Lol, the perennial argument of dragstrip aversion. I’m not really on one side or the other; I drive my car daily, accelerate plenty, enjoy it, but I also plan on going to the dragstrip when I rebuild my tranny, so I’ve got one foot in either side of this argument. However, I have to comment on where I differ in opinion with what you say. Like I said, I drive my car plenty aggressively daily (for example, when I went on a cruise with a K04 car buddy the other day he said he hadn’t driven his car that hard since he had owned it, yet I do some spirited driving like that in my car virtually daily). However getting on an onramp and accelerating hard, I still don’t put NEAR the stress I do when I’m actually trying to race somebody and bang through the gears quickly, because on the onramp I shift probably a third as fast as when I race, and I’m only shifting through one, maybe two, gears. I am able to gingerly make sure everything is right, cause it’s not like the Dodge Caravan I’m trying to pass is going to be able to accelerate to stop me from getting over. When I downshift on the highway to pass someone, I can easily downshift with care, go WOT, then back off at 85mph. Launching from a stop at a prepped track and banging through the gears as quickly as possible is infinitely more compromising on the drivetrain than daily driving a car relatively hard.
Some people couldn’t care less about the dragstrip, yet still enjoy accelerating plenty every single day in their “big dyno sheet cars with shiny wheels.” Just because someone may choose to not take their car to the track (for whatever the reason may be), doesn’t mean that they “built their 500whp car NOT to accelerate.” Some people might simply choose to enjoy their car in the absence of the track. And not having gone to the track doesn’t make them enjoy their car any less on the street daily. To equate someone taking their car to the track as “someone building a car to drive it” (and conversely someone who doesn’t take their car to the track as someone who ‘doesn’t drive it’) is often the exact opposite of the truth. Often the people who build their car to do well at the 1/4 mile are the people who only drive that car for 12 seconds at a time a couple of times per month, and daily drive a different car; and often the people who daily drive their big power builds (and may not go to the dragstrip) are the people who are the ones really ‘driving’ their car far more (canyons, freeway pulls, street races with friends, spirited daily driving, etc).
Cheesy tie-in, if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does the tree make a sound (if an honest 1500hp, 8sec car chooses not to go to the track, does not going to the track make the car drive any less quickly on the street?)?
You do have a valid point when people claim “this is an X sec car” or “this car is faster than that car” and then not backing up anything they say. I’m not referring to this case though, I’m referring to the people who simply might not care to take their car to the track.
