Chevy's C5-R started the new road-racing season with a GTS class win in the 12-hours of Sebring with Ron Fellows, Johnny O'Connell, and Frank Freon doing the driving. The C5-R is seen here in testing at Florida's Homestead-Miami Speedway. The car looks good in black.
Is there anything new with the C5-R? Not really. But it's such a good-looking car and it has dominated international road racing, so it's always good to throw in a photo.
Musclecar Of The Month'69 Dodge Charger DaytonaIn order to be competitive in NASCAR, Dodge had to fix all the aerodynamic shortcomings of the brick-like '68-'70 Charger design. The solution was first the '69 Charger 500 with a flat grille and flush-mounted rear window. Then the company got serious and added an extended nose cone and tall rear wing to create the astounding Charger Daytona.
Dodge stuffed a 375hp 440 V-8 under the long nose (originals were steel, not fiberglass) as standard and offered the blistering 425-plus-horsepower 426 Hemi as an option. Those scoops atop the fenders were there, Chrysler said, so the nose could be lowered over the oversize tires in competition. Buddy Baker lapped his Daytona around Alabama's Talledega Superspeedway at 200.447 mph, the first stock car to run a lap at more than 200 mph. Bobby Isaac used Daytonas to win 11 races during 1970 and take the championship.
Total Charger Daytona production (the sources are sketchy) was a scant 503 cars during its one year-just enough to homologate the car for NASCAR. Chrysler built the similarly conceived Plymouth Superbird for 1970.
Quick FactsProduction Total: 503 (433 with 440 V-8, 170 with 426 Hemi V-8)Engine: 440 ci, OHV V-8. 375 hp with four-barrel carburetorTransmission: Four-speed manual or three-speed automaticWheels and Tires: 14-inch steel wheels inside F70-14 "Redline" tires
0-100-SuperNovaFor the past five years, our sister magazine Chevy High Performance has conducted an invitation-only 0-100-0 contest to test the acceleration and braking performance of a select handful of readers' cars. The contestants gather at the dragstrip, and with help from the braking experts at Baer Inc., put their respective cars through the paces by making a regular quarter-mile blast and then standing on the brakes at the top end. Using a Stalker radar gun, the car's 0-100-mph acceleration is measured during its quarter-mile run, and again once it hits 100 mph on the braking side. CHP allows each car to make a series of runs, first focusing on acceleration, then on braking, so the results are not based on the single best 0-100-0 run, but rather the best acceleration run added to the best stopping run. This year, as CHP was making its preparation for the annual test, we thought it would be fun to enter our SuperNova project car. Frankly, we didn't expect much, and were more keen on getting in some track time to test a new torque converter we'd just swapped in. So we headed up to LACR, our regular test facility, to join in on the fun.