DANCING TO A DIFFERENT TUNE

Muscle cars are an American obsession that Matt Prior suggests more Brits ought to indulge in, as these highly tuned coupés offer real thrills for relatively modest bills

- Matt Prior

I am not normally an envious man, but a photographer friend moved to the US several years ago, and when I see pictures of him flying his plane over vast Californian landscapes or down the Pacific coast, or working on his classic car in the sunshine outside his large garage, I do think ‘yeah, I fancy a bit of that’.

The chief designer of the Jeep Wrangler once told me that, in winter in Michigan, he pops his snowmobile on the back of his pick-up truck, unloads it a short drive away from home and then can cruise for hour after hour on hundreds of miles of deserted track.

I’m not convinced about the healthcare costs, the risk of being shot or the predilection for plastic cheese with every meal, but there are definitely things about America that I could bond with.

Muscle cars with a shedload of power are another of them. Sure, we have modified cars in the UK, perhaps more diversely than ever. There’s the old cliché that ‘finance killed the scene’, but there’s still plenty going on these days. Earlier this month, there was a sold-out Reunion festival for cars of the Max Power generation, Volkswagens more than two decades old are ‘slammed’ as often as not and modifications haven’t really gone away. But it’s not quite as easy or popular here as it is in the US to buy Detroit muscle and a load of hot-up parts off the shelf, then find a garage in any given town to do the work and leave you with nigh-on 800bhp of V8 to the back wheels. That’s supercar territory for executive saloon prices.