Ferrari Mailing List: Re: Insanity strikes again

[Rick Moseley (ramosel]

We had a neighbor in the 70s who had 3 old Olds, his 90 series had the Hydra-matic.  Even after a rebuild, you could not start on an uphill.   He had to take a running start to get it up his driveway.   It moved fairly well on flat roads.    If you lifted over 40 mph, you could hear the fluid chugging and backwashing.   If he lifted and got back on it at the right speed, it struggled to catch up.   When it did, it sounded like a toilet flushing.  For years I thought people were calling the Flushboxes.  Then I caught on to Slushbox.  

On Feb 14, 2021, at 6:11 PM, Douglas Anderson <dnt [at] dock.net> wrote:



The ULTIMATE slush box was THE smoothest slush transmission of all time – the Buick Dynaflow.  Yep – who can deny hearing the powerful 1948 OH valve straight eight Buick hooked up to a Dynaflow revving at 4000 rpm for half a block just to get going.  Over time it improved but was no match for the Olds Hydramatic and subsequently the GM TH400 as used in various US cars, Rolls Royce and (ahem) Ferrari.

 

Of course for racing there was the Powerglide 2 speed that Chaparral picked up as an ultra secret racing weapon.  However, later in the CanAm game it came back to bite them because the smallest torque converter was 10 inches which limited how far they could drop the engine for low center of gravity.  However, McLaren used a coffee can stack of standard clutch and floaters and could drop their 500 cid aluminum engine almost on the ground.

 

Today – the absence of manual Ferrari transmissions and their quintessential ‘clink-clink” shifting was made way because only the old rich males could afford a Ferrari or the young rock stars didn’t know how to shift.  Either that or multigeared automatics shift faster and more efficiently raising Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) numbers.

 

I dunno.

Doug

 

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