Ya know, I really hate to rain on your "The days of the pushrod engine is
over" parade but it's simply not true. There was a reason the 318 & 360
engines lasted for so long: THEY PRODUCE POWER! A pushrod engine will always
out do an OHC engine for torque purposes. Horsepower isn't everything.
I believe it was a few weeks ago where someone posted up to the list that
they went to the track and a Cummins Turbo Diesel RAM wiped them all out.
Talk about an archaic engine, an in-line six with pushrods and all the ancient
engine technology that diesels represent.
When you are racing, you want gobs of both HP and Torque. Never give up
one for the other and call it and "advancement", because it's not, it's a
"compromise". Advancement is a gain in all categories, anything else is just
a 'change'.
The 4.7's represent a more 'efficient' engine. Lighter and quicker to
respond, but they can't handle all the gizmos people like to tack onto them
like nitrous and such: they are aluminum engines with the weaknesses of an
aluminum engine. Because the engine is already near it's peak efficiency,
there's not much you can do to it to make it "better".
The 5.9 and 5.2 engines will always be able to out power the 4.7 in both HP
and Torque, but not until they are brought up to the efficiency level of the
4.7 engine. That requires aftermarket goods. There is no substitute for
cubic inches save and entire engine concept change... like oh, a turbine...
All car magazine's suck, no matter which one they are. They are puppets of
their reporters biases and of their advertisers. They always make compromises
since they can never compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges because
there's really too many differences in vehicles. If someone wants to give MT
a fair comparison, take a supercharged or nitrous'd R/T to them and tell them
to whip out the Lightning and go for their tests then. Until then, I suggest
all you R/T owners should write them a nasty letter and tell them they suck
and their testing techniques are extremely unscientific and biased since they
don't even have a clue enough to compare proper engine types...
Shaun H.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Jun 20 2003 - 12:18:33 EDT