Californian GT3 fans are up in arms about not being allowed to use their right arm to throw gears at the car’s 9000rpm, 503 hp flat-six. Porsche had to pull the manual transmission option from the state at the last minute after realizing it wouldn’t meet out-dated noise legislation.
Read: Why Porsche Can’t Sell You A Manual 911 GT3 In California Even If You’ve Ordered One
But that’s not the first time Californian fans have been denied access to the best performance options. In a bid to battle its nasty mid-century smog problem, California pioneered car emissions legislation in the 1960s that would later be adopted nationwide. That was great news for clean air, but not such great news for California-based car fans.
Scrawny Chicken
Back in the late 1970s, Pontiac’s Firebird Trans Am was pretty much the last survivor of the muscle car era. And though it was a pale shadow of its former self, you could still upgrade the stock 180 hp 400-cu in (6.6-liter) V8 to the W72 high performance version that put out 220 horses. Except in California, that is, where the only available engine was a 185 hp Oldsmobile 403.
Things got even worse by the turn of the decade. While the other states bitched about the new 301-cu inch (4.9-liter) Trans Am Turbo’s measly 210 hp, Californians could only buy the naturally aspirated version with a pathetic 145 foals, pictured above.
The Worst Corvette Ever?
Ask a Corvette fan to name the model’s lowest ebb, and chances are they’ll tell you it’s the Californian-spec 1980 version. The L48-code 350-cu inch (5.7-liter) engine fitted to the rest-of-the-U.S. cars was hardly a fireball with its 190 hp rating, although if you were prepared to put up with an automatic transmission you could upgrade that to the 230 hp L82.
But the only motor available under the hood of a 1980 Corvette in California was a 305-cube (5.0-liter) V8 that made 180 hp, and quite a bit less by the time it had worked its way through the mandatory three-speed auto to the back wheels.
Camaro SS and ZL1 Made No Friends In The Golden State
Moving the story up to modern times, just last December we learned that Chevrolet was banned from selling three high performance variants of the Camaro in California and Washington.
The fancy Brembo brakes fitted to the SS and ZL1 fell fowl of a law enacted in 2010 that forbid a vehicle’s brake pads from containing more than 0.5 per cent copper content starting in 2021.
