Another young guy's perspective
I'm here to beat the dead horse one more time. I too, turned 16 eight years ago, and I was obsessed with old muscle since that day. I agree with the previous post, that our generation loves the hondas and the mitsus, and what's a poor boy to do whenever it's a big dog world out there. We clone.
It's not so much cloning on my behalf. I took a 72 Chevelle SS 350 and dumped a big-block in it, and my 70 Lemans has an endura bumper and new sheetmetal on the way. The Chevelle's a 500 horse ground pounder, and the GTO will be a little more docile, but it'll still sound, look, and run wicked.
But, what burns me are these guys who come into my uncle's shop and precede to tell stories of how they used to hot rod these cars when they were younger, and how it'd 'do wheelies' in stock configuation, and how fast these cars were. These types are usually of the middle-to-upper- managerial or state police profession, who weren't even remotely interested in hot rodding or turning wrenches, and typically are nerds with a mid-life and/or self-esteem complex. Then they take their car that took X amount of dollars to restore with numbers matching junk, trailer it to the car shows, and get a trophy for their efforts, and just use these cars as 401K trading cards. Not me, I pound the things hard on the street, shine 'em up, and kill #'s Matching trailer queens in muscle car classes at all the local shows... and they, the grown men that they are, cry like babies about how much money they have invested, and blah blah blah.
These people who are only concerned with the worth of a car need to get out of our hobby pronto. As far as I'm concerned, they are just fairweather car guys, and will probably dump the car whenever they're not the 'in' investment. I'm not saying that it's not good to preserve the rare 'museum piece' muscle cars, and I probably wouldn't go out and pound an original RAIV Judge... ok, maybe a little...
I kind of rambled, but please guys, leave us people with empty pockets alone. We're just as big of this hobby as you guys are, well, even bigger.
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