemi too. The other factories weren't far behind and NASCAR realized that there would be a few factory cars out front and nobody without a factory deal would have any chance of being competitive. Can you picture Richard Petty in a Superbird with a double overhead cam hemi under the hood? Could any of the tires and chassis have handled this kind of horsepower? We were fixing to top 1000HP in those big heavy cars on a closed course. Lord knows how many great drivers would have been killed.

I remember a few years later a lady wanted a record. Fastest lady on a closed course. Best I recall she got it with the Superbird at around two hundred. They just drug it out of the museum and put it on the track. It had a dead cylinder, no problem.

Hu
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Wow. Those were the days.
I got tired of that pony car being right next to me at 80 so I upgraded to a 70 GTO with a 400. I was racing him on a road I was unfamiliar with and hit 120 mph. It is still the fastest I have ever been on a road.

Everything was going well until the asphalt ended and it was gravel after that.
Somewhat hard packed but I always bragged that the fastest I had ever gone was on gravel🫨

I recently drove a Ford Lightning, it was my first time in an electric vehicle. OMG…stupid fast.
 
Cuebuddy said:
Wow. Those were the days.
I got tired of that pony car being right next to me at 80 so I upgraded to a 70 GTO with a 400. I was racing him on a road I was unfamiliar with and hit 120 mph. It is still the fastest I have ever been on a road.

Everything was going well until the asphalt ended and it was gravel after that.
Somewhat hard packed but I always bragged that the fastest I had ever gone was on gravel🫨

I recently drove a Ford Lightning, it was my first time in an electric vehicle. OMG…stupid fast.
Click to expand...

Never drove an electric car. The fastest I went was in that little Mustang. Dead sober, four AM. They had put in a new wide rural road with about four miles dead straight, smooth concrete. I figured that was the place to top end the Mustang. Came out of an S curve at 75 not pushing things in second gear, shifted out of third when I pegged the speedo. It was still noticeably accelerating when my vision had shrank up to about a basketball sized circle dead in front of me. I couldn't see the side of the road to tell where I was at and it ended with a 50-60 feet drop and huge oaks sticking up which would be the first thing I hit after going airborne.

I had another issue too, the car was drifting so badly I was touching grass on both sides of the at least 24' wide concrete, maybe as wide as 32'. I said to myself, "Self, if you get this puppy stopped before the stop sign I ain't never doing this again!" It and an 850 Norton were the only two road machines I owned without top ending until I was twenty-five. I had to get so low on the Norton that I couldn't see the speedometer which kinda defeated the purpose!

The quickest I went was in my dirt car. Just a personally built 327 but I ran faster than several all aluminum 427's with it, safe to say it was stout. Plus I was turning a thousand tighter than the competition, another edge.

I was just starting racing, started off on regrooved asphalt tires from the team I was working on the pit crew with. After about six weeks I went and bought dirt tires for the right front and both rear corners. I was set to show something now! Not exactly, I buzzed those asphalt tires, these dirt tires logged me down like a pulpwood truck. I was turning exactly the same time as before dropping five hundred dollars. It was a practice day and I was a wee bit annoyed. I was running a three speed scratchbox in the car and when I went back out I left it in second gear. I would drift up within inches of the wall coming out of the turns at about 3/4 throttle or a bit more. Slam the hammer down and the straights genuinely felt about fifty feet long. I did that for about ten laps before I cooled off and decided blowing my engine was stupid.

I don't know how quickly I went down the straights, I do know a sprint car I drove on the same track didn't seem nearly as fast!

My last dirt car was a midengine 67 Camaro, 454. Moderation wasn't in my vocabulary. I'll tell you the tale of my first ride in a '65 Mustang I was driving for somebody else sometime if I haven't already. Got bumped at an unfortunate time and flew through the air seventy or eighty feet. It hit the ground vertical like a caber. Tight driver's compartment anyway and this happened at the end of the straight so full speed. Stopped in an inch or two when I hit ground. That hurt! Not the car, hairlipped the hood a little. A hundred or two people came to the crash, I had them push the car off in time for the restart!

Hu
 
ShootingArts said:
I like the Mustangs too! My first toy was a sixty-five 2+2. Being a kid I did terrible things to it. One of my customers bought a 65 or 66 GT 350 that had been in the salt for $125. I kept offering him more and more money for it, not to restore it or do something smart, to cannibalize it for the side windows, disk brakes, and I forget what all.

I had built a full race engine for my street car like a dummy. That 289 in a stripped down Mustang would fly, the worst thing about it. At 160 or so it would just touch the road now and then! It pegged the 120MPH speedometer in third still pulling hard and I would shift down into fourth. Probably fortunately for me a huge limb out of an oak tree fell on it and crushed it. As Ralph Nader would say, it was unsafe at any speed!

Hu
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While in the service in the late 60s I'd sometimes come home on leave to find my brother-in-law had rented a GT350H from Hertz....sounds like the one you described...289 Cobra engine @ 306 HP and dual Holly quads, automatic or Hurst manual gearshift...an absolute monster. Seems as though Ford only made about 1,000 of these for Hertz to rent out. Problem was that street racers would rent them for street racing and, of course, take them to the track on the weekends. Further problem for Hertz was that occasionally someone would changeout the engine for something much less powerful and keep the original. The rental project only lasted for a few years before it was discontinued, but what a blast those car were, would literally walk away from the 'vetts, GTOs, 442s, and 396 Chevys...not sure about the Hemis...

Story: https://www.mustangspecs.com/1966-shelby-mustang-gt350-h/

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jimmyg said:
While in the service in the late 60s I'd sometimes come home on leave to find my brother-in-law had rented a GT350H from Hertz....sounds like the one you described...289 Cobra engine @ 306 HP and dual Holly quads, automatic or Hurst manual gearshift...an absolute monster. Seems as though Ford only made about 1,000 of these for Hertz to rent out. Problem was that street racers would rent them for street racing and, of course, take them to the track on the weekends. Further problem for Hertz was that occasionally someone would changeout the engine for something much less powerful and keep the original. The rental project only lasted for a few years before it was discontinued, but what a blast those car were, would literally walk away from the 'vetts, GTOs, 442s, and 396 Chevys...not sure about the Hemis...

Story: https://www.mustangspecs.com/1966-shelby-mustang-gt350-h/

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The GT350's were fast but they were only 289 inches, 306HP/329ftlbs of torque, 1/4 mile times were in the low 15 second range. They would be hard pressed to run alongside Chevy 427's, Hemis and other big block Mopars, and the big block Ford offerings of the day. Very cool cars though.
 
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