The Mini Revolution

Rattlesnake Raceway is a private road circuit, six miles from Midland, Texas, on Route 349, once the, legend-strewn Pecos Trail. I was not called Rattlesnake Raceway out of whimsy: the flat, arid countryside around it, sparsely covered with coarse grasses, tumbleweed, mesquite and other desert vegetation, supports a formidable population of Grotalus atrox. The snakes come out of the bush to sun themselves on the warm concrete of the track, and drivers now and then run over one; sometimes they go back and stone it to death. Out past the perimeter of the property, there are groves of pecan trees, white-dotted cotton fields and, fallow, the warm red Texas earth. This is oil country: There are 58,000-odd people in Midland, and an oil-company headquarters for every 80 of them.

Rattlesnake Raceway is the test track for the building-and-racing firm of Chaparral Cars, Inc., and it is the most sophisticated circuit in private hands. One must go to General Motors to find anything comparable. The radio-telemetry equipment at Rattlesnake enables Chaparral technicians to produce as many as eight simultaneous remote readouts on a moving car up to five miles away: speed, lateral g force, engine revolutions per minute, the time in second fractions required to shift from third to fourth gear, deceleration rate and so on. Photoelectric cells rim the track and it can be wetted down from beginning to end. Until it was made available to Playboy, the circuit had not been open to any publication for extended testing. It was the ideal setup for us in assaying 14 subcompact automobiles that were likely to demonstrate only slight differences in many categories—differences that would be impossible to establish precisely by seat-of-the-pants evaluation.

Another advantage was multiple testing of the cars by experts: the three Chaparral technicians assigned to the project; Don Gates, chief vehicle engineer, formerly chief of the Product Performance Engineering Croup at Chevrolet Research and Development; Wesley Sweet and Harold Galford, race mechanics; Jim Hall, founder of Chaparral and one of die legendary figures, both as driver and builder, in U. S. road racing; and Chaparral executive vice-president Cameron R. Argetsinger, who created Watkins Glen, oldest of American road races. We all drove the cars (Austin America, Capri, Colt, Cricket, Datsun 510, Fiat 850, Gremlin, Opel 1900, Pinto, Renault RIO, Saal) 99E, Toyota Corona, Vega GT, Volkswagen Super Beetle) many miles on the circuit and on the road.

Jim Hall is particularly sensitive to a vehicle's performance on Rattlesnake, because in the development of his own cars, which have been fabulously successful here and in Europe, he has driven more laps on it than he can remember, certainly high in the thousands. For a two-mile course, it has a lot of variety: a double 90-degree corner, a long straight with a fast bend in the middle, a hard corner that tightens up wickedly the farther one gets into it and an uphill blind bend. Then there's a skid pad of a 150-foot radius that runs around the building housing the radio and recording equipment. It was on this circuit and in the shops down the lane from it that Hall and his partner Hap Sharp developed the innovative Chaparral racing cars (first to use airfoils for increased rear-wheel adhesion, for example), and it was on Rattlesnake Raceway that the almost incredible Chaparral 2-J—the "vacuum-cleaner" car designed for Hall by a team of ten men led by Don Gates—first ran.

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The new small cars come to the U. S. market under the force of compelling logic: The Volkswagen showed the way 20 years ago, and when the sales of VWs, Renaults, Fiats and the like began to round ten percent of the U. S. total, Detroit policy setters had to concede that somebody out there wanted them besides car snobs, budgeteers and eccentrics. The returns are in now, and they affirm what many experts in various fields have felt for some time: We cannot indefinitely justify 3000-pound, 300-horsepower, nine-miles-per-gallon vehicles for the transportation of one or two people. It's likely that in 25 years the four-car family will be commonplace and that all four autos will fit comfortably into today's two-car garages still standing.

The equation contains factors beyond the obvious ones of economy, ecology, historical imperative, Ralph Nader's stunning appearance on the national scene in the role of David against the industry's Goliath, and Federal intervention. One of those factors is the post-War travel and (continued on page 130)Mini Revolution(continued from page 104) recreation boom. People came home from their first European trips planning their second. If the price of two weeks in London and Paris was the difference between a Chrysler and a Volkswagen, then the local VW dealer was about to see a new face in his showroom. People didn't need another trip to Europe, but they wanted one more than they wanted another mighty juggernaut from Detroit. Rather suddenly, the American consumer found that he had a lot of new wants: a boat, a snowmobile, a weekend or summer house—and a smaller car, so that he could swing them. Once this phenomenon was big enough to see with the naked eye, Detroit's response was predictable. David E. Davis, Jr., of Campbell-Ewald, the Chevrolet advertising agency, has said that the Vega comes closer to meeting consumer want than any car General Motors has built since World War Two, and perhaps even World War One. He may have something: Chevrolet sold 43 percent of its available stocks in less than three days after the Vega went on sale, smashing all industry records.

In choosing the cars for the test, Playboy made no attempt at a Consumers Union dead-level standard, beyond shooting roughly for a $2000 base price. Because of model availability at the time (in the case of one make, there were only three cars in the country), it was impossible to specify options. We might not have done so in any event, because what we wanted above all was a group of cars that might have been picked at random on the street. One car, the Saab 99E, a $3300 item, was included because we were curious to see what $1000-odd added to the $2000 standard would bring, and also because we suspected that some $2000 cars would arrive in Midland loaded with $1000 or more worth of extras, and we wanted to offset that by including a car that began at $3000. We took the Saab instead of die equally attractive Swedish Volvo only because we wanted another front-wheel drive. Two cars did show up with $3000 stickers: the Gremlin, at $3180.70 on a $1999 base, and the Vega at $2945/$2197.

Mildly startling is the fact that of the 14 cars, only one, the Gremlin, is totally American. The Capri is built by Ford of Germany, engined by Ford of Great Britain. The Dodge Colt is made 100 percent by Mitsubishi of Japan, the Plymouth Cricket by Chrysler United Kingdom, Ltd., sold in die U. K. as die Avenger. The Pinto's basic engine (1600 c.c.) is British and the optional one (2000 c.c.) is German, as is the optional automatic transmission. The Gremlin comes out of American Motors' parts bins and die Vega was newly designed from die ground up, though using die Opel transmissions. 3 Otherwise, Detroit appears to have elected to use imports in phase one of its fight against imports.

All 14 cars were thoroughly run in, whether they came to Midland truck-borne or under their own power. In an undertaking of this kind, it's safe to assume that the vehicles have been well prepared, but the degree of tune depends upon chance and the enterprise of the supplier. We suspected one car to be a cheater—deciding finally that it was not, only that it had been supertuned by the knowing hands of experts.

The tests required a week and were meticulously done to the highest standards of scientific discipline. Some of the equipment used—the remote pickup registering speed, acceleration and deceleration, for example—was designed by Don Gates, made in the Chaparral machine shop and is unique. Watching the recorder spew out feet of paper as the pens inked in a car's behavior was an almost eerie experience. "He's doing 62 in third gear, you see," Gates would say, "and that little jiggle means he's about 100 yards past the bend ... there's a rough place on the circuit there ... he'll brake about here in two seconds."

Space limitations and complexity have prevented die chart on page 104 from fully reflecting the extent of the testing. The drag and horsepower figures are an example. Data fed into the computer for this test included the weight of the car and the driver, die rate of deceleration of the vehicle coasting with power off, and the density of the air. The figures were taken at 30 and 60 miles per hour and computer extrapolated to 100, 150 and 200. We have used only die 60 and 200 mph figures. Since the Fiat Coupe showed the lowest drag figure, 105.7 pounds at 60 mph, and would require only 314.6 horsepower to propel it at 200 mph, it was obvious that it would also show the lowest fuel consumption, and it did—44.5 miles to die gallon at 60 mph. Incidentally, this reading was so low that we repeated the whole test, with identical results.

To demonstrate understeer and over-steer, the cars were run clockwise and counterclockwise on a precise line around the 150-foot skid pad at speeds applying increasing side force to them. Understeer and oversteer are functions of front-and-rear-wheel adhesion: An un-dersteering car tends to go through a corner at a less acute angle than the position of the front wheels would seem to indicate; an oversteering car takes a greater angle. Put another way, an un-dersteering car driven past the limit of adhesion will plow off the road front end first; an oversteerer will spin off rear end first. Understeer is considered safer for passenger vehicles and the graphs made on each of the test cars showed the curves typical of understeer, with one exception: The Renault R10 showed some initial understeer, changing quickly to oversteer. The Renault was the only car we damaged: One of the Chaparral technicians had taken it to .58 g of side force, when it switched from under- to oversteer, dug in the outside rear wheel to the rim and gently turned on its side. Interestingly, detailed examination of the data subsequently showed that it had gone past the point of no return before the wheel rim readied the concrete. The driver unfastened his safety belt and climbed unhurt out the top door. Damage to the car was slight.

In appearance and performance, the 14 cars moved all of us variously, but in die end we—Messrs. Gates, Hall, Argetsinger, Sweet, Gafford and I—came to near unanimity. It's important to know that we had in mind the urban car, not the transcontinental grand touring machine, and that we were not attempting oracular infallibility. It was not our intent to say buy this, do not buy that, but rather to suggest, to point, to establish facts as a basis for individual judgment.

Austin America. This boxy little car derives in direct line from one of the bench-mark automobiles of our time, the Morris Mini, by the notably original-minded British designer Alexander Issigonis. There were three essentials in Issigonis' concept: For stability and full utilization of space, a wheel at each corner and minimum overhang; front-wheel drive by a front-mounted engine set transversely; suspension by hydraulic fluid interacting between front and rear: When a front wheel hits a bump, its rise instantly puts counteracting pressure on the corresponding rear wheel, thus lifting die rear of the body to the level already reached by the front. This concept, in various modulations, has been very successful and usually produces a superior ride. In fact, the Austin America has been compared with die Citroen, which uses a hydraulic system of much greater complexity. Front-wheel drive, by eliminating transmission hump and drive-shaft tunnel, gives a space bonus; the Austin is remarkably roomy for a 147-inch automobile. Steering is rack and pinion, brakes are disk and drum, with a limiting valve to prevent rear-wheel lockup, and the transmission can be either four-speed manual or seven-position automatic.

The makers claim a top speed of 85 mph for the Austin, but the fastest we could make it go was 77, and it had the longest 0-60 mph acceleration time, 22.1 seconds, of die 14 cars. Braking was good and it showed a hair better gas mileage (continued on page 200)Mini Revolution(continued from page 130) than the Volkswagen. Jim Hall thought the ride spongy—which may reflect the race driver's preference for fairly taut springing—and objected to the car's tendency to "hook in"; that is, go to oversteer when the throttle was lifted in a corner. The Austin was not really stable on a straightaway. I thought the amount of engine noise and vibration excessive, and final data did show that only three of the cars were louder at low speed. For urban use, these flaws are not critical and will, for some, be overweighted by the excellent boulevard ride, good mileage, ample load space and low price. I liked the car well enough, driving it around Midland streets, but I didn't enjoy pushing it hard on Rattlesnake, because performance was inadequate for that kind of work. The test car had a manual transmission. If I were buying, I would take the automatic, simply on the principle that in anything but a genuine high-performance motorcar, manual is a bore.

Capri Sport Coupe. A heavy swath through the European market has been cut by the Capri and it will do well on this side of the water. For some tastes, the Capri has a flamboyant air: fat bulge on the engine-compartment lid, thick crease along the sides, simulated brake-cooling scoops aft the doors, high-mounted race-type gas-filler cap. However, our consensus was that it's a sharp, good-looking motorcar. It was one of two fastest of the lot at 99 miles per hour and in the top group in acceleration: 15.8 seconds to 60 mph. Only one car, the Vega, outstopped it, and only two, the Opel and VW, equaled it at .91 g and 132 feet from 60 mph to standstill. This was an automatic, working off a well-placed T-bar lever, and if handled with reasonable regard for the workings of the device, it offered the sought-after turbinelike gear progression. The Capri had a number of insignificant but beguiling details—clock mounted conveniently on the shift console, for example, and a genuine, made-in-England gooseneck Butler map lamp. Performance considered, 27.4 miles to the gallon of gasoline is commendable.

We all liked the Capri and no one entered a heavy criticism of it. The 2000-c.c. engine would be my choice, and the automatic, but Jim Hall opted for the 4-speed. He particularly liked the handling, flat ride, competent suspension and good straight-line stopping, and was not put off by the slightly excessive un-dersteer that we all noticed.

Dodge Colt. Mitsubishi has been selling the Colt in the home islands for a while and began peeling off 3000 to 4000 units a month for us at the first of the year. Good things are made by Mitsubishi, the Nikon camera for one, and the house is the biggest corporate entity in Japan, where anti-monopoly regulations are not very anti: Mitsubishi is in ships, oil, airplanes, financing, insurance. One would expect the Colt to be a good, well-worked-out kind of automobile, and it is. Two of the figures we charted on it were exemplary—it squeezed the Volkswagen hard on mileage, at 32, and only the bigger-engined Vega could outaccelerate it, and that not by much.

There are four body styles: 2-door hardtop and 4-door sedan, station wagon and 2-door coupe, all running a 1600-c.c. engine, small but strong, single overhead cam, hemispheric combustion chambers and 5-bearing crankshaft. Devices usually thought of as optional are standard here: adjustable steering wheel, tilt-back seats (except in the coupe), 2-speed windshield wipers, a good closed-window ventilation system. There are extras: air conditioning and automatic transmission. The interior is remarkably handsome, except for the trunk, and doesn't look at all "economy."

The Colt is fast all the way through the range—too fast. I felt, for its handling traits. Braking was poor, with front-wheel lockup and rear-axle hop easy to come by, plus oversteer in hard corners. The variable-ratio steering is pleasant for ordinary use. The Colt is a handsome little motorcar and I'd have liked it a good deal had it given me more of a sense of security.

Plymouth Cricket. At first sight, the name plate and flower identifier on the side of the Cricket strike one as the cheapest-looking notion since fake-wood station wagons, but. bearing in mind the number of flower-power VWs cruising around, Plymouth may know something we don't. At any rate, here we have the Avenger, a brisk mover on the British market, its 70-horsepower four-cylinder engine pushing one body style, the 4-door sedan. Detroit publicists are seasoned experts in double-think semantics and a fine example of the art comes with the Cricket press material: "Designers attribute the distinctive styling of the Cricket to the fact that the car was conceived solely as a 4-door sedan, not as an adaptation of a design for a hardtop. Thus, the styling is free of the compromises that are necessary when the same basic body shell is used for different configurations." Well, one body style anyway, pleasing to the eye and capable of transporting four humans in reasonable comfort.

The interior is not an unalloyed delight; there is a good deal of molded plastic and rubber mat-ting in view. Controls are handy, except for what Plymouth calls "distinctively designed pods on the sides of the steering column" for lights, washers and wipers and so on. These, and the ignition-steering lock, are perhaps not really bafflers, they just take a few hours of learning with the owner's manual on your lap. Getting in and out of strange automobiles all day does tend to build an understanding of the short fuse that is the outstanding characteristic of parking-lot attendants. Not being mnemonists, none of us even tried to remember on which car the transmission had to be in reverse before the key would stop squealing or which one mandated the key out, not in, to unlock the steering. As for safety-harness fastening methods—no hope. A logical mind new to the problem might wonder why we cannot have standardization of these gimmicks, plus uniform dashboard instrumentation and shift patterns, but you and I know that permanent world peace will be easier to come by.

The Cricket's braking power impressed all of us as extraordinary. Jim Hall remarked it first, with the caveat that the fronts (power disks) were a bit too strong. I was surprised, when we had the data, to see that the Capri, VW and Opel were better, if only by a little, at .91 g, and the Vega considerably better at .95—the Cricket had somehow felt stronger. Our car had a banshee howl in the differential, which I choose to believe was atypical, and a most alarming groan, with accompanying stiffness in the steering column, plus a reluctance to find center and stay there. Otherwise, die handling was exemplary and we all enjoyed driving it. I thought the Cricket's readability fabulous when I noticed that I was going into the Mexican at 86 mph. Disillusionment came later, when the speedometer proved to be the wildest of all: it showed 87 for a true 80. Still, if that's the worst thing that can be said about the car....

Datsun 510. The Japanese automobile industry is the youngest in the world, and, next to die American, the strongest: Since 1956, production has doubled every three years! The Datsun is produced by the Nissan Motor Company, part of a huge complex of vehicle makers.

Nissan turned out 1,375,000 Datsuns last year, so the make, while fairly new to us, has been thoroughly de-bugged. In 1969, the Japanese exported only 14 percent of production and they are turning cars out so fast, to meet a steadily increasing home demand, that their own doom criers point to 1974, when they'll be putting 3,300.000 cars a year on a wholly inadequate road network, as the year of saturation. Thus, as in so many other things, the Japanese will get there—in this case, a nationwide bumper-to-bumper traffic jam—before anyone else. (Presumably, Tokyo will have before that time made a new breakthrough in pollution control: Even now, city traffic policemen take pure oxygen at regular intervals.) This farsighted view, plus the work obsession of the average Japanese, who makes even Germans look like dedicated loafers, accounts for the Japanese export drive, so formidable that it has struck fear into as sturdy a type as Henry Ford II. Incidentally, Nissan has been reported as intending to build a passenger car using the steam-powered engine—it cooks Freon instead of water—developed by Wallace Minto of Sarasota.

The sophistication of the Datsun 510 is reflected in items such as its expensive double-universal independent rear suspension that, unlike the basic swing-axle layout, keeps both wheels vertical relative to the ground over any road surface, and in interior noise level: In the low-speed range, it was the quietest car we had, only 4 points louder than the comparison Cadillac. It has a really working flow-through ventilation system and three adults can ride in back without unseemly intimacy. Handling is good if not extraordinary under stress and the normal ride is excellent.

Fiat 850 Sport Coupe. If this motorcar had a Made-in-Patagonia plate screwed to the fire wall, you would still know instantly that it's Italian. Perhaps not from the outside, but once the door is shut and you're looking through the pierced-spoke steering wheel at the saucer-sized tachometer and speedometer dials, once you hear the four-cylinder engine, all 903 c.c.s of it, muttering away behind you, then it has to be. The body is deceptive; there's nothing extraordinary-looking about it, save the extreme rear chop, but, as the chart clearly shows, a lot of wind-tunnel hours have gone into it. The Fiat is a rarity: You can put your foot flat on the floor, and leave it there all day, without feeling you're throwing away gasoline. (When you do fill it, eight gallons is overflow.) The seats are comfortable and bucketed, but it's tight behind the wheel for a big man: Jim Hall, considerably over six feet, couldn't really find the combination. There's a lot of pedal offset to the right, which takes getting used to, so much so that several times, going into a coiner, I caught myself looking down to be sure I wouldn't put both feet on the clutch and nothing on the brake. Like most rear-engined cars, it will show straight-line instability in a cross wind, but not enough to be a nuisance, and final oversteer if it's really pushed in a corner. The car is low enough to suggest, for the first 50 miles or so, that you're sitting on the road, but after that, you forget about it, probably because you're marveling at the amount of push coming out of 58 horsepower. Italian engineers have never worried a lot about noise, and the Fiat was one of the three loudest, level with the Pinto at 15 mph and only a couple of points quieter than the Vega.

In a sense, the vehicle was outside our pattern, being oriented more toward touring than urban use. When I had a chance to run on the open road for fun, with 14 cars to choose from, I usually took the Fiat, but when I went home at night, I drove something else.

Gremlin. On first sight, I liked the Gremlin better than anything else. I was in good company: the Gremlin was Don Gates's favorite, too. Cameron Argetsinger, who had said from the beginning that the Vega was number one, called us both daft. I still think the Gremlin a splendid-looking car; the rear-end treatment, I insist, is stunning; and I will not back off on dandy little touches such as the inset steps that make the roof rack an easy reach and the big dash-mounted lock for the glove compartment. (The test car carried every option but radar.) Once it's under way, however, the Gremlin is less enchanting. For example, the power steering is pure overkill, all power and no feel whatsoever. At Midland, we had the 3-speed manual transmission, an archaic arrangement without synchromesh on first or reverse. To say the Gremlin won't stop is an exaggeration, but 183 feet from 60 mph is a long time to wait and wonder if you're going to hit the wall or not. In right-hand corners, the engine invariably cut out, presumably due to fuel starvation. Pulling 135 horsepower out of its six cylinders, it took the Gremlin pretty quickly out of the hole—14.3 seconds to 60 mph—and it was faster on top than anything save the Capri. The inevitable trade-off for this performance was in fuel consumption, 25.6 miles to the gallon, not really bad in the over-all scheme of things, but lowest of the cars we had on hand.

I still like the way the rear window opens to take luggage. Granted, I might not enjoy that long lift over the sill, but it certainly does look dandy, rising lightly on its countersprings.

Opel 1900 Sport Coupe. Opel is one of the monument names. There've been Opels on the road since 1898 and, by 1912, the firm had made 10,000 cars; in 1935, it was the biggest producer in Europe. It's in the General Motors family now. The make has for years been thought rather staid and stodgy, but Opel used to swing, and when Gary Gabelich did 622 mph in a natural-gas rocket car last autumn, long memories recalled Fritz von Opel, who pushed a rocket car to 125 mph in the late Twenties. The "doctor's-car" image is changing now: The Opel GT has had good acceptance here.

The Opel 1900 was one of my Midland favorites. I liked it so much that I drove it more than I should have. It had a solid, well-built feeling and it conveyed the impression that it would last. Oddly, though the body looks aerodynamically right, the sloping roof line being particularly attractive, it churned up quite a lot of wind noise, 79 decibels at 60 mph, ranking it even with Vega and Volkswagen. The engine, not itself notably quiet, was well insulated. Braking was superior, at 132 feet and .91 g, and it stopped dead straight. Extremely sensitive in the seat of his pants, like all race drivers, Jim Hall was more or less critical of the ride quality on 13 of the 14 cars, the Opel being the only one he would say was "very good." It was quick—13.8 seconds to 60 and a top speed of 97—but still gave 29.1 miles to the gallon. All around, a good car.

Pinto. The automotive-mechanic population of the United States is about 40,000 short. In some communities, it's almost impossible to find a mechanic who'll come to start a stalled car: like doctors, auto mechanics don't make many house calls anymore. The "do-it-yourself" alternative collapses when you first look seriously under the hood of a standard V8. Change the sparkplugs? On some engines, you can barely see them, and only a special jointed wrench, rubber-collared to hold the plug tight when it's loose, will bring it to daylight. Ford has a better idea: The Pinto is about as simple a vehicle as the market will accept and, with it, you get a 129-page illustrated home-service manual. It's loaded with labeled drawings and photographs and it starts at ground level: Figure 241, for instance, is captioned "Adjustable Wrench" and the one working part is clearly labeled "Adjustable Screw." Figure 243 is captioned "Hand Cleaner." (The stuff is called "GOOP"; it contains lanolin and other good things.) If your capacities are overtaxed by doing two things at once, such as reading and using a screw driver, you can get a recording. The Model T is back and there is hope for all of us.

Pinto, son of Maverick, is the line diat leaps to mind—it has the same long hood and short deck. The car looks bigger than it is, and with reason: In one dimension, width, it's almost 9 inches past the VW, a statistic reflected in interior room and not much roll in corners. The engine is the Capri's, with the usual transmission choices on the 2000-c.c. engine only. The smaller engine is available only with the manual. It's noisy—82 decibels at 60 mph, the highest figure we recorded—and a lot of vibrations come through. Road shock also is heavy through the body and particularly the steering wheel, a big one by today's standard. In braking—all drums—the Pinto compares badly with its primary rival, the Vega: 162 feet against 127, and .74 g against .95. It was almost uncontrollable in panic stops from maximum speed. I thought it very good in coiners and reasonably stable on the straights. The test car, running the small engine, did 81 mph: the 2000-c.c. version should add ten to that. There's a surprising amount of room in back—limited travel on the driver's seat and none at all on the front passenger's—but you wouldn't want to live there. There is an extended option list and you can build a deluxe version of the Pinto if you like. But it still is going to be difficult to stop.

This observation suggests that the self-appointed car tester takes rather a lot upon himself—maybe too much. Usually, he's assaying only a single example, and the danger of condemning 50,000 automobiles for the flaws of one is ever-present. There are, however, two safeguards: If the car is bought anonymously off the dealership floor, that's one thing, but when the maker knows in advance, and can select the vehicle, one must assume it's a good one. Second, it's often possible to consult other testers. In the matter of the brakes on the basic Pinto, not many huzzahs are heard in the land.

Renault R10. Renault has been selling automobiles to Americans for 65 years, and the subcompact model R1O is, from a moneysaving point of view, king of the castle. Low in initial cost, at $1799, it's also a super gas miser: The test car did 36.2 miles to the gallon at a steady 60 mph, a reading not seriously threatened by any of the other cars and exceeded only by the phenomenal Fiat 850. It was by no means the slowest on pickup at 17.6 seconds and the actual top speed, 88 mph, was close enough to the maker's 85 mph claimed. It has disk brakes on all lour wheels, good rack-and-pinion steering (the most positive system, a gear wheel on the end of the steering column meshes with mating teeth on a straight bar that turns the front wheels) and it can be stuffed into minimum parking space. In other words, good for city use. But for long over-the-road trips, not so good.

The R10 uses swing axles in the rear: two drive shafts universally jointed to the differential. The swing axle was one of the early solutions to the independent-rear-suspension problem, and it works: the bump the right-hand wheel hits has no effect on the left-hand wheel. This system has been used by some notably good automobiles, Porsche and Mercedes-Benz among them. Swing axles have a compensatory disadvantage, however, which is that the combination of short wheelbase, rear-engine weight and swing axle makes a car relatively unstable in side winds and tricky in hard corners and sudden severe direction changing. If a swing-axle car is pushed hard enough, the outside rear wheel, which is taking most of the side force, will tuck under and begin to move the rear of the car independently of the front, setting up a violent oversteer. A driver who knows the phenomenon can cope with it if he's sharp, but he must be quick, because it's a right-now kind of happening. Sometimes, even an expert, like the Chaparral technician who was driving the Renault on the Rattlesnake skid pad when it dumped, will miss—even though he knows he's asking for it by pushing the car hard.

The Renault was not everybody's darling at Midland, the objections most often cited being the offset pedals and the odd gearshift positioning, the lever having to be stuffed into the seat cushion to get reverse, bringing it just about under your leg. The brakes were good, as would be expected of four-wheel disks on such a light automobile. But it was rough in side winds. In the Fiat, I followed Harold Gafford along Route 349 when he was running the Renault's mileage tests. A strong wind, gusting to 25 mph. was blowing across the road and Gafford had to work hard to hold the car dead straight and maintain a precise 60 miles per hour. I had gone for miles at rates up to 90 and, while the Fiat let me know it was windy out there, I wasn't in anything like Gafford's trouble. Jim Hall's reaction to the Renault's road behavior was definitive if brutal: He said that taking it hard into corners gave him the positive conviction that he was going to come out facing the other way. I can't believe that the good old swing axle will show up on many Renaults in the future.

Saab 99E. I've been a Saab admirer since 1959, when a factory-team driver took me for a flat-out ride on the gravel roads around Linkoping in Sweden, and a week with the new fuel-injection 99E model did nothing to diminish my regard for the make. Beautiful it's not. The shape is chunky and boxy to the point of being positively anti-aesthetic. (But you can see the ground 11 feet ahead of the bumper.) Still, looks and heavy steering at slow speeds are all I can cite against the automobile. This is a vehicle that has been screwed together to stay. To peer into the engine compartment is a pleasure; it looks as if it had been put together by aircraft mechanics. The Saab see-through headrests are the most sensible made. The interior is luxurious and the high-speed sound level was the lowest of the 14. The Opel had better acceleration and top speed, but I was faster around Rattlesnake in the Saab—attributable, perhaps, to front-wheel drive or, more likely, absolute confidence. But, as I said earlier, the 99E was running out of its class and it would have been surprising if it had not looked good. Still, it did do well, and it should have—price does matter.

Toyota Corona. The Toyota Motor Company is the 15th-largest corporation in the world outside the United States, has been making cars since 1936, reached an output rate of 100,000 cars a month two years ago and is now the world's number-five producer. With little advertising and an exploitation budget that Detroit would be ashamed to allocate to a new horn button, Toyota sold 208,112 cars here last year, second only to honorable number-one import. If you think all this happened by chance, return to square one. It was brought about by bright people, who had the inestimable advantage of knowing that they didn't have all the answers, or even all the questions. So they boarded JAL jets in large numbers, tried out cars all over the world, found out and went back to tell the folks manning the drawing boards. The Toyota Corona isn't the most exciting thing on wheels since the Curved-Dash Oldsmobile, but it is a good automobile homing in tightly on its target.

The Corona 4-door sedan has disk/ drum brakes, a comfortable ride—which would be improved by bigger tires—and a well-thought-out, well-put-together interior of practically solid plastic that is so good you may not notice it. As with other industrial materials, the Japanese have certainly found out about synthetics in the past couple of decades. My notes on the Toyota begin with a remark about value for money: It carries as standard a lot of other makers' options—power brakes, adjustable seat backs, tinted glass and whitewalls, for openers. And 30 miles to the gallon from a solid new engine taking 108 hp out of an overhead-cam, 5-main-bearing configuration. Since the engine is I860 c.c, or 116 cubic inches, that's almost one hp to the inch. Another edge the Corona has is the 4-door setup. Nobody really likes to climb into a car, particularly a small one, over a bent front-seat back, and Toyota proved the point by selling over 80,000 4-doors here in 1970.

Vega GT. The Vega was, overall, the best in the corral at Midland, reflecting a clean success, one might almost say a triumph, in meeting conflicting objectives. For example, the Vega is certainly a subcompact—our test car, running the big engine and optioned to the roof, pumped out almost 31 miles to the gallon—but it looked and felt bigger than any of the others, a circumstance that endeared it to some of the testers on sight. Fear not, the long-conditioned American love for the big barge is not going to disappear overnight. The Vega outaccelerated everything else, outbraked all the others with room to spare and even showed an almost-honest odometer, at 9.95 miles for 10 true. Negatively, it had the highest interior low-speed noise level, and the brakes, while they would put out .95 g. needed a lot of leg. When I first took it fast into a corner. I had a second or so of deep thought, and even Hall, used to standing on brake pedals, complained about the effort required. Handling seemed to be just about impeccable, the car completely controllable at all speeds and in all attitudes. The Vega was designed for an objective rarely achieved: absolute neutral steer with no loss of straight-line stability, even in wind. Theoretically, a perfectly neutral car, pushed past the limit, will go off the road all in one piece; in fact, when given enough throttle, the Vega will finally go to oversteer, but it will stick for a long time first.

The 2300-c.c. engine is unique. It has a die-cast aluminum block—the dies weigh 75,000 pounds—a high silicon content in the alloy making the usual inset iron cylinder liners unnecessary. The valves move on a single overhead camshaft driven by a cog belt that runs the fan and water pump as well. The engine is a strange-looking device, but accessible it certainly is—indeed, it looks lost in the space one usually expects to find crammed to the top with wires and plumbing. Like the Pinto, the Vega comes with owner's fix-it book, not as detailed and explicit, but adequate. Visibility is good, four people can be packaged in reasonable contentment and the seats, while much too soft for my taste, will please short-trip riders.

The enthusiasm I'm reflecting for die Vega GT must be tempered by the observation that this was a top-line model, the second-heaviest-optioned car we had. It was the only one of the 14 running on wide rims and fat tires, for example, and, while its handling was obviously inherently superior, the amount of rubber it was putting on the road had to be an advantage. It was a splendid motorcar, but it carried a $2944.75 sticker. The basic S2091 Vega 2-door sedan, with the 90-horsepower engine instead of the 110, cannot be expected to run with it or feel like it. This may be why Chevrolet has allocated only 20 percent of production to the sedan, while the coupe is down for 50 percent.

Volkswagen Super Beetle. In line with carefully maintained tradition, the new Volks looks much like the old one on the road, except for a noticeably bulgier trunk lid. Inside, it's different: 89 ways different, the factory says. The new engine delivers 60 horsepower and much of the suspension and chassis system, front and rear, is new—diagonal trailing arms in back and MacPherson struts in front, working on a track three inches wider. This change has finally fixed the handling problem that gave the old Bugs a deserved reputation as lethal oversteerers. (I once saw one spin across a four-lane freeway coming out of an underpass into a cross wind.) Front-strut suspension takes less room, so a great deal more can be piled into the trunk. The heating system now delivers through seven outlets and there's a 2-speed blower on the flow through. The floor is fully carpeted and, all in all, there's not much left of the old bare-bones look. The interior detail is superb, with first-cabin German-quality workmanship showing everywhere. I suspect the Super Bug will be in heavy demand. The Midland test car certainly was: We took it off a dealer's floor, it was the only one he had, and, as it went out the door, an irate customer was still waving a wet check over his head and demanding that we bring it back.

The VW stopped inside everything but the Vega, Capri and Opel, and it was surprisingly quiet once you'd slammed the doors. And with the windows closed, they take slamming, because the Bug is still all but airtight. What surprised us was the handling: The Super Bug really sticks in there, it was a revelation on the skid pad and you can belt it into a corner now without any of the old "oh-oh, here it goes" sensation. The VW, they say, is about to be shot down. I'll wait until I see the flames.

The subcompact is, perhaps, the wavelet of the future. AJJ eminence of Detroit has suggested that when our children come of age, anything bigger than today's intermediates will be tagged deluxe. Possibly. If that's the case, the assaying we have attempted here may have some significance.

None of the 14 Midland cars perfectly mated with the mold into which we were trying to fit it: a motorcar exactly suited to urban use, quick and sure-footed on the highway, aesthetically delightful in form and sophisticated in accommodation. Some cars were well sized for the city but aesthetically unsatisfying. Others were fast over the road but flawed for urban use by individual traits such as high fuel consumption or heavy steering. The ideal doesn't exist. We must hope that it, or a reasonable facsimile, is on a drawing board somewhere.

And so, as the setting sun reddens the plains of Texas, we leave old Rattlesnake Raceway, slightly saddlesore and, maybe, a little wiser.