Power Hungry
Some car fanatics are shifting away from flash and toward more horses under the hood.
David Shipulski’s Saab 9-5 appears to be just another sedate sedan, the kind you see parked in a suburban driveway or hauling groceries. It’s a genteel black, its only ornamentation a set of slightly oversize wheels. It also happens to be a tire-smoking monster with a gleaming engine that produces nearly 500 horsepower (a typical 9-5 has 260 horses). Meet the sleeper, the car your mild-mannered neighbor just might be driving. If every vehicle makes a statement about its owner, a sleeper says “See you later” instead of “Look at me.” In this latest twist on car style, stealth trumps flash, and the emphasis is on understated power.
The ideal sleeper silhouette is low, sleek, and subtle, heralding a shift back to classic form that is also emerging in new-car design. It’s difficult to determine who has had more influence on the new direction: car designers motivated by the muscular simplicity of past motifs or car enthusiasts opting for performance over gaudy appearance. This return of quiet cool may be partly a pushback against the extreme car style popularized in The Fast and the Furious film trilogy, which featured compact Asian and European cars tricked out with showy paint jobs, huge rear wings, and mufflers the size of cannon barrels. Cars inspired by the films still prowl the streets and compete for trophies and bragging rights at car shows. But Shipulski, of Pelham, New Hampshire, chose a different path.
“I can’t stand some of the things that you pass on the highway. It kills me to look at it. You see the fenders and the skirts and the wings and all that stuff, and it really turns me off,” says the 38-year-old civil engineer. His focus was on something fast, comfortable, and, most important, “a car I wouldn’t be embarrassed to take my wife to dinner in.”
More than $15,000 worth of engine tinkering and turbocharger upgrades – and hours of arm-numbing engine polishing – transformed Shipulski’s car into a beast. Like a burly nightclub bouncer in a Prada suit, the car has a refined on-road demeanor that can become a growl in a blink.
Recent course corrections in car design may also be playing a role in this aesthetic realignment, says C. Edson Armi, a professor of the history of art and architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who has written books on American car design. Just six or seven years ago, Armi says in an e-mail, “ ‘Aspirational’ luxury brands such as BMW and Mercedes were designed for the ‘stealth wealth’ crowd,” with softer, understated curves dominating style on the exterior. But then they began producing additional models, many of which were less subtle and more angular, and “largely abandoned the refined buyer.” Today, Armi says, there’s a definite reversal, with many manufacturers, including GM and Ford, rekindling “classic, flowing vocabulary and a more refined interior.” He’s critical of Chrysler, citing “weak proportions, unsuccessful articulations, and just plain unsophisticated execution.”
Jean Bader would disagree. She owns a 2003 Dodge Neon SRT-4, a sport compact, which now has more than 500 horsepower under the hood. Bader, 46, a human resources professional from Worcester, is also an administrator on srtforums.com, a major online gathering of high-powered Dodge fans. But, like Armi, she does see a shift away from exterior flash. “On the car forums that I’m on, people tend to get ridiculed if they go too far to the extreme,” she says. “Actually, they’re brutally ridiculed for it. That shows me that the more stealthy look is starting to come back a little.”
It’s difficult for Bader to be inconspicuous during her weekend trips to drag strips, where she’s known as SRTGRL – for her vanity plate – and as a respected racer with a blistering sub-12-second quarter-mile time. According to her boyfriend and tuner, Nivo Ayala, her best run of 11.9 seconds was when her engine had “only” 500 horsepower. An engine rebuild over the winter should push the output to more than 700 horsepower, which they hope will propel her into single-digit times.
Three weeks after she bought the Neon, Bader took it to a quarter-mile track and got “bitten by the bug,” she says. “I said, ‘Wow, I need more speed.’ ” The modifications began, and she hasn’t looked back – except at the cars in her rearview mirror.
Michael Saunders, assistant systems editor for the Globe and a former staff writer, owns a 1997 Saab with more than 350 horsepower and a 2002 Honda minivan that he is forbidden to touch. 