Indholdsfortegnelse for January 2023 i Hot Rod

Editor-in-Chief @john.mcgann On my desk at work, I keep a copy of the January 1948 issue of HOT ROD magazine. It’s a reminder of how we started, a reminder of HOT ROD’s original purpose, and frankly, it’s an ego check. This magazine, this brand (as things are called in our age of digital and social media) is much bigger than me and the current editorial staff. HOT ROD is 75 years old, and this issue is a celebration. Ponder for a minute the changes that have happened in our world since 1948. The United States was on the verge of a technological boom in the wake of World War II. Young servicemen had returned home, the recipients of cutting-edge training in the military that they were able to transform into…

Jim McFarland, January 1967-April 1968 HRM: What are your top memories from your time at HOT ROD? Jim McFarland: I studied mechanical engineering at the University of Texas, and I was working there as a part-time teacher for the extension division when the opportunity came to join HOT ROD. I had done an engine swap [putting a 400-inch Buick in his ’55 Chevrolet Bel Air], and the guys I was running with at the time said, “You like HOT ROD so much, why don’t you send them a story?” We all laughed and had a big time with that. Well, I put together a little story, sent it in, and nothing happened. The guys were getting a big kick out of that. Then one Friday afternoon, [then HRM Editor] Bob Greene called.…

Jeff Smith, May 1987-March 1993 HRM: Top memories? Jeff Smith: The first one that comes to mind is the internal fight we had to get the first centerfold (Pete Chapouris’ Limefire roadster, Oct. 1987) accepted. [VP Group Publisher] John Dianna didn’t want to do it because it was going to be expensive. So, my publisher, Harry Hibler, came up with the idea to pitch the concept to the circulation department. Most of the editors I knew at Petersen didn’t get along well with the circulation department because circulation had their ideas on how our covers should look, and we felt that they wouldn’t work for our readers. But oddly, the head of the circulation department, Nigel Heaton, liked our centerfold idea and offered to pay for the production costs. Of course, we…

I got my start in this business in 1962. Somebody on my paper route subscribed to HOT ROD magazine. I’d sit on the curb under grey British skies surrounded by grey British cars reading about red and yellow cars under California blue skies. I was hooked. In 1963, the unlikely named Dante Duce shipped the Mooneyes dragster to England to run at the Brighton Speed Trials. He was found guilty but not as guilty as Mickey Thompson who, not to be outdone, shipped out the Harvey Aluminum Spl., and muscled his way onto the program. The Royal Automobile Club forbade side-by-side runs but the pair blew away the Brits at Brighton and M/T set the hay bales on fire—bless him. In a flash of chrome, tire smoke, and burning hay,…

I woke up early Saturday morning and thought, “It’s raining. It’s raining in my room.” And it was. Water was gushing out of the light fixtures. “That’s not normal,” I thought. I threw back the shades, and sure enough, rain was bouncing hard off the roof of the hotel. It didn’t look good. Fellow Brit Geoff Stilwell’s 7707 land speed team assembled in the hotel lobby and contemplated the news that the Salt Flats were closed for the day. We had arrived midday Friday after a troubled 700-mile drive up from Geoff’s race shop in Pomona, California. A wheel came off the trailer in Jean, Nevada, and despite a “quick-n-easy” fix, we had more problems in Las Vegas, resulting in a careful, painfully slow 60-mph drive up through the beautiful…

Although “barn find” is still a popular buzzword in the hot rod world, you’ll find that it is much more common to find an old car in a field or backyard. The unfortunate side of a field find or backyard discovery is that the car is typically not preserved as nicely as the ones that are stashed away under a roof. Such is the case with this forgotten fat-fender Ford that was recently pulled out of the weeds. This 1938 Ford Deluxe Coupe was found in the hills of Tennessee where it sat outside for most of its life, so it’s quite rough. You might notice that the paint is gone due to the abrasive cycle of sunshine, moisture, and of course, time. The climate plays a huge role in…

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The first recorded use of a supercharger on an automobile was by Mercedes in 1921. The first recorded use of one on a hot rod was by Bill and Tom Spalding, who fitted a Mercedes unit to a Riley OHV Ford V8 in 1938. With a homemade intake and two Stromberg carbs, the Spauldings’ Modified ran about 120 mph. The supercharger apparently cost $100 from a foreign car wrecking yard in Los Angeles. It possibly came from a Mercedes 500K (K for kompressor) that had been introduced in 1934 at the Berlin Motor Show. When Bill and Tom stepped up to racing a streamliner, they sold the hot rod to Don Blair of Blair’s Speed Shop, who christened it “The Goat” and raced it to advertise his new hot rod…

Terry Cook, April 1972-June 1974 HRM: Top memories? Terry Cook: I don’t have any top memories, except perhaps chatting with Richard Petty in the Turn 4 hospitality tower at the Daytona 500 on Saturday for an hour or more with nobody bothering us, even though he was King Richard. The epitome of cool guys. Car Craft was 10 times as much fun as HOT ROD. Car Craft was one of the best periods of my life. HRM: Is there an article or cover that didn’t do as well as expected? Cook: We had Grumpy Jenkins’ Vega Pro Stocker blasting off the line (Dec. 1972) and within a few months had a blue Chevelle street machine (Oct. 1973). The Chevelle outsold Grump’s car considerably, though he was on a December cover, a month that traditionally sells…

Steve Campbell, April 1993-March 1994 It’s been decades since my stint at the magazine, and I honestly don’t remember individual contents. In those days, we held staff meetings regularly to discuss the makeup of every issue, and each staff editor brought story ideas that reflected both his own interests and what he thought might best appeal to the general HOT ROD readership. Much of what we did was influenced by newsstand results, but I don’t recall huge sales swings from month to month. The magazine market had begun to decline in general as the Internet started to pull audience away from print products. As technology advanced, we started using rudimentary digital cameras, and magazine manufacturing gradually moved from typesetting and paste-up to electronic design and production. While those changes have…

Rob Kinnan, January 2005-November 2011 HRM: Top memories? Rob Kinnan: Driving CadZZilla, without a doubt (Sept. 1990). I was just an editorial assistant and took over for Gray when he got sick and had to call out, so it was Steve Anderson and me on the trip of both our lifetimes. I’m starting a YouTube channel, and my first video is on that subject. It was unreal. Driving a bunch of legit Shelbys around India in 2009 (June 2009). For the real story, search it on HOTROD.com—if you can find it anymore. Racing in the Miller Cup in 2008, which ran with the Grand Am circuit. It was my Walter Mitty moment in life and was grand. Thank you, Jamie Alison. HRM: Any article or cover that didn’t do as well as expected? Kinnan: Oh…

HRM: What does HOT ROD represent, in your opinion? Johnny Hunkins: HOT ROD is unlike every other car magazine—and I’ve worked for a lot of them—in that it is about inclusion rather than exclusion. When other magazines singled out one make of car, one era of car, or one build style of car, HOT ROD always embraced them all. For all the grief we get about favoring one brand or another, HOT ROD is universal. There’s no drawing of a line in the sand and saying, “If your car isn’t old enough or isn’t this brand, or that style, you’re not in our club.” This has not always been an easy road to follow as passing fads have sometimes played an outsized role in deciding the content that magazines publish.…

As a preface to this narrative, let’s travel back to 2002 when then-Editor David Freiburger took on the task of eulogizing his mentor, Gray Baskerville, vis-a-vis a feature on his car. In many ways in our world, a person and his car are often one in the same. Our cars are a physical manifestation of our personalities, personas, aspirations, skills, and abilities. What we do with them is also representative. Gray’s car was his daily driver. It went on the very first HOT ROD Power Tour. It made dozens of trips to the Bonneville Salt Flats and California’s dry lakebeds. From about 1966 until Gray’s death in 2002, the car was not only synonymous with Gray, but it was also synonymous with HOT ROD itself. It went on the very…

The world is full of undiscovered treasures. Some people use metal detectors to dig up lost wonders, and others hunt garage sales for that pot of gold at the end of the proverbial rainbow. Gearheads, however, search the classifieds for their automotive lost treasure. This is that story, but this time around it wasn’t the high-tech interwebs, it was a printed ad in a small-time newspaper. Yep, those still exist. As Todd Evans explained, “I was browsing a little-known local newspaper that serves the High Desert areas of California and the Lake Havasu, Arizona, area on a Sunday evening when I ran across the ad. ‘CAR COLLECTION FOR SALE: 1963 Corvette cpe, 4 sp, SCCA race car w/spares.’ That was it, a small text ad with no pictures in a…

Hot rodders share a common denominator, irrespective of brand loyalty: get from point A to B as fast and as inexpensively as possible. Within the scope of the engine, that means focusing primarily on the breathing potential of the cylinder heads. You can lavish as much time and money as you want on other areas, but if the cylinder heads can’t satisfy the airflow demand of the engine, you’re leaving power on the table. There is a secret that Mopar fans already know that sets them apart: The third-generation Hemi has cylinder heads that out-flow its competition by a large margin. As a quick point of reference, the 392 Hemi heads from our Junkyard 392 BGE project engine flowed 330 cfm (intake) and 218 cfm (exhaust) at 0.600-inch lift in…

Great cars start with great ideas, and before metalwork is done to any panel or any fiberglass is laid, there must be a plan. Even before that, there’s a spark of an idea buried in some gearhead’s gray matter. This custom 1963 Corvette is no exception, and that gray matter belongs to car builder Bob Bertelsen. As Bob told us, “After finishing Green Mamba, my 1968 Corvette, I started thinking about what to build next. Green Mamba was working great and winning races, so the next car had to be just as fast, or faster. That’s when I started thinking about C2 Corvettes and how much I’ve always liked them.“…

Being the editor of HOT ROD has changed a lot in the 75 years since Robert E. Petersen and Robert Lindsay published the first issue out of the offices of the Tailwaggers Dog Club. Then again, in many ways it hasn’t changed at all. The editor’s core responsibilities, then and now, boil down to planning future stories (though now we substitute “content” for “stories”); working with the staff to execute current stories/content; and taking the heat when the readers, management, or accounting (or all of the above) don’t like something. There’s staff to manage and advertisers to appease. Events to plan. Stories to write. Cars to build. Cars to drive. And while doing all that, the editor is supposed to have a finger on the pulse of automotive performance, to…

Drew Hardin, April 1994-August 1996 HRM: Top memories? Drew Hardin: Launching the Power Tour. I spent long hours planning tour logistics and drove the lead car on that first tour, a prototype 4.6L Mustang convertible we borrowed from Ford. This was 1995, pre-Internet, so our only means of promoting the Tour was via the magazine, and the first articles about it appeared just a few months before we left Los Angeles for Ohio. We had no idea how this was going to be received by the readers, and just seven cars (other than magazine- and sponsor-related cars) made the 2,858-mile, nine-day Long Haul. But I can’t tell you how exciting it was to see people holding a homemade Power Tour banner on an overpass near San Bernardino and joining us on the first…

Evan Perkins, October 2016-December 2017 HRM: Top memories? Evan Perkins: My first trip to Bonneville, crossing the great basin from the Sierras and spotting wild Mustangs at sunset. Power Tour 2016, where we found a treasure-trove of forgotten speed parts in Strong City, Kansas, road-tripped through an unreal thunderstorm alongside muscle cars, and ate way too much etouffee in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Attending the HOT ROD/In-n-Out 70th anniversary show in Pomona, a few blocks from my first house. HRM: Any article or cover that didn’t do as well as expected? Perkins: The Danny Thompson land speed record cover—the view from inside the cockpit of Challenger II at Bonneville—shot by Holly Martin (Jan. 2017) was my most disappointing cover. It was a truly amazing image and a beautiful story, and I’m blessed to have played…

By this time everyone has heard of social media and most people are on at least one social networking site. Maybe you don’t have an Instagram account, or you fall into the “never TikTok” category, but it’s probably safe to say you have a Facebook account. Nevertheless, social media has found its way into our daily lives and is more than likely here to stay. Where did it start? Myspace, right? That social network did play an important role in creating awareness for customizable profiles with shareable video features, but technically Friendster was one of the first proper social networks. Launching in 2002, it predated Myspace by two years. By now, brands with more current awareness have probably crossed your mind, so let’s continue with the journey back in time…

My dad, Jim, and I love a good story. Take Brian Burnett’s Deucari, for example. The son of famed cutaway illustrator Rex Burnett had Dick “Magoo” Megugorac build a Deuce roadster with a Ferrari mill (Brian was a Ferrari dealer). The car won the ’79 Grand National Roadster Show. That’s an accomplishment that usually guarantees a car a pampered life, but Brian chipped the paint off that car driving it around the country. It’s one of our all-time favorites. The same thing is true with Gray’s car. He loved the fur right off the thing. Twice! It’s like the hot rod version of the Rock of Gibraltar, so, when my dad started building his own roadster, he used Gray’s as his muse. My dad and I had a good relationship…

Car builders—the real ones who do it repeatedly for a living—have a daunting challenge before them every time they start a new build. How do they one-up themselves after the last build? Bob Bertelsen is such a builder, and he knew topping his previous builds would take a lot of work and a fair amount of thinking outside the box. His two most notable pro-touring builds were a 1969 C10 truck called Orange Rush and a 1968 ’Vette named Green Mamba, both shot in retina-scorching colors, so it’s safe to assume Bob isn’t afraid of vibrant hues. For this build, Bob wanted to scratch his C2 Corvette itch. He had always loved the lines and had ideas about how to improve on them swirling in his cranium, but to bring…

This custom 1969 Camaro is so good, Chevy should’ve built it! If America had an automotive sweetheart, the 1969 Chevrolet Camaro would likely be a top contender. Few enthusiasts can gaze upon its illustrious lines and find fault in the stamped-steel skin. That takes skill. While few possess the eye to take such a car to the next level, there are builders unafraid to challenge the status quo. The reward has been countless revisions, revelations, and remasters that have augmented the blissful and ever-lasting romance with this iconic pony car. Jeff Lilly’s version does it again, but in a wildly different way. There are no linebacker-esque fender flares, no carbon-fiber accoutrements, or really any of the all-too-common queues found on many a custom car. Instead, Jeff took a step back…

General Motors has been thinking about the C8 Corvette Z06 for a long time now. In fact, the story of the new LT6 engine began back in 2014, with the first prototype engine builds happening in 2015 and the first production-intent engines completed in 2018. When you start with a blank sheet of paper, it takes tens of thousands of man-hours to go from nothing to the most technologically advanced engine ever under the hood of a Corvette, or any Chevrolet for that matter. The new LT6 also turned out to be the most powerful naturally aspirated V8 in a production car, ever. Fun fact: The 5.5-liter LT6 is 1 kg heavier than the LT2 but manages to make 175 more hp. For that matter, it’s 14 kg lighter than…

Email us at hotrod@motortrend.com It’s remarkable to think of the history that has passed through the pages of HOT ROD. We were there at the start, after the war, and on the dry lakebeds. We thrived during the factory horsepower wars of the ’60s, we toughed it out through the misery and gas crisis of the late ’70s, and we surged back in the ’90s. Since then, we have faced bigger and more existential challenges in the changing media landscape. Can HOT ROD survive another 75 years? I believe so. With the right kind of creative people overseeing our online, print, and social media outlets and a greater emphasis on video production, there is no reason why HOT ROD can’t thrive in this changing environment. Like Robert Petersen stated in…