The main intersection in the town in which I grew up was dominated by a firehouse and three gas stations. It could have been any intersection in middle America in the mid-1960s, and my first job was pumping gas at the Mobil station.Across the street, behind the firehouse, was our town’s version of Gasoline Alley, a series of high-performance “speed” shops devoted to “The Embassy Trade” (we lived within shooting distance of Washington, D.C.), where a kid could hear the exotic, guttural roars of unmufflered Ferraris and Lamborghinis. I also listened in wonder to American music every Friday evening as Tom, the chief mechanic, would peel out in his ‘55 Chevy, leaving twin streaks of black on the cement, and as Eddie, my fellow gas jockey, would rev his ‘66 Plymouth Sateffite as he pulled it into a vacant service bay. He spent the summer, head under the hood, in a labor of love, and by Labor Day, through the addition of such high- performance components as a four-barrel carburetor, racing headers, glass packs, and high-performance manifolds, he had turned his 383- cubic-inch engine into one screamin’ machine.
Back then, at the height of the muscle car era, the performance enthusiast was a marked man—a dirt-under-the-nails bruised-knuckles kind of guy. Essentially, he was dedicated to a single premise: “How do I make this thing go faster?” and he found a whole industry— based mainly in Southern California—ready to assist him in his quest.
But times change, and by the mid-1970s the glory days of the muscle car—and their sound of sweet thunder—were gone. Speed was replaced by caution and a new emphasis on fuel economy and emissions. Manufacturers realized that the mechanical systems that controlled a vehicle’s performance could not deliver the precision that new government standards mandated. Slowly at first, and then with increasing speed, manufacturers began to incorporate electronic controls into their lines. Speed shop purists and shadetree mechanics grumbled: Every year it seemed there was less and less to work on.