PERFORMANCE

Since the introduction of our very unique high performance 356A replicas in December 2002 we have been asked many times about certain performance characteristics. Quite frankly we were more interested in the safety, handling, braking, and reliability issues and did not have the means nor time to make performance evaluations.

However, it is obvious to performance enthusiasts and racing participants that a mid-engine arrangement is far superior to front and especially rear engine technology. All of the world leaders in racing will attest to that, and that was the basis for our selecting mid-engine technology to put beneath all of our 356A replicas.

Fortunately one of our enthusiastic owners took the initiative and invested time and money to find out from what kind of stuff was his 356A Cabriolet made. The results are shown below.

"I got my OBD II software package and have been playing with it some.

Here is some other interesting information I was able to gather from the performance monitoring and calculators.

0-60 5.5 seconds 1/4 mile 14.1 seconds 1/4 mile speed 100.1 mph

1/8 mile 9.0 seconds 1/8 miles speed 80 mph Calculated hp 179.4

Now the manual makes a big deal out of holding the car until you get 3000rpm to launch. This is suppose to get rid of the automatic transmission torque converter slippage in the bottom range. I didn't do this part because it just seems unfair to not let the automatic transmission show its drawback. It does make your hp reflect a little lower, but it is still close enough for my purposes. The real hp would be slightly higher and the times would be slightly quicker, I'm guessing the 0-60 time would be right at 5 seconds if you wanted to do the drag racer start.

I was also able to read a constant readout of gas mileage, it must use the speed and the amount of fuel being used to calculate the number. It ran about 34mpg on interstate travel (flat lands). And it ran about 30mpg in the city driving.

Top speed of the car 125 and I only know that because the computer kept track of it for me, I wasn't looking at anything but the road."

Steve O'Brien January 10, 2006