Difference between muscle cars and sports cars?
In: Engineering
Muscle cars are usually (feel free to disagree) considered to have been born with the original Pontiac GTO. The GTO, in turn, was basically a protest by the car designers against Pontiac’s contemporary departure from factory-built race vehicles due to bad press surrounding accidents and casualties of auto racing at the time.
What they did was take what was then a compact-form-factor car (the LeMans) and shove the 389 V-8 engine “intended” for use in bigger, heavier cars into a comparatively light frame. The result was a torque-y (i.e. muscular) monster that could jump off the line with little hesitation. Eventually Pontiac made the GTO its own distinct design, and other companies followed with their own interpretations of the hot-selling GTO in the forms of high-performance packages or new models.
The thing is, the LeMans was not a particularly amazing platform otherwise, in terms of handling, being otherwise a standard compact commuter vehicle, and its only real performance metric was its raw proportional power. Most muscle cars of the era followed Pontiac’s example, where the only thing that mattered was power. They definitely got more nimble as they became de facto sports cars over the years and a bit more emphasis was placed on the “big picture” of performance, sure, but all was sacrificed at the altar of horsepower when the scales were balanced out.
Conversely, vehicles identified as “sports cars” are intended to have modestly to much improved performance in all regards (power, acceleration, handling, street suspension) to “lesser” vehicles. It’s a balancing act, though; where we consider it in the framing of an out-of-10 scoring system, a sports car might be:
– Handling: 8
– Acceleration: 8
– Top Speed: 8
For a total of 24 points, a muscle car is more balanced towards power, e.g.
– Handling: 6
– Acceleration: 9
– Top Speed: 9
Still for a total of 24 points, but with different priorities.
And both compared to a supercar (which wasn’t really a classification at the time, but to illustrate) which would be like a sports car but still better.
– 9
– 9
– 9
For 27 points, with 30 point cars being painstakingly-built race-intended vehicles.
One other defining feature is price; muscle cars tend(ed) to be cheaper, given that they were just variations on existing platforms and all you really paid for was a bigger engine. I would argue the classical definition of “muscle car” doesn’t exist, as Hellcats et al aren’t built off of, say, a Stealth or some other “generic” platform.
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