1964-1974 [Subscribe to Daily Digest] |
First, with the stock wheel/tire size, a Sonett III will hit its marked 5500-rpm redline at almost exactly 100mph (the manual says 99.9mph, but hey, let's make the math easy here.)
That means that in top gear, you turn 55 rpm for each mph of road speed... so 65mph will be 3,575 rpm. Yes, that gets pretty loud (especially if you have an MSS exhaust, which is tuned for that range.)
Not sure how much you can do about it, though. The Sonett already has a taller final-drive ratio than the 96 (and a lot of people feel its ring and pinion is more failure-prone as a result, although the issue mostly seems to come up in hard competition driving) so swapping in a 96 box would make the problem worse, not better. And all the R&P combinations I've seen in the old Sport and Rally catalogs were shorter ratios, not taller, since they were designed for rallying where you need a lot of grunt.
You could solve the problem by putting on larger-diameter tires, but they'd have to be a LOT larger! For example, you're now turning 3850 rpm to make 70mph... if you just wanted to get down to 3000 rpm, you'd need to boost your tire circumference by 128%, which would mean boosting the tire DIAMETER by more than 40%! (I doubt that tires with a 35.5" diameter would even fit in the wheel wells, and even if they did your car would look sorta weird...)
So unless you think of something really radical, you're going to wind up like the rest of us who drive Sonetts on the highway -- either you learn to love the noise (and yell "WHAT?" a lot when talking to a passenger) or wear ear defenders while driving! I wish those slick noise-cancelling headsets that airplane pilots wear weren't so dratted expensive... would be a great solution...
posted by 204.76.113...
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