Tip for making a long drive pleasant, two words Options

[Demick]

Two words: Ear Plugs - or maybe it's just one word, earplugs. Who knows.

Having just returned from the WCC, my journey home was only about 325 miles (small in comparison to others). The wind noise, road noise, engine noise etc can get so tiresome on a long trip. Put in a set of earplugs and you will swear that you just got into a modern car. The transformation is unbeliveable. And I guarantee that after an hour or two when you remove them you won't believe the racket that your car makes. You will think there is something wrong with the car because it is so noisy! Earplugs made my 5.5 hour trip home a breeze. Even after spending a whole day at the track. Without them it would have been a very fatiguing drive home.

Demick

[lapuwali]

No, just better sound insulation. You can't use a taller gearing w/o dropping the engine down out of the best speed range for the cooling fan. If you used a DTM or the like and geared the fan to spin, say, 2x the crank speed THEN you could cruise at 2000rpm instead of 3000rpm and still have good cooling. But with the fan mounted directly to the crank, no dice. Even if you did this, and put on a quiet exhaust, and used an airbox instead of K&N filters, it would only help so much. A great deal of the noise you hear at freeway speeds isn't the engine, but wind and tire noise. 30 year old rubber seals don't tend to keep wind noise out, and a significant lack of interior insulation doesn't help with the tire noise.

Modern cars are so well insulated against noise it's almost eerie. Sit in a new(ish) car with a window rolled down, not moving, engine off. Now roll up the window, and note how much of the noise disappears. Most of this is simply dedicated engineers working on nothing but "NVH" (noise, vibration, harshness), making endless refinements over the past 30 years to insulation materials and seal design. Nothing was that quiet in the 60s, not even a Mercedes (maybe a Rolls, but I have no idea for certain). I haven't tried taking a ride in a 1990 luxo car that was known to be quiet (say, Acura Legend, for example) recently to see if they're still quiet, or if 15 years have taken the edge off the rubber seals.

Earplugs do make a tremendous difference. The foam kind are plenty adequate, just don't try to reuse them too much, as you can get an ear infection from the wax that clings to them. Buy a $20 boxful and use them once. I was always struck, when I first started wearing earplugs while riding bikes, how much MORE I could hear with them. Light valve noise that was swallowed up by wind roar w/o plugs became audible. I could even hear the wind/tire whisper of a car next to me at 70mph, over the sound of my engine/exhaust.