Playing traffic light roulette
ACCELERATION: MOST DRIVERS WILL ONLY ACCESS ABOUT 80% OF WHAT A CAR CAN OFFER
A F1 car when I was a boy would have been blown away by the new muscle cars.
Atrue petrolhead is that because his or her cranium is filled with automotive minutiae – kilowatts, top speed, fuel consumption … and the most important of all, the time for the 0-100km/h sprint.
What a car will do flat out is really only of interest to lunatics and those with access to a track with a long enough straight – but acceleration is a real-world number which puts cars in their place in the pecking order.
When I was a laaitie, times were for the 0-60mph (miles per hour) … and I can still remember figures from those times.
A top-spec Porsche 911 was the first car to dip under the magical six-second barrier and I recall the writers on UK Car magazine as doing flick-flacks of amazement.
My mother’s Datsun 1200, with its sturdy 54kW engine, took 15.3 sec for the same feat. The first car I owned was a “hot” 1965 Ford Cortina GT – but its 0-60mph time was still only around 12 sec.
Then I bought a 1964 Datsun Fairlady convertible, mainly because it had a brawny 2.0-litre OHC motor which would blow away many cars. I later discovered the car would get to 60 in just under 9 sec.
It is being restored, but with the 1500 engine it should have had when I bought it. Its 0-60mph time is a rather anaemic 15.7 sec, according to contemporary American road tests.
I still have an acceleration filing cabinet in my head and that knowledge used to be indispensable when I was out in test cars and up for a traffic light challenge.
I knew the acceleration times of whatever was drawing up next to me and whether it was worth having a go.
Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.
An Audi A4 driver – at the wheel of the 2.0-litre, 147kW version – thought one night he’d take me on when I was driving a Subaru Legacy 2.5 GT with manual transmission. The Audi would have a 0-100km/h in the high 7s, whereas, with the manual gearbox, the 185kW Scoobie was at least a second quicker. Japan 1, Germany nil.
These days, perhaps because I am getting more, shall we say, mature, I follow acceleration times as a mere academic exercise.
Roughly once a week, Mark Jones, from The Citizen Motoring team, goes to the Gerotek test facility outside Pretoria, wires up his V-Box measurement system and then blasts off several runs in that week’s test car to get the best 0-100 time, as well as a host of other acceleration standards.
I am only interested in the 0-100 benchmark – and it has amazed me that the magical mark is now sub-4 sec … and even more amazing, how many cars can do that, even at Gerotek’s altitude.
To put that into perspective, a decent Formula One racing car when I was a boy would have been blown into the weeds by the new muscle cars.
Jones, of course, is the type of driver who can get the maximum out of a performance car – and even he is surprised on occasion when he betters a manufacturer’s acceleration figure.
Are these times important in the real world? Only if you’re a boy racer. Obviously, you would also want to be aware, pulling out to pass a truck, whether you were driving a slow dog of a car, too…
Also, when a car is getting to 100km/h in 4 sec – even in less than six – it is too fast for mere mortals like me.
Jones and a small bunch of natural race drivers can get the most out of such cars – but the rest of us will probably only ever access about 80% of what a car can offer.
That means, if you bought a R1 million performance car, you paid R200 000 too much.
The numbers I focus more on these days – which shows I am almost at the pipe-and-slippersby-the-fire stage of life – are those for fuel consumption. Less is still more – but it’s now a lower litres per 100km figure I prefer to see, not a smaller one in seconds.