"Getting a Grip" on Your Muscle Car

I'm Cam Venti and we're at Hotchkis Performance today. We're going to teach you how to get a grip. Not on your life, but on your car. We've got a beautiful 1968, 327 automatic Camaro, that was a barn find, beautiful car, great raw material for what we're going to do here. Now changing the suspension to a performance mode is not necessarily just for racing, but it's for safety, this vehicle handles like a 1968 car. There's been a lot of advancements since that time, but with Hotchkis performance, we can make a big change in this vehicle. So we're going to take this 1968 Camaro and we're going to take it for a drive, show you what it feels like, take it through a little slalom course and get that kind of down, so you understand what's happening here. And I'm going to put it up on the rack, install the Hotchkis Performance pieces and show you how much better and safer that vehicle is. There you go, 1968 all over again. This is truly a raw, unmolested vehicle, so it's amazing. It's like a time capsule here which is the good and the bad. So we're going to go for a little ride here. See what it feels like, I can already tell it's an interesting scenario, but again a really nice car and a great place to start here. I can already feel the suspension and a lot of this is tire, brakes are pretty much, just a guess at stopping. So again this car could use many benefits that we can offer here. We're going to focus on the suspension at this point, we're really going to be involved with how it handles around corners. And it also affects acceleration and braking, body roll, and such are all dynamics with regards to handling that really need to be assessed on a vehicle and then you tune the suspension for that particular vehicle, the beauty of the Hotchkis system is that they've really done all that for you. They have it all pretty much mapped out. There are some different variances in terms of product that they offer if you're really getting into a performance mode, but for the most part, the vehicle is, that system is tuned for you, but if you could feel that we just went over some railroad tracks, definitely an interesting dynamic, the bounce and the jounce of the front end is all over the place. Again, another thing that needs to be evaluated as we've talked to John and other technicians over at Hotchkis. You see as you turn into it, the steering is fairly slow, which is pretty typical again for this era, but it's hampered by the fact that the suspension is so soft, it's not only the pieces, and with regards to sway bars and springs, that will affect how this handles, but also the different kinds of polyurethane bushings and such that are used to shorten up the distance that the suspension moves as soon as you drive the car. So we'll get into some more of that detail 'cause we'll be looking at those pieces in a few moments, but this is definitely old-school and requires a lot of assessment. It's no wonder that today these cars are highly valued, but people don't realize until they drive them, how hard they are to drive compared to an old or compared to the new situation we have with regards to full-time adjustable suspensions and other things. So those are the basics of the road manners of this car. The guys back at the shop set up a slalom course, so we can actually measure the dynamic of how much body lean and how much better we can make the suspension. Okay, so here we go, we're gonna put this up on the rack. There's our mechanic, Cory, he's going to guide me up on the rack and we'll start digging in. There it goes.