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CONClUSION In 1991, aftermarket sales, which had been on the rise for decades, actually fell by 4 percent. It was only a temporary dip, however, and sales picked up again in 1992 and have risen dramatically each year since. Thus, particularly with the benefit of fifteen-plus additional years’ worth of hindsight, 1991 seems to have been at most an aberration, a brief lull associated with the economic recession that followed on the heels of the Gulf War.1 Closer examination of the data, however, reveals that though this postwar recession was indeed the immediate trigger for the aftermarket losses suffered that year, deeper structural problems within the industry actually meant that it was a setback that was at least a couple of years, if not decades, in coming. Consider the trends of the 1970s and 80s. Through 1975, much of the industry’s annual growth was associated with the muscle car boom of the 1960s and, to a lesser extent, the lingering afterglow of the first OEM horsepower race of the 1950s. In fact, add-on street and strip components for domestic high-output, V8-powered street machines accounted for more than 60 percent of the performance industry ’s aggregate sales right up through the Ford administration. New-model muscle cars disappeared in the early 1970s, however, and by 1975 there were very few cars left on showroom floors with more than 200 horsepower under their long and pinstriped hoods. Enthusiasm for new American cars dwindled accordingly, as did late-model speed equipment sales.2 Nevertheless, total high-performance sales continued to rise each year as equipment manufacturers developed new niches that more than made up for their losses in the street-machine market, including imports, domestic compacts, vans, street trucks, and street rods. Combined with lingering demand for street-machine products, not to mention traditional drag-racing gear, 236 t h e b u s i n e s s o f s p e e d 236 t h e b u s i n e s s o f s p e e d these new market fragments drove the industry’s ongoing growth, enabling it to continue to expand during the course of an otherwise difficult period.3 Lurking just below the surface was a fundamental structural weakness, however , one that would ultimately contribute to the industrywide slump of 1991. Again, the recession of the early 1990s was the immediate cause of that dip, but recessions had never seriously affected the industry before—certainly not in the 1970s, at any rate, when the high-performance aftermarket boomed while much of the rest of the American economy suffered intermittently from stagflation, energy crises, and manufacturing-job losses. The difference in the late 1980s and the 1990s was that the specialty equipment industry of the time was particularly soft in a critical niche that had not been weak in a time of economic recession since the very early 1930s: new-car products. Toward the end of the 1980s, that is, the street rod niche remained strong, as did the nostalgic custom market, the street truck market, and the performance aftermarket for 1950s, 60s, and early 70s street machines. However, with the exception of street trucks, each of these niches was naturally limited by the supply of the older-model cars on which it was based, and in the long run, each was therefore destined to level off eventually. This is precisely what occurred in the mid-1980s: muscle cars and other street machines rose in value—and slowly crept out of the reach of ordinary enthusiasts—as they became scarcer and thus collectible . What’s more, vans turned out to have been a passing fad, as did Detroit’s compacts, which quickly fell out of favor among enthusiasts as soon as the oilsupply fears of the 1970s began to fade from memory. On the other hand, European imports continued to grow in popularity during the 1980s, though with the exception of water-cooled Volkswagens, European tuning was for the most part a higher-dollar, lower-volume enterprise centered on Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Porsche, and other expensive makes. In short, what was missing in the late 1980s was a strong, reliable, entry-level, new-car niche for speed equipment. In fact, the entry-level, new-car niche had begun to dry up years earlier, when the production of affordable OEM performance cars effectively came to a halt. For when Chrysler, GM, and Ford abandoned the high-performance market...

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