If you sometimes find yourself with a nostalgic yearning for the 50's and 60's when American cars were kings of the road (well, some roads) you'll enjoy an article in Auto Aficionado magazine by Alan Girdler. He describes this "Golden Age" in a nod to the Gilmore Car Museum and lightly dusts off some facts about the history of the automobile since 1900, focusing on speed and performance. I especially like this line, "For most of the first half of the 20th century, the scales were parallel; big was faster than small, expensive was more powerful than cheap, and the more you spent, the faster you went."

Referring to the birth of Oldsmobile's Rocket 88 he writes: "There's the muscle-car formula: the big engine in the small car, offering more performance than a Cadillac at a price not much higher than for a Chevrolet." The one sour note for me is when Girdler, a member of the Tulsa Timing Association at the time, boasts of a Rocket 88 beating a Mercedes 300SL in a drag race, "watching the Olds put the Mercedes-twin cams and desmodromic valves be darned-on the trailer. The world had turned upside down." It might have literally turned upside down for that Olds driver if he'd sparred with the 300SL on a road course, especially if he'd tried to best it in top speed. That aside, I enjoyed the Web version (the full article is in the magazine), and commend it as a good read.