by Frank Miller

Created on: December 27, 2008

That Sixty Something in the Muscle Car

It took a whole lot of skill to drive the cars of yesteryear.

If you are sixty today, you've probably been driving for about forty five years. You probably began your driving career with cars built in the early sixties, maybe even the Fifties or Forties.

Cars were slightly different then.

We didn't have Radial Tires. If we were really lucky, we had tubeless bias-ply tires. Yet older tires had rubber tubes in them to hold in the air. Those old rubber shoes didn't have quite the grip that today's tires do. They didn't steer very well. They got a lot of flats. They blew out just every so often.

Power steering? We didn't start to really see that exciting option until around the middle sixties and even then it was an expensive option. Oh, and of course the steering was still usually "recirculating ball." Rack and pinion? Practically unheard of.

Yeah, we did have vacuum assisted windshield wipers (when they worked) but McPhearson Struts? More of a Seventies type of thing. You were happy if your early suspension system kept you upright while you were standing still much less at fifty miles an hour!

You could get loose (skid sideways) in half a heartbeat and if you did, the slightest wrong twitch on the steering wheel would put you upside down hanging from your seatbelt. Oops, almost forgot. Didn't have them either. Well, actually some cars did. Simple lap belts were an option. Airbags? What a concept!

Speaking of transmissions (were we?) most cars were standard shift. Automatics were starting to happen then but they too, were expensive options. Most cars came with a third pedal - which needed to be pushed, in order to shift gears with something called a gear shift. You needed at least a basic understanding of how a transmission works, to even pass your drivers test. Today we have countless drivers who have never even seen a clutch pedal. They get in the car, put it in Drive and off it goes.

But horsepower? We had gobs of it. Not too much in the early fifties but by the time the sixties had rolled around, Detroit had discovered that "bigger was better" and "faster was funner". "Big-blocks" with a couple of four barrel Hollies (remember carburetors?) were definitely cool. We had plenty of horsepower if we wanted it and often even if we didn't. She was fine, that "409".

Gas Mileage? Not a problem either, with gas at 5 cents a gallon or so. Pushing the pedal on the old muscle cars could really siphon gas out of the tank but you pulled up

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