^ Cool, that sounds like you had a blast with all those classic / modded muscle cars! Unfortunately, not everyone has your skills and therefore can't drive the fun stuff.
Plus today's cars are much more factory tuned (by computers) and keeping them stock is often the only way to go, although there are some exceptions. Even the Expedition's 5.4L Triton can't be modded much for performance / reliability improvements. Except maybe for better (metal) timing tensionsers and the high volume oil pump to help with lubrication, I haven't read anything about making that engine any better...
That's mostly because we're talkin trucks. Most people for trucks putt cosmetic dress up stuff on them bike wheels and tires or lift kit so they can put bigger wheels and tires, big bumpers, cool exhaust and tips, grills, sun visors, tool boxes in the bed and double roll bars in the bed and stuff like that. They don't go a lot for performance mods because they have enough power anyways. People use the electronic tuners and chips like they have since the late 90s.
When you get into cars especially performance-oriented once they're still tons of modifications. You can buy high performance heads for the 4.6 Mustangs and the 5.0.
There have always been high performance intakes, throttle bodies, plenums, high-flow injectors, ECM reprogram, cams
Then you get into supercharging it like like they did with some of the higher performance Ford's.. Factory superchargers are always a blower type supercharger, but then you have the add-ons that are centrifical or Paxton Style belt driven superchargers which are much easier to install and Plumb into a car than a turbo has not Factory.
Every time a new car comes out within a year or two the aftermarket companies are finding ways to shave several tenths at minimum off of the 1/4 mile ET.
I'm not really into Mopars other than the respect I have for what Dodge has produced recently horsepower installing wise but I'm sure there's an entire aftermarket out there of Hemi bolt ons and modifications to take your standard Hemi and Beef It Up two Hellcat demon levels.
I agree that most people don't have the ability or don't want to take the time to buy something lesser and modify it. I have always migrated towards the class of people that do. I got involved talking to them and learn from them then I started doing it. I have the utmost respect for those people and even more who can take a brand new car pull an engine out and put a bigger crate engine in and all that crazy stuff. Sometimes I see it as a waste of money and not super cost-effective because that is what some of them do. If you're going to spend more to make a challenger as fast as a demon you should just buy the demon to start with and then mod it a little bit.
Some people do it the hard way or the expensive way.
I just always love it though when somebody who thinks they have the baddest car around because they bought a brand new Corvette or a brand new demon thinks they can't be beat and they get their ass handed to them by someone with a much cheaper car or an old classic.
There is a battle going on today and people love to Hype it up with Millennials vs Boomers and Boomers versus Millennials and stuff like that. There is also a raging Battle of people who love to claim one generation of cars is better than the other. As I always say, it's all relative. You won't find that many highly modified new cars especially not many highly modified demons are hellcats. But for every demon you show me I can show you 10 other 64 -74 Mopars that can not only dip down into 8 second quarter mile oh, but can also do wheel stands if they were to choose to set it up that way.
Now I will admit that after all of these years most of those cars have well over a 100K invested into them. But those are growing pains and lots of engines and different things and levels to get to where they are. Just like with the Grand Nationals. When I first started nobody really knew how to mod them. There were a couple of companies like three out there selling parts for them. And everyone wanted to sell you Parts but different combinations worked better than others. There was one place you could drive your car there and leave it for four days and they would guarantee you certain speeds for a certain price. Then years later it's common knowledge what works and it's so much easier and cheaper to build a fast one. We had to figure it out the hard way often mismatching parts and not getting very good results for our money.
You can only do so much with tuners and electronic programming on new cars and mini the manufacturers are smart enough to allow some parameters for people to do that. But even when you start changing up a lot of the factory software and computer controlled stuff you can only go so far. After that you can still go further you just need to start replacing hard Parts with bolt on parts.
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