If your YouTube feed is anything like mine it’s littered with drag race suggestions. Mostly new car head-to-heads from the likes of CarWow, plus some wild modified face-offs courtesy of Hoonigan.
Even bone-stock regular production cars are so fast these days it’s rare to watch any race that takes longer than 13 seconds. So you might assume that watching one where the cars needs twice as long to get down the strip would be deadly dull. But as this race from Autocar India proves, that’s definitely not the case.
The two cars in question are giants from India’s automotive past. One is the Hindustan Ambassador, which incredibly, remained in production from 1958 to 2014, and at one time accounted for two out of every three cars sold in India. The other is the Fiat 1100D, which was built under license in India between 1964 and 2000, again proving just how much the country has changed in the last few years.
The 1980s-spec Ambassador’s mighty 1.8-liter engine thumps out 60 hp, theoretically giving it a big advantage over the Fiat which belongs to presenter Cyrus Dhabhar and, despite a bunch of mods including a hot cam and sports exhaust, squeaks out just 50hp. But factor in the Fiat’s tiny 1951 lbs (885 kg) curb weight and the odds tip back the other way.
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Despite a slow start (and a comically long-throw gearchange) the “Ambi” soon overhauls the Fiat in race one, crossing the line in 24.27 seconds to the 1100’s 25.29 best effort.
But with his pride hurt enough to persuade him to get a bit more brutal with his pride and joy, Dhabhar works the Fiat hard and turns race two into a proper nail-biter. And the advantage of watching cars this slow is the tension lasts so much longer. We’ll not spoil the result, but let’s just say it’s a lot more fun than the numbers would have you believe. Who else would like to see more seriously old cars hitting the strip on YouTube?