Highest Scoring American Vehicles

Hi goatwgn,

I liked and agree with most of your post (especially your thoughts about the automotive media), but I have to give you some insight on some of the American vehicles that you spoke of:

I owned a '76 Chevy Vega that (believe it or not) I used to drag race, and I won 7 races and one championship (Bandimere Speedway in Morrison, Co.'s Memorial Day High School Drags).  I did neutral drops with the Turbo 250 automatic tranny and never broke it!  The car withstood being rearended by a '71-4 Volvo Station Wagon, and did more damage to it's front end than to my cars rear end...that wouldn't have been the case with the imports!  That car was so great for me that to this day, I remember the vin number of the car...how's that for loving a particular car?  Granted the '71-75 Vega's had engine block woes due to their non-sleeved aluminum construction, but the '76-77 engines were tested in Arizona heat, to prove they could handle the heat/stress of normal wear & tear... thus the engines were waranteed for 5yrs & 60k miles...no Corolla or B210 had such a warranty!!!

I won my (one and only) High-School Reunion drag race (also at Bandimere's), with an '85 Chevy Celebrity (with the 151c.i. 4cyl engine), because it was consistent enough in it's elapsed time performance, that it was hard for the much quicker cars that I ran against to adjust to when we got near the finish line of a handicapped race...most imports I've raced against can't lay claim to that kind of performance, and I've raced many of them this past decade to prove it (the only way I lost to them, was if I screwed-up as a driver, because my Chevy was always doing its job)...btw that only happened once, to a Toyota Tundra, that I lost to because I was so amped up to beat this very successful Chevy bracket racer driving that truck, that I over-shifted my tranny, thus ruining my momentum and letting a vehicle that I clearly had beat, win!

Enter my current drag racing car...a 1986 Chevy Cavalier Z24, that I race in Stock Eliminator for the N.H.R.A.  My Z24 has nearly won 2 national events (a 3rd rnd loss by .009 (in '99),  and a 4th rnd loss by .015 (the winner was just .014 over his dial-in, and I helped the matter by not getting my car consistently cooled), and 2 divisional

events (one lost by a false start of just .013sec. in the quarter-finals, and the other due to running too quick as opposed to my competition---in a round four contest with a very good rear-wheel drive racer).  When ever I race against imports, I generally win!  Why, because consistent performance isn't built into their products...so if they're as good as the mag rags claim they are (Consumer Reports & Car and Driver being the worst), then why aren't they out there proving their so-called superiority over the X, J, K, and other fwd American car models?  Why is it that only fwd Dodge Omni's/Horizon's, Aries K cars, Neon's, and the fwd Chargers (etc.), the Ford Escorts & Tempo's, plus Chevy Cavaliers, Citation's, Oldmobile Delta's & Toronado's, plus Cadillac Cimarron's, the only fwd cars I see or read about traversing the countries N.H.R.A. drag strips racing in Stock Eliminator?  What about it Consumer Reports, if those cars are so much better than our American cars, then they should be out here proving it...but guess what, they're not because THEY AREN'T!!!  As a local radio talk show personality said last week,  "I'll put my Chevrolet's up against any import made anywhere in the world, by any automaker...for dependability and reliability"!

While you people at CR were denouncing American products and touting the Japanese imports, I was doing the following:

1.  Offering help to a lady who just bought her '83 Honda Civic (New) 6mths earlier, but was stuck at a local gas station with a cooling system problem, while my '82 Cavalier cruised up to over 120k miles with no such problems!

2.  I delivered a fan belt to a service shop for a Toyota Prius with only 55k on the odometer...if they're such great cars, then that vehicle should've gone much farther before such a repair!