Anyone who goes to the track with a car in stock form either just loves to go out there and push their car, want to set a few benchmarks before mods start happening or are deluded and think their car is fast. Some cars really are fast in stock form - I'm reffering to "normal" cars.
Anyone who puts a loud exhaust on their cars and thinks it makes the car go faster gets a
from me. (Not that they'll care)
Anyone who puts a "Body kit" on their otherwise stock car, welds a fart can to the exhaust and drives around like they own the road doesn't earn my respect.
Anyone who puts a K&N filter sticker on their window next to the sticker for their "high performance" spark plug wires without doing any meaningful mods is just cluttering up their visibility.
I think we agree with that.
If you race against some cocky, egotistical Marauder owner who hasn't done a single performance mod to his vehicle, then he hasn't run a real race before and he deserves to have his ego bruised.
Those people are on both sides of the cylinders agrument.
Driving around town in my 17 year old pos, I had one kid in particular pull up next to me at a light in his equally old Honda prelude/civic. I don't know, I didn't see the back of his car. He looks over at me and revs his little N/A 4-cyl at me, and I roll my eyes. Light turns green and he floors it, so I do too. As I pass him up, I gave him a short wave and changed lanes in front of him as they merged into one. When I hit the speed limit of 40mph, I stopped accelerating.
Does this mean I think my car is fast? No way
My car in stock form pulls low 18's in the 1/4 mile. Did I realize that even though my car was twice as heavy, from a stop light the "massive" torque my engine puts out would give me an early advantage? Hell yeah I did.
What kind of engine are you running, btw? Does it use forced induction? An interesting note to those who didn't know this/never thought about it is that forced induction basically increases the displacement of your engine. 14.7 pounds of boost (from anything) is equal to 1 ATM, and effectively doubles the displacement of the engine.
I agree that Modern Crown Vics are merely "decent" in their stock form but, just like with imports, the car can be built up to perform better than stock. I know a guy who has a '00 Mustang GT motor with a Vortech S-trim and Vortech Aftercooler, 80mm MAF, 3.73 track-loc rear end in his Crown Victoria. He's making 373 RWHP / 353 RWTQ at 11 psi boost and runs 12.590, a best mph of 110.20, and 1.89 60 ft. time on street tires and no weight reduction (removing things from the trunk, etc).
Now, that's pretty quick. It's not super fast but it's a whole lot better than the morons you and I have described.
What it all comes down to is "what have you done to your car?"
Have you ever heard of the late Turbo Gus? This guy had a Chrysler Minivan with the 2.5L turbo 4-cyl engine. He bumped the psi up as much as he could, then he got a bigger turbo, etc until he was running 27 pounds of boost and ran a 13.184 @ 102.57 mph.
Check out his web site here:
http://home.earthlink.net/~turbogus2/mini.html (now THAT's awesome)
If those guys with the Marauders made the changes I suggested in my previous post and added a supercharger or other form of forced induction (which is a GREAT addition to any DOHC engine because of their breathing capabilities), they would really have something to brag about.
If the math that 14.7 pounds of boost effectively doubles the displacement of an engine is correct, then Turbo Gus would burn as much A/F mixture as a N/A 7.1L 4-cyl (1.775 L/cyl). The guy with the 11psi 4.6L would have an 8.05L V8 (1 L/cyl)
Okay, I think I've rambled on long enough to obfuscate the point of this post, so I'll just end it.