These days, when I'm not hard at work keeping the laboratory's networks running smoothly, I can generally be found cruising around town in my home away from home. No, it's not a Winnebago; it's a 1995 Dodge Stealth R/T Turbo (click for lots of pictures!). Peak 320bhp, 315 ft-lb torque, Getrag six-speed manual transmission, all wheel drive, 18" chrome wheels with Yokohama 245/40ZR18 tires, twin low-mass turbochargers. Zero to sixty fast enough to give you whiplash. Throw in leather seats, a sunroof, CD changer and unique instrumentation, and you've found the quintessential Gran Tourismo vehicle. As the marketing literature says: "Stealth R/T Turbo. You know what I got."
Before my '95 Twin Turbo, I owned a '93 base model Stealth.
My current "rainy day" car is a 1989 Chevy Cavalier. Before that, it was a 1987 Mazda 323 which met its demise at the business end of a Ford Bronco in a crash at an intersection in which the Bronco driver admitted full fault and responsibility.
Check out my race results!
If you want a tutorial on how to drag race, visit Michael Beard's Guide to Bracket Racing. Be sure to read his Reaction Time Clinic page if you need help understanding how the starting lights work, what they mean, and how to develop good launch strategies.
Just for fun, here's a graph of my best run compared to Bob Fontana's best run in his heavily modified 1993 Mitsubishi 3000GT VR-4.
And here's my quick sketch of the wastegate actuator vacuum/boost lines showing which line to disconnect where in order to manually bleed some boost away from the wastegate actuators (resulting in higher boost and higher power).
For you physics geeks out there, check out the torque and horsepower curves for the 1991-1993 Stealth/3000GT twin turbo engine. Note the discrepency between the curves above the horsepower peak. Maybe Dodge finally did "break the rules" of physics, as they keep claiming in their commercials?
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Update: nabbed by radar at 56 in a 40 (too lazy to bring the radar detector from the other car - bad move!) on November 18, 1996. The cop refused to hear any plea for reduction to a warning. This would have knocked out the above supervision plus given me the additional ticket. By the time the cop got back to my car, he had had a change of heart and lowered it to a warning. Good cop! You get a jelly-filled!
Another update: nabbed by radar in rural Indiana on Christmas Eve. Cop was using instant-on X band and had blasted a car well in front of me, so I had plenty of warning that he was coming. I was decelerating from 65 (in a 55 zone) when he got to me. By the time he got a lock, I was at around 62mph. He dove across the huge, embanked median in the snow, caught up to me, and claimed that he had a "dead lock" on me doing 74mph. He also claimed that he was using K band radar. I argued, and he let me off with a warning. Very bad cop!
