Models
1966 Shelby GT350 | Car 50
Transcript +
Hi, I'm Tom Scarpello of Revology Cars, and this is car #50 - the 50th production car from Revology cars. It's a 1966 Shelby GT350 in Candy Apple Red with Wimbledon White stripes. So, it's a major, major milestone for us. The team has done a fantastic job to actually get to this point. No one has ever produced as many consecutive 65 to 68 Mustangs as Revology Cars, with the exception of Ford from 1965 to 1968. So, it's a pretty significant milestone. We're really thrilled about it. Let's take a look at this car, car #50!
So, one of the things about doing something 50 times is you get pretty good at it. We've continued to refine and tweak the platform just to improve things like what we call squeak and rattle. The expectation of the consumer has moved so much in the over 50 years since these cars were originally produced. It was very commonplace to have squeaks and rattles, and you go over to railroad track, and you just get things all to go boom, and that was just the way cars were, and people just kind of accepted it. We're taking this platform that was designed originally in the 60s, and we're updating it to modern spec, and that means even the way that the car behaves over bumps has to change, has to improve. So, that was a railroad track, I don't know if anyone realized that!
The other part of it is suspension compliance. So, a lot of the aftermarket suspension designs are sort of more aimed at getting you the best possible auto cross time, which if you’re auto crossing, that's great, but if you're really building a car for street use, not necessarily great because they're. If you don't have any compliance in the suspension, you're going to have a really rough ride, and you need to have a certain amount of suspension travel to soak up these bumps. So, what we've done is tuned our suspension to deliver a level of compliance very similar to what you would get in a modern OEM car, only get the body so stiff and keep it from creaking and squeaking like a 60s car used to do.
Well, one of the things we do is we test them extensively on the mean streets of College Park, Florida. I say mean streets because they're cobblestone. This is a horrible cobblestone, just Street after Street of dips and bumps, and you could just fly down the cobblestone and just knock anything loose that has a remote possibility of coming loose. We instrument the cars with a tool called chassis gear, and it's a like a remote listening device that you place all over the car, and then there's a central unit that tells you which of the sensors is picking up some kind of noise, a vibration, and then you're able to quickly pinpoint where that's coming from. And then the way that we would mitigate that particular source of the sound depends on what it is. I mean, it may be putting another weld in the body. It may be we call it NVH noise vibration and harshness material.
So, it's a scientific process. You obviously could never afford to go through that if you're doing a one-off build because the characteristics of a ‘66 Mustang Fastback are going to be different from the characteristics of the ‘68 Camaro or ‘70 Challenger or whatever you might be building. Only if you do the same thing over and over and over repeatedly, can you make the kind of development and get the kind of refinement and attention to detail that we're able to get and that's what doing 50 cars in a row gets you. It's a level, an unprecedented level, of attention to detail, refinement, craftsmanship at a reasonable cost. That is one of the major things that make us different!
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