Did the Car Hoby Used to Cost Less?
 

Question especially for the old timers here. I get the impression that while there is a lot more stuff available these days, back in the olden times, say 80s and earlier, it wasn't nearly as expensive relatively speaking for the common man to have a project car to fart around with.

My coworker is 67, and he tells me about all the things he used to do to his cars. He always talks like it was the normal thing to do was throw in a cam and headers back.

Well, the original hot rodding car hobby grew out of straight up working class status. They had very little to induldge, so they became very resourceful. I'm hoping Glenn will come in here and give us a run down, as I'm sure he knows a ton.

I think what it was, was there was a relativly small amount of stuff you could actually purchase and most performance upgrades were all labor. Remember you had a rediculously fast car if you had 1hp per cubic inch back in the day.
Now a days, 2-3hp per Cubic inch is the norm, blowers, nitrous, and cylinder heads are readily available and of course are quite techical thus being expensive.

Pay attention, nothing ever changes except where we put the decimal point.

When I was into air cooled VW's the parts were fairly inexpensive in relation to other car marques however it was just as hard for me to budget the extra cash back then as it is now to buy parts for the Miata, which in reality is today's air cooled VW when it comes to hopping stuff up on the cheap.

Yes it was less expensive back in the day. But a 13 second car was fucking considered pretty fucking quick even with a built short block and a power adder up through the mid nineties. Today, it's hard to find a car that doesn't run low 13's to mid twelves from the factory.

Back when I started (1988) the really fast street racers (we raced in Ontario off Etiwanda) were running low 11's. One of my friends had a buddy that everyone wanted to race and he always won. I found out later that he had only run his car on a track once and ran 11 flat. That's what the Chevelle is running on the engine alone now and I consider it to be slow.

Also, back then electronic fuel injection was new. No one was building quick FI cars. The fast cars were carb'd and running a hidden nitrous kit. If someone was running a blower it was a 671 roots and they had a ton of money in it.

This is easy--back in the late 60's-- you would buy a new car and then take it apart and change EVERYTHING.


Yep, I helped do that many a time.:p

Yep, that was how it was. I did street racing from 69 to 91. It was the carb cars that were fast and if you couldn't build a FAST engine you put Nitrous on it ( or a blower ).

You could do a complete rebuild of a SBC for less than $500. Including a new cam and lifters, all the rings bearings and gaskets, and still have enough left for beer.