Indholdsfortegnelse for October 2005 i Hot Rod

EL MIRAGE ES NO RAPIDO Well, that didn’t go so great. El Mirage is going to make sure we earn our stripes. The quest began just over a year ago when HOT ROD conspired with Keith and Tonya Turk of So-Al Racing to run Bonneville— their car, our engine. You read about it in the January ’05 issue as we thrashed to assemble the ’80 Camaro into the new HOT ROD Magazine Spl., which we used to get all three of us into the Texas 200 MPH Club during testing at the paved standing mile in Goliad, Texas. Weeks later, it took just two passes to set a Bonneville record of 243.015 mph, earning me entry into the 200 MPH Club. We were on top of the world. Then it…

CALL ME LUCKY Here’s what happens when a family that bleeds Chevy orange drives a Ford. The green Mustang was totaled by my daughter on the first day she was driving it to school by herself, which was only a week after her 16th birthday. Needless to say, the money spent at the Russell driving school’s highway survival course was a waste. She walked away with minor scrapes from crawling out the passenger side window. The motor pictures are from the ’73 Lola Formula Ford 1600 that my 19-year-old son drives in the SCCA. In the words of a famous NASCAR driver, “We had an oil pan failure at 6,200 rpm.” Thankfully this happened on the chassis dyno and not on the track with 20 other cars around. Best of…

Certain things are known about Power Tour(tm). You know you’re going to drive your brains out, smoke the tires, break something, hang out with 50,000-plus other hot rodders, and deal with at least one lost hotel reservation. You’re going to have 20 hot rodders pull over to help you when your junk vaporlocks on a two-laner in the middle of nowhere and you’re going to have 20 hot rodders pull over to help you when you just need to take a leak. If your car doesn’t overheat at least once, then you’re one of the few. Count on getting rained on, too. You’ll probably meet Vic Edelbrock, see at least a dozen cars you’ve read about in magazines, make new friends you’ll keep forever, and get a chance to have…

“This car symbolizes the past, present, and future success of the GM small-block V-8.”—Mark Reuss, GM Performance Division Executive Director Fonty Flock is officially credited with Chevrolet’s first NASCAR win, but an equally significant place in the Bow Tie racing pantheon belongs to the No. 92 ’55 Chevy sedan built by Smokey Yunick and driven during the ’55 season by Herb Thomas. The ’55 Chew launched Smokey’s career as arguable the single-most influential tuner in the engine’s legendary racing career. The car’s victory at Darlington Speedway in the ’55 Southern 500, then NASCAR’s biggest race ol the season, put the new Chews on the racing map. The win represented a changing of the guard, with the passing ol the torch from the heavy Hudson Hornets, Oldsmobiles, and Chrysler 300s to…

MOPAR DREAM ENGINE PG.10 Admit it, you had totally forgotten about the huge Win Your Dream Engine Contest we started way back in 2003. In the past year, we’ve built the Ford and the Pontiac, and this month we finally got another one done. This is the Mopar, designed and won by reader David Stottmann. 5.7L HEMI HOP-UPS PG.112 In August we brought you the first-ever dyno test of the new Mopar Performance 5.7L Hemi crate engine. This month, Dulcich threw in the big Comp Cams roller and ran a few intake manifolds across the Hemi and found out that it responds really, really well. This is going to be a popular factory crate motor. 427 FORD SMALLBLOCK PG.120 We have a new project car coming up, a Factory Five…

HOT ROD’s latest project car is a Factory Five Cobra that has been a long time coming. We’ve had the basic kit for quite some time now, but a project of this magnitude brings out our innermost procrastination tendencies, and that means it has gone much slower than we intended. With the ever-oppressing magazine deadlines getting in the wav, we tapped on the shoulder of John Balow at Musclecar Restorations to help us build the can You’ll see more about that in ensuing months, but while Balow’s guvs were doing their thing to the Factory Five kit, we concentrated on something we know a little more about, and that’s the engine. The nice thing about a Factory Five Cobra is that you can use nearly any engine you want. We’ve…

We noticed that this issue is packed with Stock Car lore, from ’shine running to the latest wind-tunnel development. That’s odd for a magazine known for drag racing and a distinct Southern California bias. So, in the name of retaining our traditional pretense, we’ll use this opportunity to share an image we found in the archives long ago and have been eagerly waiting to print. It’s iconic of both the prime era of drag racing and of SoCal car culture. It’s the last drag race at Lions. You’ve certainly heard of Lions, so-named because it was founded by a Long Beach judge, who hoped to cut down on street racing, in conjunction with nine local chapters of the Lions Club, which garnered charity contributions from the track’s profits. Early letterhead…

They have patina galore, but don’t call these three cars rat rods. Only one can legitimately be considered a street rod, and the tattoo and greased hair set take exception to the term “rat” anyway. “Rusto rod” was beaten to death in the ’80s and ’90s, so we’ll turn a deaf ear to that suggestion too. I guess you could call them beaters, and their owners probably wouldn’t have a problem with that, but a beater conjures images of a rusty hulk broken down on the side of the road with Old Faithful launching through the slack-jawed, open hood. These cars are reliable. How ’bout instead of sticking a label on them, we just call them what they are, which is a trio of really neat, perfectly driveable, home-crafted hot…

“I haven’t driven it yet, though a friendly cop offered to escort me in his cruiser on public roads if I ever wanted to.”—Pat McKinney “When I finish a restoration, I have to sell it to pay for the next one. With certain Hemi Cudas selling for well over a I million dollars, I’m thinking a documented Petty race car shouldn’t be far behind”—Pat McKinney NASCAR history fans know that 1971 was Richard Petty’s so-called million-dollar year. On August 1,1971, The King became the first NASCAR driver to win more than one million dollars in his career, the prize money for his victory at the Dixie 500 finally pushing him over the top. It was Richard Petty’s 551st start since he put down the shop broom and took the wheel…

REVISED VICTOR RAT HEADS Edelbrock 310/781-2222 www.edelbrock.com One of the first new creations to come from the joint forces of Edelbrock and Pat Musi is a revised version of the company’s 24-degree Victor big block Chevy heads. Although they retain the 2.30-and 1.90-inch intake and exhaust valves, Manley springs, and titanium retainers and locks from the standard heads, the new competition versions are fully ported utilizing a Musi-designed CNC program. Edelbrock says they’re the only out-of-the-box heads on the market with a conventional port location capable of generating 950 hp. DIAMOND-PLATE POWERSTRIPS Wiremold 800/621-0049 www.wiremold.com You feel manly just looking at this thing. Wiremold’s new Plugmold Tough powerstrip is housed in rugged diamond plate and easily mounts to a wall or workbench without the need for any hardwiring. At 48…

E-MAIL: HOTROD@PRIMEDIA.COM • MAIL: HOT ROD BENCH RACING, 6420 WILSHIRE BLVD., LOS ANGELES, CA 90048 • FAX: 323/782-2223 • MESSAGE BOARD: HOTROD.COM OK, some of you are hearing this and some of you are not. We really would like it if you send us photos through the e-mail, but listen up: they must be at least 300 dpi and at least 4 inches high by 4 inches wide. Otherwise, we can’t use them. If you’re computer illiterate and can’t figure out what all that technical mumbo jumbo means, go get the teenager living next door and have him figure it out for you, or reset the camera to “best quality” or whatever it says in the manual. Then we’ll all be happy. If you’re new to HOT ROD and didn’t…

GM’S NEW TYPHOON Remember the GMC Syclone and Typhoon? In the early ’90s, GM raised the factory hot truck concept to a new level by installing a turbocharger on the 4.3L V-6 in the compact ’91 GMC pickup and later in the ’92-’93 mini GMC Jimmy to create what were then the world’s fastest production pickups and SUVs. In the dozen years since the end of that dynamic duo’s three-year production run, numerous trucks have followed in the Sy-Ty’s footsteps, most notably Ford’s multi-generation SVT Lightning and Dodge’s current Ram SRT-10. But while the Lightning defined the modern performance truck, and Dodge leapfrogged it with the heroic but mostly useless (as a truck anyway) Ram, GM’s recent attempts to field an entry into the performance truck/SUV category with its all-wheel-drive…

Like old thoroughbreds in their stalls at a racing stable, the aging moonshine-hauling cars of Willie Clay Call sit at the ready in the garage next to his home in the Appalachian foothills of Wilkes County, North Carolina. Their rear suspensions are still ultra-stiff and ready to conceal the weight of more than 100 gallons of white lightning that the cars would haul out of the foothills to Winston-Salem, Lexington, or other points east. They wait for loads that will never come from creek-side stills that no longer exist. The customers are gone too. The moonshine culture is dead—killed not so much by the persistence of law enforcement as by the spread of legal liquor and ABC stores into previously dry Southern states and counties. The backwoods still, an American…

The late Dale Earnhardt once claimed he could “see"how the air came off the race cars around him on the superspeedways at Daytona and Talladega. Most of us lack that ability. Maybe that’s why aerodynamics is one of the least developed of all the sciences involved in making a car go fast. The problem with studying aerodynamics is that in many ways it’s largely a matter of faith. Big E aside, you cannot see downforce or drag. Aero can definitely help a car hold the track in a turn, but even for the most experienced drivers it’s difficult to tell when mechanical grip stops and aerodynamic grip starts. The only way to accurately measure the effect moving air has on a vehicle is in a wind tunnel, which has for…

Stewart-Warner has been in the game of manufacturing aftermarket gauges for a long time but fell off the map somewhat over the years as its focus shifted to designing OE gauges. Fortunately for enthusiasts, the company is launching a new foray into the aftermarket under the Stewart-Warner Performance banner with quality electric and mechanical gauges priced competitively with the more popular aftermarket alternatives. One of its niftiest new gizmos is the Gauge Ultra-Shift (GUS) light, essentially a 21/s-inch shift light with an integrated digital tachometer. Obviously, since it’s awfully tough to read a digital tach while driving, the GUS is more shift-light than tach, but the digital rpm readout features anultra-fine resolution of 10 rpm that makes it great for dynotuning. The shift light’s compact size allows easy mounting into…

THANKS, FELLAS Power Tour(tm) 2005 was another raging success, but we can’t take all the credit. The hundreds of sponsors and volunteers who help out each year are the true heros, and this year was no different. So here’s a quick shout-out to them to show our appreciation. SAUDER FURNITURE Hot rodders should be able to do something as simple as assembling shop furniture, right? For the second-straight year, Sauder put Power Tour(tm) participants to the test by having teams compete to see who could put HOT ROD-licensed garage furniture together the quickest. Winners took home some cool freebies, and Sauder donated the items to local charities. SEMA SEMA dished out big bucks to roll out the hotel-suite-on-wheels, and their man in Washington, Jason Tolleson, signed up members for the…