Apologies if this has already been posted- did a search on the board and couldn't find it.
Here is an article that I came across recently in the US CAR & DRIVER Magazine from July 2007. Batmobile v Starsky & Hutch v Back to the Future v Mad Max v General Lee
Its a shoot out between movie replica vehicles and features an Interceptor. But where did it come in?
Yep, that is my buddies Paul car that I shipped over for him...I set up that for him in a sense..My friend writes for Car & Driver and did the article.. Came out really cool !!
they couldnt have picked 5 better cars...love them all and have the 1/18s except the batmobile or interceptor yet..but i reckon the general lee could give them all a run..with the delorean last.
I could only read 1/2 of the article. It was ......... poor.
I don't know how old the author is but to write a line such as "But at its core, this is a Gran Torino, and Gran Torinos flat suck." is pretty unprofessional. Another thing that says to me that the author is a little too young for this task is this line......
"......the hood is so stupidly long it should be divided into counties........"
Long hoods and short decks are what gave musclecars their appeal. This was practically exaggerated in the Mustang when it was introduced and was replicated in so many of the musclecars that followed it. This was a "good" thing, not an irritation. Perhaps the author would prefer a corvair?
It is stated that the engine in the S&H Torino is a 360. This was a truck engine and I don't think it likely to have been in the car, though not impossible, certainly not practical when it is so much easier to drop in a 302 or 351, W or C.
The author continues to review the car as if it were a production car and harps on it's short comings, when the car was merely a movie prop and these typically are not in a highly desireable condition in order to save on production costs. It merely needs to look the part.
When reviewing other cars the author writes as if the available replicas were the way that they all turn out. Again the author seems to miss the point, this was only how these particular replicas were built, others have built better but the way the author wrote the article he made it sounds as if this is "typical" of what to expect.
I don't feel the author had a handle on what he could do with the available cars. I don't think his article was worth anything. I also can't believe Car and Driver printed it with the way it was written.
The fact that the car in the article was not really supercharged, or as fast as the Charger should'nt matter I would think to general fans, you'd think people would just appriciate the article for having a Mad Max car in it period...
Fast or slow, still cool to see one in print (in a national multi-make magazine) now a days..
I agree with you wholeheartedly. I love it when any Falcon get US print and congratulated Paul on his article. The photos were terrific but as stated above, the writing on all of the cars and in general was horrendous to say the least.
Maybe we should be glad Brock Yates didn't write the article ?????
but i am with Mark i too like to see any write up on Falcons in U.S. mags i always get them , much to the wifes dismay. Waiting for Hemmings Muscle Machines to do a follow-up to Mark's GT and have the BoB in the mag .
