With $4 gas, what do you get for mileage??????

My '68 GTX (440, auto, 3.23) was my daily driver during the first "gas crisis" of 1973-74. The guy I bought it from ordered it with the 3.23 because he was stationed at Ft. Riley, KS and was driving back to LI to visit whenever he could.

I was driving it back and forth from school in Daytona Beach to LI for summer breaks. I wanted to cruise at 60mph to monitor my progress on I-95.

I was using a Holley 750 (small primaries, large secondaries). I put a stiffer spring in the vacuum secondary can to open them at around 65mph. I put a set of 15 inch G-70 Goodyears on the rear. The car was loaded with my earthly possessions, books, wheels and tires, etc. and I was getting 20-22 mpg on I-95.

As an aside, I remember that my brother ('70 Superbird) and my father would take their cars to a local gas station in freezing rain, sleet, or snow before the sun came up, wait in line with the engines shut off, to buy $2 worth of gas. Ironically, in Daytona Beach at that time, we had plenty of gas. Some of the local stations just closed at 5 or 6 p.m. instead of 10-midnight. Interstate stations were always open. My father, an airline pilot, remembers seeing oil tankers anchored low in the water around Delaware Bay. We could never understand that. It was a few years ago that I found that the "shortages" were really caused by the good ol' U.S. government. Nixon put wage and price controls on the economy. The oil companies purchased oil from OPEC at the high-cost prevailing rate, but would have to sell it at a loss in the US because of the price controls, so they warehoused it in tankers or re-sold it overseas. To further compound the problem, the government devised an intricate, impossibly complicated gas allocation scheme. Any place that had a remote possibility of mass transit (such as LI) had reduced allocation. Places like Florida, whose economy survived on tourism, were allocated much higher amounts of gas.