I don't think it's BAD that cars are emotionally significant to people. They're the modern analog to animals, and people used to get pretty sentimental about their horses, even ones used commercially, hence the phrase "Busman's holiday"
When the Tesla Model S first came out, the Detroit concours had a class of EVs and I was talking to a woman about their Tesla and I'd have to characterize her reaction to the car as aroused.
I'll admit to laughing out loud at miles per gibbon. Well played.
And people that don't like automatic 3-cylinder cars DO, in my experience, care more about new refrigerators' compressors dying prematurely. It saves on electricity, but surely that doesn't help the environment by causing you to purchase a new refrigerator every 5~10 years now. And have you SEEN the size of American refrigerators? You could put an entire... uh... Czechrepublicanian thing in there. Maybe you have a nice Czechian goat species? You could fit an entire goat in there.
Ha! Cutting them up is cheating. I mean pick up a goat, stuff it in the fridge, close the door. Mine can certainly not hold more than one intact Nubian goat.
Seems like he does. Matt Farah said on a recent podcast (might have been a Patreon-only one) that Jonny sent him excerpts from your Valkyrie (sp?) piece.
it’s the arrogance that gets me. i’m ok at math but i’m very careful not to put anything in an email or a comment without double checking the numbers. if you don’t know that downforce is dependent on speed, than you don’t even conceptually understand the concept of downforce.
Jonny ABSOLUTELY does not understand the concept of downforce, or how it's produced, or why it might change. He has a fourth-grader's understanding of science and math.
Would that be a 1960s 4th grader or a 2023 4th grader who has missed two years of classroom education because of Randi Weingarten (a shanda fun de goyim if there ever was one)? Perhaps one reason why people don't understand downforce is that there are multiple ways that it can be created, with actual wings like the Chaparral (Hall mounted the struts directly to the rear wheel hubs, btw), with undercar diffusers and extractors, with fans like the Chaparral and Williams racers and Gordon Murray's new toy, and the now banned in F1 blown exhaust diffusers. Also, while I can demonstrate lift and the Bernouli effect with a fan and a hand-shaped styrofoam wing it's harder to show people how the opposite is effected.
toby silverton, who briefly owned bristol cars several years ago, told me a hack into ferrari hq conversations found that they suddenly started talking about downforce on their street cars because their drag coefficient was so bad. i'd kinda like a bristol fighter gt sometime soon!
a dozen years ago i put bristol in contact with land speed louise at bonneville; they wanted to build a twin-turbo fighter to set the record for a street-licensed car. when they found out all the mods required to do that their interest flagged. i told 'em they could run a 'private' test at bonneville but i think that was more $$ than the silvertons wanted to spend
Great synopsis for us common folk. Interwebs chock full of toxic morons who look up data and spew them out of context. If only there was some mechanism for accountability.
You're only allowed to dislike white supremacy. Everything else must be liked. How do you know if it's white supremacy? If you're allowed to dislike it.
I haven’t seen one of these videos made recently, but a decade ago or so, you could find demonstrations where a couple street cars, a “stock” type racer or GT class car, and an F1 car would stagger start a single lap race such that they would all finish at about the same time. Nothing has ever driven the idea of what fast really means home to me in quite the same manner.
I just want to say, I have an extremely high tolerance for watching you repeatedly keelhaul a fool. It is endlessly entertaining and I hope it never ends. Maybe this will be the one time Jonny admits he’s wrong, as his argument isn’t even debatable.
Having been an avid reader of car magazines since the 70s I enjoy the mudslinging about these people I’m familiar with. It’s fun to hear the behind-the-scenes stuff. You must have some Jean Lindamood Jennings stories
To be anal, the 150 mph Corvette was the 1985 with 230 hp. The Cross Fire was good for 140 mph. The ZR-1 top speed varied between 172-180 mph, which is a huge difference for no real mechanical changes.
Btw, I think I once said I don't give a damn, or something like that, about Lieberman. But, while I don't care about him personally, I also really enjoy your articles about him and the car mag industry in general.
"To be anal, the 150 mph Corvette was the 1985 with 230 hp."
I believe you're correct in terms of magazine tested performance; C/D got 142 from the Cross-Fire, but I seem to recall that GM claimed 150. Maybe they just drew a good one.
The Camaro didn't hit 150mph until the IROC-Z 350, right?
The 150 mph claim was for 1985. They handed out "Life Begins at 150 mph" t shirts and hats at the 1985 intro.
GM did do a lot of work updating the C4 from year to year. Oddly, when Porsche does that with the 911, it's a good thing. When GM does it, then it's an example of poor GM engineering.
And yes, I do own a 1990 ZR-1. It's funny, I'm kind of a Corvette guy, but I don't like the typical Corvette type folks. You don't see me at a Corvette club event or anything. Just sayin.
It was definitely north of 140. Though, I gotta say... how the F long was the straight stretch or test track where they could get to north of even 130??? Crossfire feels so breathless above 120ish.
The 91 car had the smoother nose with flush turn signals. It's aero was improved a great deal which helped. L98 engine was carried over, but it is possible there was a slight gear or trans change. Can't remember.
Actually, I don't think the aero changed much. It was more of a mid cycle cosmetic refresh. Top speed tests show no real changes.
I'd say the two best C4s, of the non-ZR1 variety were the 89 (6 speed, new rear suspension, digital dash, original (and best) C4 styling - best C4 sports car) or the 96 (dramatically more refined, OBD2, LT4, better materials - best C4 GT).
1989 was the first year for the 6sp manual and the last year for the disco dash. I've always wanted one, but I'm a short man with size 10 EEE feet and when I put the seat far enough forward to reach the pedals comfortably, I can hardly get out of the damn thing. It's pretty funny, actually.
The sills are all thanks to Lloyd Reuss. A year before production, he decided that the C4 needed to be a proper targa, not just a T Top as the engineers had designed it. That was an awful big piece of structure to lose. The engineers did what they could within time and budget constraints to make up for it, and those stupid high sills were part of that.
The targa top was likely the right choice. However, the timing of the change wasn't. Reuss is known as a car guy. You'd think he'd be engineer enough to understand the magnitude of his request.
The Greenwood brothers spent a lot of time on that structure to actually make it handle and feel good. I wish I could post pictures of what they actually came up with. I'd love to drive one some time. I've heard it referred to as the best handling car of the 90s. John Greenwood was the real deal.
Finally, the Corvette chassis, as designed was actually stiff for its time. It would have been a hell of a car if McLellan and crew were allowed to finish it as planned.
Yeah, there isn't a ton of room there. But a 911 or 928 of that vintage wasn't better. Actually worse. And year for year, the C4 will outrun them on the track.
As an engineer I have spent far too much of my life involved with numbers. It's easy - sometimes - to make a stupid mistake when making a glib comment. But then you take a step back and look at it and wonder how you could have been so dumb.
But when you're doing something for work, or for research, or debate?
Then you sit back and run the numbers a couple of times using different methods as a check, because being wrong then costs a lot more.
The biggest problem I see is that politicians are all lawyers, and lawyers have shit all for an education. They don't study anything harder than basket weaving in most prelaw degree courses and they NEVER study math or science. People think that are congress critters and senators are smart people.
No, they're just charismatic. None of them can count past ten without taking off their shoes.
I tried to listen to the congressional hearing where Tik Tok CEO Shou Zi Chew was raked over the coals by both parties but for different reasons. After the first 30 minutes I had to switch to music to calm myself down. The incompetence on display by our leadership was genuinely embarrassing. Listening to our elected representatives stumble and stutter reading questions prepared by their staffs; many of them had zero comprehension of what they were asking. How can we have a democracy while we only elect the worst and the dumbest?
Doesn’t matter, it’s a clusterfuck wherever you go. Canada is being led by a drama teacher with great hair that has been caught on camera in blackface not once, not twice, but three separate times. The only thing he does well is apologize for the past sins of our white forebears. Backing him up as deputy prime minister is a frantically nodding yes-woman who doubles as finance minister with zero qualifications in that field but a masters in Slavonic studies. WTF
That's because we're going from a constitutional republic to an oligarchy. We may exist as a democracy in between that for a decade or two, hard to say. But every since the got rid of civics and stopped teaching kids how our government works, it's been all downhill.
The smartest in Congress (Thomas Massie comes to mind) share the unique distinction of pissing EVERYONE (the uniparty and its donors) off by actually thinking. Not great for longevity, as it makes you rich for a primary.
There are lawyers and then there are lawyers with serious fluency in technical areas of law. Inside any big practice group at a law firm, there's always the one person that people call when things get complicated. Being that person is not a good way to make a lot of money, but it's a good way to be totally insulated from the usual annoyances and pressures of the law firm environment, because everyone knows you're indispensable.
There are fewer lawyers in the legislatures than ever before which is why they pass more laws which fail constitutional review and are subject to challenge, accidentally try to establish a state religion, or just take the the legal agenda of a PAC and put it in as a bill without hitting control F and changing the name of the state it was mutually introduced in to their state before submitting. Truly horrendous.
There are, it seems, two types of people who go into politics, and they're both sociopaths.
The first is the aforementioned lawyers, who are trained to baffle 'em with bullshit and twist words until they're warped beyond recognition. The second is businessmen, who've gotten rich by compromising and negotiating and never holding the line on any values they might have.
John Van Stry writes “None of them can count past ten without taking off their shoes.” Counterpoint: you should see how quickly we can calculate attorney’s fees, and with our shoes on.
So a lawyer is writing a will for an old lady, he completes it, and she pays him with a crisp new 100 dollar bill. As he sits at his desk rubbing the bill between his thumb and forefinger, the bill separates with a crisp shhusshh, and he realizes he has 2 $100 dollar bills in his hand. And now our lawyer friend has an ethical dilemma: does he keep the money for himself, or does he share it with his law partner?
My favorite story is from federal evidence, which was taught by the very distinguished dean of our law school. Older gent, bald, handsome, sophisticated, Saville row tailored three piece suit. He says, the first day of class: “I need all your help. You must keep my secret. Please don’t tell my mother I’m a lawyer; she thinks I play piano in a whorehouse.”
When I was a kid, my dad traded his Opel Manta for an MGB, and had the MG's former owner, a guy with a Scottish brogue so thick you couldn't understand him, maintain it for him.
He sounded like a Glaswegian soccer hooligan until it was time to discuss the bill. Then it was all Received Pronunciation straight from the Court of St. James.
It requires a lot of mechanical intelligence to work on an assembly line, book smarts not at all. Although I bet they just didn't give a fuck about inventory and did it half assed because the would rather build MRAPs.
Most of them (McConnell, Biden etc) had incredibly mediocre and short legal careers or just never practiced at all. You don’t see, like, the appellate chair at a BigLaw firm (or a distinguished lawyer at a big firm in one of the smaller states like AL, WV) making a run for office.
Understood. Trust me; plenty of my fellow JDs make it very hard to be proud of that accomplishment. Our society is so ridiculously litigious, ambulance chasers on TV…
I suppose it depends on what kind of lawyering that you need done. Not every legal task requires a skilled litigator and not every skilled litigator has the other skills needed to do all legal work. I suppose it might help to have someone who has defended their position in a court but is that really necessary for drawing up contracts, negotiating, or doing real estate and title law?
YES! Oh YES! NEVER EVER do contracts with a lawyer who hasn't defended said contracts in front of a jury. It makes a HELL of a difference. Learned this from a friend of mine who dealt with a lot of lawyers and a lot of court cases and as I started having to deal with more and more legal issues I learned it as well.
There's a lot more to law than logic and making an argument. There's the presentation and yes, the performance aspects as well. The courtroom is a theater and 'surprise' witnesses are always well coached and if at all possible actors to boot.
You need an attorney who is used to dealing with said shenanigans. You need an attorney with balls, experience, and foresight. You do not want someone who'll choke when opposing council pulls out something he's not allowed to, but the judge still allows it. (and yes, I've had this happen to me).
As you can tell by my name; I have Irish heritage, too. Another reason for attacks! Those Irish stereotypes really piss me off! The next time I hear one I might put down my beer and punch someone.
Bullshit on that buddy. Lots of lawyers who get math. Try to litigate patent law, antitrust or anything using regression analysis. What you mean there are a lot of crap lawyers don't don't know anything including math. They don't do very well.
Had a lawyer teach me statistics in community college. He understood the material and used it as a lawyer. I do wonder whether his being a part-time community college instructor was because he enjoyed to teaching or needed money to fund his law practice but he was very intelligent for a community college instructor and unfortunately this was the ony class where I failed to recieve an A.
I'm not an engineer; I earn my living with words, but I apply the same rule with editing: take the time to check. If I've got even the slightest question, I'll double-check the dictionary or the appropriate stylebook to make absolutely sure I'm correct before making an edit or suggestion. I live in fear of some Inigo Montoya telling me a word does not mean what I think it means what I think it does. As an earlier posted noted, I can in most cases avoid that by taking a moment to just step back and fucking think.
It's hard to edit your own material because you read what you wanted to say, not what you actually put down, but also not every editor is perfect. One of my editors, who shall remain unnamed, was a pretty good writer but he once used "nadir" when he meant something more like "apex" or "apogee".
It annoys me to spell lead as "led", as in "he lead the team", but I worry that today's readers will get confused if I don't. "Led" would have gotten me a red check mark if I used it in K-9.
It wasn't you. It was someone who might have been my son in law today if he hadn't made a barely suggestive joke to my daughter that she took way too seriously.
The Ivy League-educated divisional CEO I used to work for would flag “lead” annd have me change it to “led” every month when I’d write his executive summary for the board. I never knew if he was trying avoid appearing ignorant or actually was.
Scott Adams once wrote that "leader" derived from "lead," the material bullets were made from, because the guy in charge was the one everybody wanted to shoot.
It's true that many lawyers worshipped the mighty GPA and weren't willing to risk getting less than an A in a math or science course but not quite all lawyers or all politicians are complete dolts. Some of the patent attorneys that I've met have engineering degrees. Rand Paul is still licensed to practice medicine as far as I know and Thomas Massie has a couple of engineering degrees from MIT. On the other hand, Debbie Stabenow seems like a nice lady and has enough ambition to be in the Senate but isn't much brighter than a 5W incandescent light bulb.
Working prototypes are well before my time, and I am a grey haired old man. Always been a requirement as far as I know. You can prove you have qualifing coursework equal to an engineering or science degree, but I don’t know of anyone who’s successfully gone that route.
Willful ignorance lies at the root of many problems. Happy thoughts from JL and his ilk can't alter physics.
This recent book was well done and worth a read. I've recommended it to a few who think by just eating bugs and driving a Tesla, we'll live in peace and harmony with all the latest tech in the most modern of buildings while magic makes food appear and waste disappear.
His wife Eva is a physician[4] and his son David is an organic synthetic chemist.
He lives in a house with unusually thick insulation, grows some of his own food, and eats meat roughly once a week.[10] He reads 60 to 110 non-technical books a year and keeps a list of all books he has read since 1969. He "does not intend to have a cell phone ever."[14]
Smil is known for being "intensely private", shunning the press while letting his books speak for themselves.[4] At the University of Manitoba, he only ever showed up at one faculty meeting (since the 1980s). The school accepted his reclusiveness so long as he kept teaching and publishing highly rated books.[4]
Sometimes when you find yourself debating the numbers, trying to understand them (or not), you've already been duped into missing what is actually going on.... even if you are technically right.
I’m an accountant, which is because I’m not that good at math beyond adding.
But what I am good at is understanding “does this make sense?” It’s something I had pounded into my brain as a kid, and I now pound into my kids’ brains, as well as occasionally my employees’ or coworkers’.
Just take a step back and use your noodle. Does the answer make any sense? Does it make sense you calculated profit at 3x revenue? Does it make sense OPEX is 40x last month’s spend? Does your math homework asking how many days to travel from A to B make sense if the answer is 7,000?
And same here. If you know anything at all about cars, the answer to “does a street car make more downforce than a race car” is blatantly obvious, unless there’s a rule limiting downforce on the race car making the statistic irrelevant anyways.
I am hereby nominating "Just step back and fucking THINK." for the upcoming AC t-shirt shop.
I remember one time in high school our Physics "teacher" created a problem for us to solve that involved an Evel Knievel-style Grand Canyon jump. She gave us the ramp and the distance and asked us to calculate the motovelocity required for him to clear it. Which worked out to about 2000mph. Pro tip: laughing at your "teacher" in front of the class will cause your afternoon to get suddenly booked.
Good on you for doing the math -- and that's another example of "anyone who has ever jumped a motorcycle would immediately recognize the implausibility."
Another pro tip for dealing with physics teachers...don’t tell them it’s ok for you to put your feet on your desk just because his favorite student is doing it.
I remember my calculus teacher consoled us after a pretty horrid exam that "most of you'll only ever use addition (bills) subtraction (wage-bills) and modulo division (for how many beers do I have money left)"
By the time our final in calculus rolled around, all of us had been accepted to pretty much the colleges of our choices so it was sort of a formality. Our teacher, Mrs. Adelman, whose son Bruce was in our class, created a test with the same number of problems as students in the class and they were harder than any we had experienced during the course. Fair in that we'd covered the material but very hard. It was a take-home test handed out on a Friday with the rule that we weren't supposed to work together on it. Of course she knew we'd get together for a study session over the weekend, maybe two, so to make sure we knew the answers ourselves, when we got to class on Monday we had to draw a number out of a hat and go up to the board and solve whatever problem we drew. We spent all day on Saturday at one of the kids' houses going over every problem until everyone knew the solutions. Then we had Sunday to review and test ourselves. On Monday everyone did fine except for one of the kids had a classic brain freeze when he went up to the board. We were all kind of rooting him on because we'd seen him work out the problem during the study session but I don't think he ever got his brain in gear.
Doesn’t rolling friction, which is increased by downforce, eventually limit top speed? I.e. isn’t there some point of downforce diminishing returns w.r.t performance?
From an aeronautical perspective, a wing has a "lift to drag ratio", which engineers try to improve, but it's a fact of life. So while downforce (negative lift) does increase rolling resistance somewhat, drag (both parasitic and lift-induced) is significantly larger...and increases rapidly with speed.
Unlike an aircraft, racing series usually forbid "moveable aero", so we cannot reduce the angle of attack to lower the induced drag at higher speeds, and structural drag is also going to increase massively.
But you are correct in that a land speed record type vehicle, which doesn't need to corner, would have substantially smaller aero than a race car: we would need to prioritize minimizing drag while providing enough downforce to remain somewhat controllable most of the time.
You raise a bunch of salient points; people are better at estimating what they care about, for sure.
And while I don't know too many vintage fridge enthusiasts, I've certainly seen this with things like drill presses.
I don't think it's BAD that cars are emotionally significant to people. They're the modern analog to animals, and people used to get pretty sentimental about their horses, even ones used commercially, hence the phrase "Busman's holiday"
I think attaching emotional significance to cars is waning. Lots of people see them as mere appliances. Unfortunately.
When the Tesla Model S first came out, the Detroit concours had a class of EVs and I was talking to a woman about their Tesla and I'd have to characterize her reaction to the car as aroused.
I'll admit to laughing out loud at miles per gibbon. Well played.
And people that don't like automatic 3-cylinder cars DO, in my experience, care more about new refrigerators' compressors dying prematurely. It saves on electricity, but surely that doesn't help the environment by causing you to purchase a new refrigerator every 5~10 years now. And have you SEEN the size of American refrigerators? You could put an entire... uh... Czechrepublicanian thing in there. Maybe you have a nice Czechian goat species? You could fit an entire goat in there.
Ha! Cutting them up is cheating. I mean pick up a goat, stuff it in the fridge, close the door. Mine can certainly not hold more than one intact Nubian goat.
This subthread would be much funnier if you swapped 'goats' with 'journalists' or 'politicians'.
I've never seen a European goat.
I was walking on a woods trail near here and met a couple who were walking two dogs and two goats. The goats had better trail manners than the dogs.
In real (rural) America they sell freezers based on deer capacity, usually somewhere between 1 and 4.
Can you say “stupid regulations”?
Simian power sources, you say?
https://www.theonion.com/super-monkey-collider-loses-funding-1819564070
I could put tomorrow's winning lottery numbers in the fourth paragraph and he'd be too stupid to read that far. I don't actually think he reads these!
Seems like he does. Matt Farah said on a recent podcast (might have been a Patreon-only one) that Jonny sent him excerpts from your Valkyrie (sp?) piece.
it’s the arrogance that gets me. i’m ok at math but i’m very careful not to put anything in an email or a comment without double checking the numbers. if you don’t know that downforce is dependent on speed, than you don’t even conceptually understand the concept of downforce.
Jonny ABSOLUTELY does not understand the concept of downforce, or how it's produced, or why it might change. He has a fourth-grader's understanding of science and math.
Feels like you're doing fourth graders a disservice here but I suppose standards have been on the decline.
I'm thinking less "my son at age ten" and more "Baltimore City Schools".
Would that be a 1960s 4th grader or a 2023 4th grader who has missed two years of classroom education because of Randi Weingarten (a shanda fun de goyim if there ever was one)? Perhaps one reason why people don't understand downforce is that there are multiple ways that it can be created, with actual wings like the Chaparral (Hall mounted the struts directly to the rear wheel hubs, btw), with undercar diffusers and extractors, with fans like the Chaparral and Williams racers and Gordon Murray's new toy, and the now banned in F1 blown exhaust diffusers. Also, while I can demonstrate lift and the Bernouli effect with a fan and a hand-shaped styrofoam wing it's harder to show people how the opposite is effected.
my father used to demonstrate the bernouli effect with a comb and tissues. it was the stuff of family legends :)
toby silverton, who briefly owned bristol cars several years ago, told me a hack into ferrari hq conversations found that they suddenly started talking about downforce on their street cars because their drag coefficient was so bad. i'd kinda like a bristol fighter gt sometime soon!
If you ever get within sniffing distance of a Fighter, let me know and I'll be at your side directly.
a dozen years ago i put bristol in contact with land speed louise at bonneville; they wanted to build a twin-turbo fighter to set the record for a street-licensed car. when they found out all the mods required to do that their interest flagged. i told 'em they could run a 'private' test at bonneville but i think that was more $$ than the silvertons wanted to spend
Oh that's a shame. A twin turbo Fighter would have been quite a thing.
Arrogance and ignorance are the peanut butter and jelly of small minds.
I let my arrogance think I came up the with “Insecure Egomaniac” deal after dealing with my old girlfriends dad. Man I'm ignorant
Kinda like our boy Jonny
Perhaps, but they're probably still better on bread.
Well it’s clear that Johnny has both
metaphorically and literally consumed a lot of peanut butter and jelly.
OUAN, when can we get some more sweet, sweet truth about watches? I got a bonus coming I need to blow!
I think Mr. Farago is frying bigger fish right now!
Italian fish...
Good article.
Great synopsis for us common folk. Interwebs chock full of toxic morons who look up data and spew them out of context. If only there was some mechanism for accountability.
Just hit the YouTube "dislike" button...oh wait; that got canceled.
You're only allowed to dislike white supremacy. Everything else must be liked. How do you know if it's white supremacy? If you're allowed to dislike it.
I haven’t seen one of these videos made recently, but a decade ago or so, you could find demonstrations where a couple street cars, a “stock” type racer or GT class car, and an F1 car would stagger start a single lap race such that they would all finish at about the same time. Nothing has ever driven the idea of what fast really means home to me in quite the same manner.
Top Gear did it with Jonny Herbert in the Stewart Ford -- I wonder how the deltas would be different now.
There’s an ancient (1985) one lap comparison of Lauda in an F1 McLaren, Watson in a 928 and Hunt in a Ford Sierra.
https://youtu.be/UbxAFYQ9QKM
I just want to say, I have an extremely high tolerance for watching you repeatedly keelhaul a fool. It is endlessly entertaining and I hope it never ends. Maybe this will be the one time Jonny admits he’s wrong, as his argument isn’t even debatable.
I'd subscribe to an additional Substack that does exactly that.
Seconded! I’d sign up for that in a second.
jonnyisalwayswrong.substack.com!
IT COULD WORK!
Through poor willpower and a complete disregard of my character, fuck it we ball, I mean count me in.
Having been an avid reader of car magazines since the 70s I enjoy the mudslinging about these people I’m familiar with. It’s fun to hear the behind-the-scenes stuff. You must have some Jean Lindamood Jennings stories
I used to enjoy her writing in C&D when I was a teenager. I see that she’s still at it, but haven’t read anything recently.
I have a couple, yes!
To be anal, the 150 mph Corvette was the 1985 with 230 hp. The Cross Fire was good for 140 mph. The ZR-1 top speed varied between 172-180 mph, which is a huge difference for no real mechanical changes.
Btw, I think I once said I don't give a damn, or something like that, about Lieberman. But, while I don't care about him personally, I also really enjoy your articles about him and the car mag industry in general.
"To be anal, the 150 mph Corvette was the 1985 with 230 hp."
I believe you're correct in terms of magazine tested performance; C/D got 142 from the Cross-Fire, but I seem to recall that GM claimed 150. Maybe they just drew a good one.
The Camaro didn't hit 150mph until the IROC-Z 350, right?
The 150 mph claim was for 1985. They handed out "Life Begins at 150 mph" t shirts and hats at the 1985 intro.
GM did do a lot of work updating the C4 from year to year. Oddly, when Porsche does that with the 911, it's a good thing. When GM does it, then it's an example of poor GM engineering.
And yes, I do own a 1990 ZR-1. It's funny, I'm kind of a Corvette guy, but I don't like the typical Corvette type folks. You don't see me at a Corvette club event or anything. Just sayin.
"The 150 mph claim was for 1985. They handed out "Life Begins at 150 mph" t shirts and hats at the 1985 intro."
I feel so stupid. I remember that as being for the Camaro, but OF COURSE they would have done it for the 'Vette first.
They did it again for the ZR-1 in 1990. Of course, then it was "Life Begins at 180".
The coolest vette’s have 2 cams ;)
It was definitely north of 140. Though, I gotta say... how the F long was the straight stretch or test track where they could get to north of even 130??? Crossfire feels so breathless above 120ish.
Is the variation between the 1990 car and the 91+? The C4 was refreshed for 91 and things were smoothed out a bit.
The 91 car had the smoother nose with flush turn signals. It's aero was improved a great deal which helped. L98 engine was carried over, but it is possible there was a slight gear or trans change. Can't remember.
I really like that design, the 91 refresh. If I was serious about getting a real sporty car, the end-of-life C4 would be near the top of my list.
I love the early rear end but the late front end. If I was keeping our '84, I'd throw a later nose on it.
LT1 T56 C4. Hard to go wrong with that one.
Actually, I don't think the aero changed much. It was more of a mid cycle cosmetic refresh. Top speed tests show no real changes.
I'd say the two best C4s, of the non-ZR1 variety were the 89 (6 speed, new rear suspension, digital dash, original (and best) C4 styling - best C4 sports car) or the 96 (dramatically more refined, OBD2, LT4, better materials - best C4 GT).
1989 was the first year for the 6sp manual and the last year for the disco dash. I've always wanted one, but I'm a short man with size 10 EEE feet and when I put the seat far enough forward to reach the pedals comfortably, I can hardly get out of the damn thing. It's pretty funny, actually.
The dashes are DEEP compared to what you'd expect. Doubly so having to climb over those stupid side sills.
The sills are all thanks to Lloyd Reuss. A year before production, he decided that the C4 needed to be a proper targa, not just a T Top as the engineers had designed it. That was an awful big piece of structure to lose. The engineers did what they could within time and budget constraints to make up for it, and those stupid high sills were part of that.
It's part of why the C4 feels so REAL RACE CAR to me, though.
The targa top or the flexy structure? :)
The targa top was likely the right choice. However, the timing of the change wasn't. Reuss is known as a car guy. You'd think he'd be engineer enough to understand the magnitude of his request.
The Greenwood brothers spent a lot of time on that structure to actually make it handle and feel good. I wish I could post pictures of what they actually came up with. I'd love to drive one some time. I've heard it referred to as the best handling car of the 90s. John Greenwood was the real deal.
Finally, the Corvette chassis, as designed was actually stiff for its time. It would have been a hell of a car if McLellan and crew were allowed to finish it as planned.
It was a GM ploy to make extra money selling replacements for cracked glass tops.
I'm 6'4 and wear 13d's. The C4 is oddly the most comfortable tall man's Corvette.
Which is saying something. With a helmet, can still get a bit squeezy.
Yeah, there isn't a ton of room there. But a 911 or 928 of that vintage wasn't better. Actually worse. And year for year, the C4 will outrun them on the track.
So how fast could Max get around Mid-Ohio in this year's car?
This is a bench-racing topic for the ages.
In full quali mode, DRS on the three straights? This article claims that an IndyCar would run a 1:41.9 on a track where an F1 car does a 1:30:
https://us.motorsport.com/general/news/how-fast-is-an-f1-car-compared-to-indycar-wec-super-formula-and-more/9599541/
Mid-Ohio is AWFULLY tight by F1 standards but I wonder if a 59-second lap isn't out of the question.
As an engineer I have spent far too much of my life involved with numbers. It's easy - sometimes - to make a stupid mistake when making a glib comment. But then you take a step back and look at it and wonder how you could have been so dumb.
But when you're doing something for work, or for research, or debate?
Then you sit back and run the numbers a couple of times using different methods as a check, because being wrong then costs a lot more.
The biggest problem I see is that politicians are all lawyers, and lawyers have shit all for an education. They don't study anything harder than basket weaving in most prelaw degree courses and they NEVER study math or science. People think that are congress critters and senators are smart people.
No, they're just charismatic. None of them can count past ten without taking off their shoes.
I tried to listen to the congressional hearing where Tik Tok CEO Shou Zi Chew was raked over the coals by both parties but for different reasons. After the first 30 minutes I had to switch to music to calm myself down. The incompetence on display by our leadership was genuinely embarrassing. Listening to our elected representatives stumble and stutter reading questions prepared by their staffs; many of them had zero comprehension of what they were asking. How can we have a democracy while we only elect the worst and the dumbest?
If you were elected that would be a good start to salving the problem.
Democracy is ALWAYS a failure. That's why we don't live in one. We live in a Republic.
Doesn’t matter, it’s a clusterfuck wherever you go. Canada is being led by a drama teacher with great hair that has been caught on camera in blackface not once, not twice, but three separate times. The only thing he does well is apologize for the past sins of our white forebears. Backing him up as deputy prime minister is a frantically nodding yes-woman who doubles as finance minister with zero qualifications in that field but a masters in Slavonic studies. WTF
Absolutely true. But so far the best of the rest.
Always reminds me of the skit in Holy Grail. I am Arthur, King of the Britons.
King of the who?
King of the Briton’s.
Who are the Britons?
"I didn't know we had a king. I though we were an autonomous collective."
So good.
I’m being repressed, I’m being repressed.
Look at the violence inherent in the system.
"Democracy was a Greek drollery."
- King Charles I, "Cromwell."
There are serious advantages to Machiavellian rule.
Still prefer this republic. But.
It’s getting harder.
That's because we're going from a constitutional republic to an oligarchy. We may exist as a democracy in between that for a decade or two, hard to say. But every since the got rid of civics and stopped teaching kids how our government works, it's been all downhill.
And we can’t fix that at scale cause the teacher’s unions have that locked up, as noted in two separate WSJ articles this week. https://www.wsj.com/articles/students-flee-but-the-money-keeps-coming-hold-harmless-phantom-public-schools-proficiency-choice-66671227?st=xhv6yvow91qlqmv&reflink=article_imessage_share
https://www.wsj.com/articles/chicago-may-elect-a-sensible-mayor-paul-vallas-lori-lightfoot-crime-teacher-police-union-education-progressive-1b2fc515
Feature, not a bug; makes them more malleable by the people who pay for their elections.
The smartest in Congress (Thomas Massie comes to mind) share the unique distinction of pissing EVERYONE (the uniparty and its donors) off by actually thinking. Not great for longevity, as it makes you rich for a primary.
Massie's obviously very smart, but he also appears to be an arrogant a-hole.
I stopped using TikTok a while back but listening to that hearing for 5 minutes made me furious
I am a lawyer with a chemistry degree. Most politicians don’t have the chops to practice law, which is why they go easy mode by engaging in politics.
That I can believe
There are lawyers and then there are lawyers with serious fluency in technical areas of law. Inside any big practice group at a law firm, there's always the one person that people call when things get complicated. Being that person is not a good way to make a lot of money, but it's a good way to be totally insulated from the usual annoyances and pressures of the law firm environment, because everyone knows you're indispensable.
There are fewer lawyers in the legislatures than ever before which is why they pass more laws which fail constitutional review and are subject to challenge, accidentally try to establish a state religion, or just take the the legal agenda of a PAC and put it in as a bill without hitting control F and changing the name of the state it was mutually introduced in to their state before submitting. Truly horrendous.
Fight fight FIGHT!!
There are, it seems, two types of people who go into politics, and they're both sociopaths.
The first is the aforementioned lawyers, who are trained to baffle 'em with bullshit and twist words until they're warped beyond recognition. The second is businessmen, who've gotten rich by compromising and negotiating and never holding the line on any values they might have.
re: lawyers: Richard Gere tap dancing in the courtroom in the Chicago movie 20 years ago popped into my head.
EDIT: At least I was entertained.
I thought of that exact same scene reading the comment.
I'll see your Gere and raise you a Pesci.
"...the two youts..."
John Van Stry writes “None of them can count past ten without taking off their shoes.” Counterpoint: you should see how quickly we can calculate attorney’s fees, and with our shoes on.
So a lawyer is writing a will for an old lady, he completes it, and she pays him with a crisp new 100 dollar bill. As he sits at his desk rubbing the bill between his thumb and forefinger, the bill separates with a crisp shhusshh, and he realizes he has 2 $100 dollar bills in his hand. And now our lawyer friend has an ethical dilemma: does he keep the money for himself, or does he share it with his law partner?
Well it *is* a very old joke.
Heard this one in law school:
A cruise ship full of lawyers sinks in shark infested waters; yet everyone manages to swim to shore. Why?
Professional courtesy.
My favorite story is from federal evidence, which was taught by the very distinguished dean of our law school. Older gent, bald, handsome, sophisticated, Saville row tailored three piece suit. He says, the first day of class: “I need all your help. You must keep my secret. Please don’t tell my mother I’m a lawyer; she thinks I play piano in a whorehouse.”
(Rimshot!)
He sounds like a great guy. What a fantastic way to break the ice and humanize himself.
My lobbyist friend always says that same line, except he inserts lobbyist for lawyer.
When I was a kid, my dad traded his Opel Manta for an MGB, and had the MG's former owner, a guy with a Scottish brogue so thick you couldn't understand him, maintain it for him.
He sounded like a Glaswegian soccer hooligan until it was time to discuss the bill. Then it was all Received Pronunciation straight from the Court of St. James.
Like the scene in The Wire:
"Count wrong, they whip yo ass."
Being book smart isn't necessarily required to build a tank.
Or drive one well!
It requires a lot of mechanical intelligence to work on an assembly line, book smarts not at all. Although I bet they just didn't give a fuck about inventory and did it half assed because the would rather build MRAPs.
It’s probably a hinderance. I’ve seen brilliant students who just didn’t “get it” when actually doing their job.
I have 5 lawyers. One of which is in the EU. I know all about that.
But the ones who run for office? They're not the brightest...
Most of them (McConnell, Biden etc) had incredibly mediocre and short legal careers or just never practiced at all. You don’t see, like, the appellate chair at a BigLaw firm (or a distinguished lawyer at a big firm in one of the smaller states like AL, WV) making a run for office.
I’m the only thing left that it’s ok to bash: a straight white male boomer with a law degree (who worked in financial services for almost 40 years).
Never a good idea to paint with such a broad brush. Not that I’m offended; I don’t give a shit.
I was aiming at the ones who run for office with the comment, I should have made that part clearer.
As for lawyers, the rule is: Have they ever tried a case before a jury? That's the litmus test.
Oh, and as mentioned above, I have 5 of them. Used to be 6, but one retired.
Understood. Trust me; plenty of my fellow JDs make it very hard to be proud of that accomplishment. Our society is so ridiculously litigious, ambulance chasers on TV…
Dewey, Cheatem, and Howe.
"What happens if you lose my case?"
"Then I get nothing."
"What happens if you win?"
"Then YOU get nothing."
I suppose it depends on what kind of lawyering that you need done. Not every legal task requires a skilled litigator and not every skilled litigator has the other skills needed to do all legal work. I suppose it might help to have someone who has defended their position in a court but is that really necessary for drawing up contracts, negotiating, or doing real estate and title law?
YES! Oh YES! NEVER EVER do contracts with a lawyer who hasn't defended said contracts in front of a jury. It makes a HELL of a difference. Learned this from a friend of mine who dealt with a lot of lawyers and a lot of court cases and as I started having to deal with more and more legal issues I learned it as well.
There's a lot more to law than logic and making an argument. There's the presentation and yes, the performance aspects as well. The courtroom is a theater and 'surprise' witnesses are always well coached and if at all possible actors to boot.
You need an attorney who is used to dealing with said shenanigans. You need an attorney with balls, experience, and foresight. You do not want someone who'll choke when opposing council pulls out something he's not allowed to, but the judge still allows it. (and yes, I've had this happen to me).
All white hetrosexual males of any age are fodder for the cannons. Boomers of any occupation just sit at the top of the list.
Yes we do! It’s fine.
As you can tell by my name; I have Irish heritage, too. Another reason for attacks! Those Irish stereotypes really piss me off! The next time I hear one I might put down my beer and punch someone.
Bro, you are wating the head on a beer to worry about that.
Bullshit on that buddy. Lots of lawyers who get math. Try to litigate patent law, antitrust or anything using regression analysis. What you mean there are a lot of crap lawyers don't don't know anything including math. They don't do very well.
Had a lawyer teach me statistics in community college. He understood the material and used it as a lawyer. I do wonder whether his being a part-time community college instructor was because he enjoyed to teaching or needed money to fund his law practice but he was very intelligent for a community college instructor and unfortunately this was the ony class where I failed to recieve an A.
I'm not an engineer; I earn my living with words, but I apply the same rule with editing: take the time to check. If I've got even the slightest question, I'll double-check the dictionary or the appropriate stylebook to make absolutely sure I'm correct before making an edit or suggestion. I live in fear of some Inigo Montoya telling me a word does not mean what I think it means what I think it does. As an earlier posted noted, I can in most cases avoid that by taking a moment to just step back and fucking think.
It's hard to edit your own material because you read what you wanted to say, not what you actually put down, but also not every editor is perfect. One of my editors, who shall remain unnamed, was a pretty good writer but he once used "nadir" when he meant something more like "apex" or "apogee".
Oh Yes! Thank you for putting into words what I know to be true. I live in fear of writing without an editor, but that’s the reality of my job.
If it was me, I'm certain I had my reasons!
However, I did snap at you once for writing "lede" in an email; I was so drunk I thought you had misspelled "lead"
It annoys me to spell lead as "led", as in "he lead the team", but I worry that today's readers will get confused if I don't. "Led" would have gotten me a red check mark if I used it in K-9.
It wasn't you. It was someone who might have been my son in law today if he hadn't made a barely suggestive joke to my daughter that she took way too seriously.
The Ivy League-educated divisional CEO I used to work for would flag “lead” annd have me change it to “led” every month when I’d write his executive summary for the board. I never knew if he was trying avoid appearing ignorant or actually was.
Oh. I know that fellow!
Scott Adams once wrote that "leader" derived from "lead," the material bullets were made from, because the guy in charge was the one everybody wanted to shoot.
It's true that many lawyers worshipped the mighty GPA and weren't willing to risk getting less than an A in a math or science course but not quite all lawyers or all politicians are complete dolts. Some of the patent attorneys that I've met have engineering degrees. Rand Paul is still licensed to practice medicine as far as I know and Thomas Massie has a couple of engineering degrees from MIT. On the other hand, Debbie Stabenow seems like a nice lady and has enough ambition to be in the Senate but isn't much brighter than a 5W incandescent light bulb.
Every Patent Attorney must have a science or engineering degree. It is required to be registered with the USPTO.
Was that before or after they dropped the requirement to submit a working prototype with each application?
Working prototypes are well before my time, and I am a grey haired old man. Always been a requirement as far as I know. You can prove you have qualifing coursework equal to an engineering or science degree, but I don’t know of anyone who’s successfully gone that route.
Willful ignorance lies at the root of many problems. Happy thoughts from JL and his ilk can't alter physics.
This recent book was well done and worth a read. I've recommended it to a few who think by just eating bugs and driving a Tesla, we'll live in peace and harmony with all the latest tech in the most modern of buildings while magic makes food appear and waste disappear.
https://vaclavsmil.com/2022/03/07/how-the-world-really-works/
I appreciate the heads-up on this book!
<WikiBot>
His wife Eva is a physician[4] and his son David is an organic synthetic chemist.
He lives in a house with unusually thick insulation, grows some of his own food, and eats meat roughly once a week.[10] He reads 60 to 110 non-technical books a year and keeps a list of all books he has read since 1969. He "does not intend to have a cell phone ever."[14]
Smil is known for being "intensely private", shunning the press while letting his books speak for themselves.[4] At the University of Manitoba, he only ever showed up at one faculty meeting (since the 1980s). The school accepted his reclusiveness so long as he kept teaching and publishing highly rated books.[4]
Excellent
Sometimes when you find yourself debating the numbers, trying to understand them (or not), you've already been duped into missing what is actually going on.... even if you are technically right.
This was one of the enlightening things I picked up from Scott Adams as I hadn't heard of "talking past the sale" until him for whatever reason.
Scott is so right about so many things...
...and SUCH A SIIIMMMP.
Simping and genuine civilization go hand in hand -- what's more, they are NECESSARY for each other.
Lancelot? Super simp.
Every leading man for centuries in fiction and film, with the possible exception of Mr. Darcy, Heathcliff, and Rhett Butler? High simp quotient.
They literally re-shot the ending of "Pretty Woman" so that the audience would be satisfied by a billionaire simping over a hooker.
Simping works in all situations but 80/20 world, which is sadly where we are now.
In the end, you get a better result being a woman-repelling asshole than a simp. At least with the former, you keep your dignity.
And besides, isn't Love the game where the only way to win is to not play?
The ideal situation is to simp for someone who is truly worthy of it, I suppose.
Mutual respect and trust work.
Really.
Finding a woman that doesn’t play games is big, too.
Nice to be part of the 1%.
I’m an accountant, which is because I’m not that good at math beyond adding.
But what I am good at is understanding “does this make sense?” It’s something I had pounded into my brain as a kid, and I now pound into my kids’ brains, as well as occasionally my employees’ or coworkers’.
Just take a step back and use your noodle. Does the answer make any sense? Does it make sense you calculated profit at 3x revenue? Does it make sense OPEX is 40x last month’s spend? Does your math homework asking how many days to travel from A to B make sense if the answer is 7,000?
And same here. If you know anything at all about cars, the answer to “does a street car make more downforce than a race car” is blatantly obvious, unless there’s a rule limiting downforce on the race car making the statistic irrelevant anyways.
Just step back and fucking THINK. Jesus.
Careful, S2KChris, you're going to get flagged as a Covid skeptic...
But a GT3RS is basically a race car!
To an autowriter who can't really drive either.
I am hereby nominating "Just step back and fucking THINK." for the upcoming AC t-shirt shop.
I remember one time in high school our Physics "teacher" created a problem for us to solve that involved an Evel Knievel-style Grand Canyon jump. She gave us the ramp and the distance and asked us to calculate the motovelocity required for him to clear it. Which worked out to about 2000mph. Pro tip: laughing at your "teacher" in front of the class will cause your afternoon to get suddenly booked.
Good on you for doing the math -- and that's another example of "anyone who has ever jumped a motorcycle would immediately recognize the implausibility."
Another pro tip for dealing with physics teachers...don’t tell them it’s ok for you to put your feet on your desk just because his favorite student is doing it.
I remember my calculus teacher consoled us after a pretty horrid exam that "most of you'll only ever use addition (bills) subtraction (wage-bills) and modulo division (for how many beers do I have money left)"
By the time our final in calculus rolled around, all of us had been accepted to pretty much the colleges of our choices so it was sort of a formality. Our teacher, Mrs. Adelman, whose son Bruce was in our class, created a test with the same number of problems as students in the class and they were harder than any we had experienced during the course. Fair in that we'd covered the material but very hard. It was a take-home test handed out on a Friday with the rule that we weren't supposed to work together on it. Of course she knew we'd get together for a study session over the weekend, maybe two, so to make sure we knew the answers ourselves, when we got to class on Monday we had to draw a number out of a hat and go up to the board and solve whatever problem we drew. We spent all day on Saturday at one of the kids' houses going over every problem until everyone knew the solutions. Then we had Sunday to review and test ourselves. On Monday everyone did fine except for one of the kids had a classic brain freeze when he went up to the board. We were all kind of rooting him on because we'd seen him work out the problem during the study session but I don't think he ever got his brain in gear.
Most won't even understand that. They'll go on to post incessantly on social media "WHY DONT SCHOOLS TEACH PERSONAL FINANCE AND TAXES???"
You fucking idiots. They did. They fucking did. You morons.
Thats why you're the accountant, bro! You get this stuff!
Doesn’t rolling friction, which is increased by downforce, eventually limit top speed? I.e. isn’t there some point of downforce diminishing returns w.r.t performance?
From an aeronautical perspective, a wing has a "lift to drag ratio", which engineers try to improve, but it's a fact of life. So while downforce (negative lift) does increase rolling resistance somewhat, drag (both parasitic and lift-induced) is significantly larger...and increases rapidly with speed.
Unlike an aircraft, racing series usually forbid "moveable aero", so we cannot reduce the angle of attack to lower the induced drag at higher speeds, and structural drag is also going to increase massively.
But you are correct in that a land speed record type vehicle, which doesn't need to corner, would have substantially smaller aero than a race car: we would need to prioritize minimizing drag while providing enough downforce to remain somewhat controllable most of the time.
Yeah. That's why Jessi Whatshername took the wings off her F-104 -- which, in retrospect, was probably what killed her.
Then there was the F-104 pilot who took the wing off the XB-70. That killed a bunch of people.