MUSCLE CAR HEAVEN
THE SECOND WAVE OF PONY CARS quite literally grew up in 1970-’71, becoming more Clydesdale than Calabrese. Mustang shed its Falcon underpinnings, instead employing beefy mid-sized Torino bits; GM’s F-bodies had precious little Nova left beneath them; and Mother Mopar sectioned a few inches out of the B-body’s wheelbase and called it E-body. And so, a generation of light, nimble machines went ahead and carbo-loaded themselves into becoming bigger sizes altogether.
On the one hand, it meant that these quarter-mile combatants wouldn’t need to be sent to specialty builders (ie, Kar Kraft, Hurst) to wedge the biggest, nastiest engines under the hood anymore. On the other, you needed bigger engines to haul around all that extra bulk.
It also meant that the plumped-up ponies had evolved into another category altogether: They became Gran Turismo (Grand Touring) machines. What’s that mean? It’s a nebulous area, living in the Venn diagram where sports car, coupe, and 2+2 intersect: A GT is all of these, and none of them. Sports
