Fun, Interesting and Random Car Facts

[Tornadom]

Time for a random and fun car fasts thread. Everybody loves trivial knowledge, so why not apply it to Man's best friend... the car.

-The Ford F150 is the #1 selling vehicle on Earth.

-An new F150 is sold every 34 seconds.

-CanAm cars of the early 1970s used high-powered vaccums to suck the car down to the track surface to aid in handling and transmitting the 1,000 or so horsepower to the road.

-Group B rally cars of the 1980s achieved speeds higher than those of today's rally cars. They did so with limited to no electronic trickery and relyed heavily on power to weight ratios that were through the roof. Eventually Group B racing came to an end when it was determined that the cars were too unsafe (and killed a good portion of their drivers).

-Volvo was the first car company to introduce automatic headlights

-The timing belt on a Porsche 928 is over 7 feet long.

-The 1998 Jeep Grand Cherokee 5.9L Limited was the fastest SUV ever built until the following year when BMW released the X5. As an aside, we owned a Grand Cherokee 5.9L Limited, and it did haul-balls; though it did so while achieving a pathetic 10.5mpg.

-The 1994 Acura Integra GS-R had both the highest specific output (power per liter) and the highest piston speed of any car sold that year.

-Nascars, no matter what body is on them, all use a highly built 350c.i Chevrolet motor.

-The main bearings of every Nascar motor built are OEM Honda. Yep, they use the bearings right out of an H22 Honda motor (The newer Honda Prelud motors).

[Mike]

didn't realize the jeep Cherokee was so fast lol

One thing I'm mad about is that newer generation models. If I'm not mistaken, they're going to start using v6 engines intended for mini vans.

[--Z06--]

Jim Hall's Chaparrals were very innovative, following his success in the United States Road Racing Championship (USRRC). Jim Hall's 2 series Chaparrals (built and engineered with a high degree of covert support from Chevrolet's research and development division) were leaders in the application of aerodynamics to racecars culminating with the introduction of the 2E in 1966, the first of the high wing race cars. The 2E was a defining design, and the 2G was a development of that basic design. The FIA banned movable aerodynamic devices and Chaparral responded with the 2H 1969. The 2H broke new ground, seeking to reduce drag but didn't achieve much success. The 2J that followed was perhaps the ultimate example of what Group 7 rules could allow in a racing car. It was a twin-engined car, with the by-then usual big-block Chevrolet engine providing the driving force, and a tiny snowmobile engine powering a pair of fans at the back of the car. These fans, combined with the moveable Lexan 'skirts' around the bottom of the car created a vacuum underneath the car, effectively providing the same level of downforce as the huge wings of previous vehicles, without the drag. Although far too mechanically complex to survive in racing environments, the theory was sound, and would appear in Formula One a few years later, first in Colin Chapman's Lotus cars, and even more directly in the BT46B 'Fan Car' of 1978.

[Djaric]

-The timing belt on a Porsche 928 is over 7 feet long.

Wow!