Heaven help me – I’m a horsepower junkie
DRIVER'S SIDE DIATRIBEBy Al Vinikour
If you’re anything like me you’re sick of somebody else always trying to tell you enough is enough. Who died and put them in charge? It seems to begin at childhood when you’re sitting at the dinner table and decide you want more potatoes. Your mother tells you, “You’ve had enough.” Years later you’re sitting in front of the television watching your favorite situation comedy and your father comes in and says, “You’ve had enough television for one day, Junior. Go to your room and read a book.” You get the picture; when is it your turn to call the shots?
These thoughts have been running through my head lately because of work-related situations. As most of my readers know I’m first and foremost an automotive journalist. As such I test vehicles on a weekly basis. I seldom know more than a few weeks ahead what sort of vehicles I’ll have to spend time in doing heavy evaluations (I’m heavy…and I evaluate them). Lately I’ve had a run of high-performance vehicles that even make me jealous. For instance, this week I’m testing a Dodge Charger SRT8. What does that mean? It means I have a new Charger with a 6.4L Hemi engine that develops 470 horsepower. That must be fast, you say? DUH!
A few weeks back I had a Mustang GT Convertible. What did that little number produce? Try 435 horsepower! Along the way I’ve had some vehicles with horsepower ratings in the mid-/high-300 range. So inevitably I’ve been listening to some utter the same pap; “Who needs that much horsepower?” This got me to thinking about who actually is the horsepower God? Is it some mythical being like the Greek Gods on Mt. Olympus who sits around twirling a camshaft all day watching proving ground tests of new vehicles and assigns numbers to them? Wouldn’t he have to work with a medical God who figures out how much horsepower a particular person can be subjected to? Telling someone that nobody needs a certain amount of horsepower is tantamount to telling somebody they can only have a certain number of children. Who would possibly do that? (Hint: with lunch special you get one egg roll and fried rice.)
About the only thing I’m going to concede is where are you going to honestly open up a 500-horsepower mid-life crisis car outside of a NASCAR race track? Sure, there are scads of places in population-deficient areas like parts of Nevada, Utah, Montana, etc. Could it be Horace Greeley was on to something when he urged people (young men) to “Go West?” Who knows…maybe old Mr. G had a high-performance covered wagon with ‘eight’ horsepower and it’s a sure thing he couldn’t go flat out between Pittsburgh and Cleveland because of the threat of radar cops so he urged heading out to where the air is fresh and clean. I don’t care if I’m not able to race down I-75 at 200 mph. But I sure do like knowing I have the ability to do so with some of the vehicles I drive and if I want to sit at a stoplight with all 550 horses of a Shelby Mustang rumbling like a bunch of angry bees that’s my privilege. Truth-be-told I don’t really do that much driving over the speed limit in the first place but I love driving powerful vehicles. And for others to pass judgment on me by saying “nobody needs that much horsepower” goes against the grain of freedom of choice.
My dad carried a 30-caliber Browning water-cooled machine gun all over Europe for almost two years to give me the right to choose a machine that to some is not politically correct. It’s just like the massive amount of SUVs throughout the United States; if the customer didn’t want them they wouldn’t be there. Nobody with any sense tries to force-feed a $50,000 vehicle down someone’s throat.
I’ve made an effort throughout my career to try to avoid injecting religion (or politics) into the pieces I write but it’s time to give a little-known history lesson and it applies directly to the topic at hand. For thousands of years and in religious tomes it has always been assumed that Moses brought back 10 Commandments when he climbed Mt. Suribachi, Mt. Erebus, Mt. Sinai or whatever that big hill was named.
Those were written on two tablets, five to a side. What’s not known, however, is the folded up commandment that Moses put in his pocket that he was handed by the Lord’s racing consultant, Herschel Kalitta. It said, “Thou shalt not put any governance on big-block V-8s.” So there you have it.
The next time somebody looks at your 556-horsepower Cadillac CTS-V and tells you that nobody needs that much horsepower simply tell them to take a hike; you’re only doing God’s will.
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