Neon, Synth, And Horsepower: Five Star Performance Cars From The 1980s

September 17, 2018

Ah, the 1980s. What do you remember of them? Great action movies like Predator, They Live, and Terminator? The melodious tunes brought to us by Michael Jackson, Tears For Fears, Cyndi Lauper, and GNR? The decade has never been an easy sell to fans of American cars. This was the period where horsepower and engine size shrank with constricting emissions standards. However, it is not a decade that we should write off completely. There were good cars released back then, produced both in the US and abroad. If we’re going to do justice to our cars’ histories, we need to rid them of sweeping generalizations. In this article, we’re going to give a few select 80s cars their due, and recognize them for what they were, and what they mean to this day.

Chevrolet Corvette C4

As we mentioned earlier, muscle cars of the 80s seemed to experience sweeping cutbacks in power and performance in comparison to their 70s siblings. However, while the Corvette C4 may only produce around 230 horsepower, it is still a wonderful car. The car was a new, fresh design for the Corvette, for the first time in its history. The C2 had grown from the C1, the C3 had continued on, but they were all pretty similar to look at. Then the C4 comes along and with it, a distinctly 80s look. At the time, it looked like a car of the future, and even now, it maintains a retro-futuristic look which is very aesthetically pleasing.

If you’re looking for a more powerful version of this car, may I draw your attention to the Callaway Sledgehammer? This car is a C4 on…not even steroids, it’s like it’s had its genome hacked into and meddled with. The Sledgehammer fit two huge turbos to the C4, which gave it a top speed of 254.76 mph. That makes it, to this day, one of the fastest cars in history. Not bad for something that first hit that speed almost 30 years ago, right?

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