Wayne's comment is in complete agreement with what Sherwood Kahlenberg
had told me/WPC
Club (whatever/whenever it was mentioned)----the engineers/execs/Ross
Roy/Minister of Corp Propaganda
wanted to remain competitive with the industry, but they also wanted to
maintain the Pecking
Order, within the Corp of having the most expensive cars having the
'biggest' engines. That's
probably the philosophy behind the D501 being advertised with a
lower-than-Chrysler
rating, of only 340 "gross" horsepower.
Wayne Graefen wrote:
I think we all understand from a wide assortment of things that we
have heard and read over the years, that the horsepower figures that
the factories advertised for their car were at least mildly adjusted,
sometimes up to be competitive in the public opinion marketplace and
sometimes down to come in under insurance company limits or with
acknowledgment of drag racing 'stock' horsepower to weight ratios.
All these adjustments were done to gain some advantage in the market
place.
An eye-opener on this subject was received by me at the engineer's
reunion I alluded to recently. Bob Brown, one of the Chrysler factory
engineers who was directly involved with hand assembling many of the
race engines (including the engine in my 300F Special in front of him
that evening) stated it this way: "The advertised horsepower ratings
were TOTALLY irrelevant to the figures we got off the dynamometer.
They were strictly a figment of the imagination of the marketing
department."
That takes it to a whole 'nother level for me.
Wayne
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