Today’s Mustang, Camaro, and Challenger are all impressive cars with retro styling and powerful V8 engines capable of producing 400-500 horsepower, making them perfect for tire-smoking burnouts and sizzling quarter-mile times. Despite this, some people claim that modern pony cars cannot compare to those of the 60s and 70s, believing them to be poor imitations of the original models.
To explore this claim, we gathered three modern high-spec pony cars and matched them with their glory days ancestors. We compared a 2011 Camaro SS to the 69 Camaro SS 396 that inspired its design, a 2011 Challenger SRT8 to the 70 Challenger, and the freshly minted Shelby Mustang GT500 convertible to its 69 forebear.
We found that the new Camaro dwarfs the old one, being nearly a foot longer, half a foot taller, and 1.7 inches wider. The new car’s cabin is bunker-like, whereas the original Camaro lacks B-pillars and delicate A-pillars, providing an airy greenhouse. Although the old Camaro’s dash is a mishmash of vertical sliders, buttons, and knobs, its lumpy, loping idle of that high overlap cab is a joy to breathe in.
The 1970 Challenger is a rare, fully loaded SE trim model, originally painted in the Chrysler Imperial color charcoal erudition and equipped with a 440 Magnum four-barrel. Jack’s rebuild upgraded it to a 390-horse 446 Pat, the top-spec wedge motor that stood one rung below the mighty 426 Hemi on the performance ladder. The vintage car’s size difference with the modern Challenger is less dramatic, and both cars offer a relaxed fit. The vintage car’s high back chairs offer the least lateral support, and the SRT 8’s buckets offer a bear hug. The 446 nips more closely at the heels of its SRT descendant at 14.4 seconds and a hundred miles per hour flat.
The 1969 Shelby GT500’s backstory is the most colorful, built to export specs and displayed at the Madrid Auto Show in Spain. Carroll fought and lost a court battle and abandoned the car in Spain, and it ended up with one of the judge’s cronies. After being repatriated back to the states and restored, it now resides with one of the nation’s foremost Shelby experts, Craig Conley, founder of Paradise Wheels.
Overall, by any objective measure, yesterday’s heroes from the Golden Age of horsepower are hopelessly outclassed by their modern-day counterparts as performance cars. However, as time machines, the modern ponies pale in comparison. Vintage cars rule!
