asbolute speed

Yes it is surprising with the number of Big 3 employees we have in the club that this info has been coughed up by now. Wonder what the Detroit library would know about this subject. hmm

Shawn

"hottest car of the early forties,,,,cont"

Wish I could help - I checked with all the guys I know, and no-one has any new info. for Gear's question. Out of respect for Gear's request that we not re-hash personal experiences or what has already been discussed, best I can do is note my prior comment about the English road test magazines of that era - presume you are already aware of them.

If you DO find out anyting in this regard, hope you will share it with us.

Best Regards

PFH

(Perfedious Reindeer Hunter )

well that does it then! there must not be any of these roads tests or I am sure the above responder would know about it. How lucky we are as a club to have such pundits and experts in our midst. Gee i would never have thought about going to England to get info on Caddys and Buicks. Maybe I have been looking in the wrong place for info on my Standard. Here I thought Detroit would be the place to go for GM info, and England the place for the Standard. What an idiot I am!

I guess they just sort of arbitrarily decided these things in the 40's. "gee scooter, that one sure looks faster!" The decade that produced the most awesome war mechanism in history must have operated more on conjecture and speculation than I thought.

Shawn

Shawn, I think you are being unfair here. The road test hype was more of a late 40's and 50's phenomenon when Tom McCahill and Mr. Clymer first began testing cars for Mechanic Illustrated and Road and Track etc. As a kid I loved to read Tom's humourous analysis and metaphors describing his test results of the various new cars as unscientific and subjective though they were. The British had a certain fascination with American cars since before the Second World War especially since King Edward VIII preferred a Buick. Rolls Royce tested Buicks against there products as well and were surprised at how quiet and powerful these American products were compared to there own. Don't be too hard on the generation that fought the Second World war. It was a very difficult time that we of later generations have not experienced anything comparable. I am sure that when my father was in his motor torpedo boat the furthest thing from there mind was how fast a Packard or Buick car would go.

sorry got carried away with my sarcasm.

The reason I suggested the pre-war English auto magazines, is that to my knowledge, they were the ONLY source of published independant precise performance testing in the pre-war years.

Explaining why there was not much in the way of uniform, published performance figures by American car buff magazines, is a matter involving more complex cultural & social issues than we have time to review here.

GEAR should be able to find this English road test magazine with a little bit of research effort. Sorry..cant recall the name of the magazine, but it was pretty well-known and popular on both sides of the Atlantic. I MAY have some copies in storage - cant get to them now.

I do recall seeing a number of their road test results on a number of big American luxury cars from the 1930's INCLUDING the later Packard V-12...(as well as many on "ordinary" cars that simply didn't interest me (up here in eastern Latvia, we are terrible snobs...we

"want so little out of life....only the BEST....and there is

so little of that......"

( I didn't make that up...plagerized it from a classic-era society column..!)

Thinking aloud, it just occurred to me that English civilian road-test staff activities may well have been brought to a halt on Sept. 1, 1939, owing to a little "unpleasantess" with their continental neighbors. Therefore, my suggesting this reference source to a guy who wants to know about 1940's era American car performance, is in error, at least as to him, but hopefully may be of interest to other "chatters".

Perfedious Reindeer Hunter

One British magazine that comes to mind and which also did roadtests on American cars was The Autocar. Another mag was MoTor which I think was American. I don't know where you would obtain copies of these but likely are available at times on the net.

The Autocar, The Motor and The Times of England are virtually the only place you will find pre WWII acceleration figures that you will recognize (i.e. 0 to 60 through the gears in X seconds). U.S. acceleration figures, if found in pre war print will be something along these lines: 5 to 30 in high gear.

Ed, That's right. Car tests of the era seemed to emphasize how a car would pull in high gear which in those days was a much more useful information than absolute top speed. Nowadays the car mags seem to be concerned with 0-60 and top speed even though traffic and spped limits except maybe in rural Nevada or Montana seem to make this information rather redundant.

Ed and Clipper's "posts" raise an interesting point that is often forgotten when people take their pre-war cars out in today's traffic.

The "bottom line" is that the buyers of the big, powerful, luxurious "heavy-weights" of the "classics" were NOT "car buffs" ! Most were born BEFORE the onset of the so-called "mechanical era", and had little or no interest in what was under the hood. Packard, for example, correctly recognized most of their buyers had little clue what a "cylinder" was, and thus felt comfortable discontinuing the Twin Six when technology permitted them to get even better performance out of the much smaller displacement "Single Eight" introduced in the early 1920's.

Since they were not car buffs or technically inclined, most car buyers did NOT like shifting gears. Which is understandable - if you are not "into" technical matters, "double-clutching" / shifting those old non-synchromesh transmissions, was a difficult, stressful thing.

By the early thirties, most transmissions had synchromesh on all but reverse and "low", the better transmissions (take Packard, for example, shifted silky smooth). But the ability to AVOID shifting, was what auto builders knew sold cars.

Of COURSE you can gear a Greyhound bus so low, that you can start it in high gear with a motor-cycle engine. This, sadly, IS what sold cars.

An example of how this worked in selling cars, is the famous 3:31 rear axle gear set option that appeared for one year with Packard - believe it was 1930 - could be off a year or so. Some cars actually got out to dealers with this. Of course these cars could "go like the wind", reaching and crusing at speeds well beyond what the "normal" gear ratios of that era would permit.

The response was swift and severe. Of COURSE a big car like a Packard couldn't give perky response in high gear at low speeds with a axle ratio that high. Any more than a modern car with three times the horsepower could ! And of course a classic era car with a "high speed" rear end, could (and DOES !) cruise at 80+ mph all day long ! (if you "do the math", you will recognize that the average "classic"'s engine, with the typical "dump truck" rear axle ratios common of that era, is beating itself to death, spinning faster at 60 mph, than a modern car is at 100 mph...and remember, modern cars have much shorter strokes, so they are not imposing anywhere NEAR the shock loads on their crank-shafts.

You guessed it - Packard dealers were furious as the reports started coming in, that these 3:31 geared Packards were not "sprightly" at slow speeds. Of COURSE they werent. City traffic and the bad roads of that era, made the chance to use the benefits of high gearing few and far between. Most of those "high gear" Packards could NOT be sold - were re-fitted with conventional low axle ratios. VERY few actually got out on the road.

Some Packard enthusiasts have seen the Packard factory's "promo" introducing the 1940 "356" eight cyl. engine, showing it pulling ahead of a Packard Twelve when both were running wide open. Packard figured correctly that even as late in the automotive era as 1940, most of its buyers would be clue-less as to how this charade was pulled off. Of course we car buffs know the '40 Packard "356" engine-equipped car had over-drive, giving it a final drive ratio of around 3 to one, whereas the much more powerful Packard Twelve (as were most of the big "classics" ) was "crippled" with a final drive ratio so low, you would have to "special order" it on your new dump truck today !

It is interesting to note that "across the pond", there was more interest in the technical aspects of cars and their performance, than we had here in America ( at least judging by the auto publications mentioned above). So, again, that is where I would refer Gear to, for the only known published performance data ('cept, as noted previously, I would suspect the war cut this source of info off for the years Gear is inquiring about).

So - as Clipper and Ed point out, the "high gear from low speeds" was the "big deal" in that era. That is what the luxury car buying culture, and the driving enviornment required. It also explains why most luxury car engines were "cammed" to deliver their best performance in relatively low rpm ranges.

Those of you who have "re-geared" your big engined classics (thru either adding an "over-drive" or going to a "high speed" rear axle gear-set) have found this opens up a whole new world of enjoyment, as we enjoy much better over-all performance, since those "torque monsters" are now, at modern speeds, working within their "best power" ranges. Just dont try and start a "re-geared" classic in high gear from a dead stop, and dont expect to win any drag races.. !