Camaro, Mustang, Challenger: Old vs New

Hot-rod time machine: Just how good were the good ol' days?From the July, 2011 issue of Motor Trend It's abundantly clear from the hard evidence presented in these pages over the past months that these are the best of times for car guys, if vehicle performance is your measure of such things. And yet, yank a geezer's chain at a car show, and he'll jabber on about how the new ponycars just can't compare with those of the late 1960s and early '70s. Is there anything to these lunatic ravings? To find out, we've gathered three modern high-spec ponycars and matched them with their glory days ancestors. We're pitting a 2011 Camaro SS against the '69 Camaro SS396 that inspired its design; a 2011 Challenger SRT8 meets the '70 Challenger it so faithfully resembles (ours is an R/T SE 440 Six Pack); and a freshly minted Shelby Mustang GT500 convertible meets its '69 forebear. We'll turn them all loose on a closed section of road in L.A.'s Griffith Park and see what happens, but first, let's have a look at those good old days. The late 1960s was a golden era for American automakers. Those pesky imports were nibbling away at the margins, but at the dawn of 1970, they accounted for a little over 11 percent of sales. Design reigned supreme, and designers had yet to be reined in to any great extent by buzz-kill pedestrian safety regs, crash-survivability standards, bumper strength laws, aerodynamics, etc. Gasoline was plentiful and cheap, and engineers were finding better ways to burn as much of it as possible in halo performance models that earned the brands big headlines and drove sales up. Vehicular variety was on the upswing, too, with new automotive platforms of different sizes and configurations making their debut throughout the 1960s. All those babies conceived by randy veterans returning home from World War II were now grownups ready to buy their first new cars, and they accounted for 20 percent of the market. They didn't want what Dad was driving. They wanted a car to lure a backseat mate-something with a long phallic hood, two doors, and a pert, short trunk. They wanted ponycars. To keep the cars affordable, OEMs shared compact-car underpinnings, and prices started just a bit higher (Dodge and Plymouth moved their ponies up to midsize architecture for 1970). The formula worked. By 1970, the pony market topped a half-million annual sales.

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