Difference between muscle cars and sports cars?
In: Engineering
It’s pretty subjective, but generally speaking a sports car is designed to drive in a “sporty” fashion: (quick acceleration, tight handling, gear ratios tuned to drive “fun”).
Muscle cars are more about just having big beefy high HP engines, tuned to have big torque, do burnouts, and have a fast 1/4 mile time.
Example: a Shelby GT 500 Mustang (muscle) vs a Porsche 911. (sports).
Typically a muscle car is big, heavy, and designed for sheer power and not for handling where a sports car usually is more nimble, light weight, and has better handling abilities.
A 500 horsepower muscle car would beat a 300 horsepower sports car in a drag race, but the same sports car would probably beat the muscle car on a curvy race track.
Muscle cars are usually (feel free to disagree) considered to have been born with the original Pontiac GTO. The GTO, in turn, was basically a protest by the car designers against Pontiac’s contemporary departure from factory-built race vehicles due to bad press surrounding accidents and casualties of auto racing at the time.
What they did was take what was then a compact-form-factor car (the LeMans) and shove the 389 V-8 engine “intended” for use in bigger, heavier cars into a comparatively light frame. The result was a torque-y (i.e. muscular) monster that could jump off the line with little hesitation. Eventually Pontiac made the GTO its own distinct design, and other companies followed with their own interpretations of the hot-selling GTO in the forms of high-performance packages or new models.
The thing is, the LeMans was not a particularly amazing platform otherwise, in terms of handling, being otherwise a standard compact commuter vehicle, and its only real performance metric was its raw proportional power. Most muscle cars of the era followed Pontiac’s example, where the only thing that mattered was power. They definitely got more nimble as they became de facto sports cars over the years and a bit more emphasis was placed on the “big picture” of performance, sure, but all was sacrificed at the altar of horsepower when the scales were balanced out.
Conversely, vehicles identified as “sports cars” are intended to have modestly to much improved performance in all regards (power, acceleration, handling, street suspension) to “lesser” vehicles. It’s a balancing act, though; where we consider it in the framing of an out-of-10 scoring system, a sports car might be:
– Handling: 8
– Acceleration: 8
– Top Speed: 8
For a total of 24 points, a muscle car is more balanced towards power, e.g.
– Handling: 6
– Acceleration: 9
– Top Speed: 9
Still for a total of 24 points, but with different priorities.
And both compared to a supercar (which wasn’t really a classification at the time, but to illustrate) which would be like a sports car but still better.
– 9
– 9
– 9
For 27 points, with 30 point cars being painstakingly-built race-intended vehicles.
One other defining feature is price; muscle cars tend(ed) to be cheaper, given that they were just variations on existing platforms and all you really paid for was a bigger engine. I would argue the classical definition of “muscle car” doesn’t exist, as Hellcats et al aren’t built off of, say, a Stealth or some other “generic” platform.
Muscle cars are sports cars, but not all sports cars are muscle cars.
A “Muscle Car” specifically is about the drag strip. A big, grunty V8 engine that can barely idle from excessive cam lope but is able to incinerate tires and put down a sub-11 second quarter mile.
Top speed and cornering are distant memories.
Other “sports cars” are more track-focused, and feature tight steering, braking, and suspension to be more like an actual race car. They have powerful engines too, but ones optimized for a balance of speed and acceleration across a range of gears and conditions instead of a pure 0-60 hog.
It’s probably more accurate to say a muscle car is a class of sports car, rather than them being two distinct things. There’s different types.
Muscle cars: Intended for drag racing. Almost exclusively American marques. Built to accelerate quickly from a dead stop, in a straight line. Very large high torque engines, heavy, exclusively rear-wheel drive, doesn’t corner well. Eg: Ford Mustang, Chevrolet Camero, Dodge Challenger. Pony cars are a subclass of muscle cars with an emphasis on affordable power.
Grand Touring car: Sports car designed for long distance road races. Emphasis on more driver comfort and endurance, corners well. May or may not emphasize power. Often rear or all wheel drive. Eg: BMW M Series, Aston Martin DB9, Porsche 911, Chevrolet Corvette.
Roadster: Small, light, two seat, rear wheel drive. Often convertibles. Kind of like a sub category of the touring car. Eg. Mazda MX-5
Hot Hatch: Small front wheel drive three door hatchback cars with large, powerful engines. Designed to be very quick and nimble. Also popular for rallying. Eg Ford Focus ST, Renault Clio RS, Volkswagen Golf GT.
Sport Compact: Like a hot hatch, but with a compact two or four door sedan body. Eg Subaru Impreza WRX, Honda Civic Si/Type R, Mitsubishi Lancer Evo. Also commonly used in rally races.
Super/Hyper Car: Typically these embody the fastest, most powerful, most technologically advanced road legal production cars of their era. High performance with an equally high price. Eg. Bugatti Veyron, Lamborghini Aventador, McLaren P1, Ferrari LaFerrari.
There is no actual rule differentiating the two. However, you can lay out features that most people would associate with a ‘muscle car’ or a ‘sports car’.
But the most critical distinction is likely the driver’s intentions.
Driving a muscle car is about *the car*. Frequently, muscle cars are noteworthy only to others with a decent knowledge of cars. Muscle cars frequently look like the car your Dad drove to work for 30 years – the difference is in what is under the hood.
Driving a sports car is about *status*. The actual performance of the vehicle normally isn’t relevant compared to how it looks to others. You want others to look at your car and immediately perceive you (the driver) as a high status individual of some sort.
A good example of this is the Tesla. If you watched the Fast & Furious movies (at least the early ones), you’re probably familiar with the phrase “10 second car”. This is a description of a car that can complete a quarter-mile in 10 seconds and would ordinarily be used to describe a ‘muscle car’. Our heroes in Fast & Furious went to considerable lengths to build “10 second cars” out of stock vehicles.
But that phrase also describes the Tesla you can drive off the lot. You don’t need to do any tinkering with nitro, stack blowers or timing computers to get 10 second performance out of it (and, indeed, you’d get some pretty strange looks down at NAPA if you tried).
However, no one would describe Tesla as a ‘muscle car’ because no one buys a Tesla for Thunder Road. You buy a Tesla to impress your buddies – who probably know nothing about cars. So it’s a “sports car”.
I follow the old SCCA Production homologation rule…a sports car has two seats. It should also have a good power-to-weight ratio. There are plenty of sports cars with low horsepower, but low weight (see any of the old British roadsters).
A muscle car is generally a high-powered coupe or sedan with a back seat, RWD, and a V8.
A muscle car is an American term for high-performance cars, typified but not limited to American make, rear-wheel drive, stylized, coupe, fitted with a large and powerful V8 engine, and street legal. The term originated for 1960s and early 1970s special editions of mass-production cars which were designed for drag racing. The term is subjective.
A hot rod is a modified muscle car, typically for additional style and performance, or the perception of such.
A sports car is designed to emphasize handling, performance, or thrill of driving. The term is broad. There is no minimum requirement other than the expressed or implied intent of the car’s design and purpose. A sports car is an object of luxury rather than necessity – you may need a car to get to work, or to carry your tools or a family, you don’t NEED a sports car. A car is regarded as a sports car out of consensus. There is no definitive distinction between sports cars and other categories. Hot rods and muscle cars are sports cars, but not all sports cars are hot rods or muscle cars.
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