Indholdsfortegnelse for January 2006 i Hot Rod

Talk to people in the automotive industry and you’ll find the rat rod trend is a love-it-or-hate-it deal, but you wouldn’t know it by reading our mail. The majority of those who wrote in about the October issue love these “traditional-style” hot rods. Regardless of which side of the fence you hang over, there is no denying that, at least for now, rat rods are one of the hotter aspects of hot rodding. Sure, they’ve always been here in one form or another, but their popularity has exploded recently following the resurgence of the whole rockabilly look and lifestyle. Here are some of the many letters we got on the phenomenon. THINKING I MADE A MISTAKE I loved the October issue in all respects and really enjoyed the three Power…

1966 BOON DUGGIES When people think of the good old days of HOT ROD, they rarely recall the coverage of motorcycles, Baja, go-carts, and Pintos that was included in what was truly Everybody’s Automotive Magazine. And when you think HOT ROD today, you don’t think “dune buggie,” either. But we were there. By the ’50s, rodders had figured out the great fun of blasting around sand dunes in a lightweight jalopy with huge tires. Soon, a boat I builder named Bruce Meyers (not to be confused with hot rod collector Bruce Meyer) realized the benefits of a minimalist fiberglass body combined with the drivetrain from a Volkswagen 1200 sedan, and his Meyers Manx became the first of the fiberglass dune buggy kits. That’s Bruce wheeling his creation in an Eric…

VIPER ’CUDA TO STRIKE POWER TOUR We showed Troy Brumbalow’s blown Road Runner in the Power Tour™ coverage in the October ’05 issue (page 64-65); here’s what he’s up to next. Brumbalow bought this ’70 Cuda at an auction with a plan already in his head, and he had Murray Pfaff sketch it out. As we go to press, the car is under the knife for its transfusion of Viper venom. The engine will be a Gen II Viper GTS V-10 with a blower and methanol injection, and it’ll be backed by a six-speed and a Dana 60. A full GTS interior molded into the ’Cuda brings the Viper feel into the cockpit as well. Pfaff designed the look, and after 30 different versions they decided on orange over black…

PHIL COOPER ’66 Chevy Nova PA Big-Block AVG.: 8.701 @ 155.876 BEST:8.632 @ 157.26 LARRY LARSON ’66 Chevy Nova PA Big-Block AVG.: 8.874 @ 154.814 BEST: 8.382 @ 163.51 STEVE HOCH ’68 Chevy Corvette PA Big-Block AVG.:9.232 @ 149.618 BEST: 9.102 @ 151.12 BRIAN ROCK ’65 Pontiac GTO PA Big-BlockAVG.: 10.562 @ 127.376 BEST: 10.450 @ 128.69 JUSTIN BURCHAM ’05 Ford Mustang PA Small-Block AVG.: 10.756 @ 131.378 BEST: 10.301 @ 137.65 JERRY HENDERSON ’69 Chevy Camaro NA Big-Block AVG.: 10.886 @ 125.614 BEST: 10.776 @ 126.71 STEVE ATWELL ’68 Dodge Dart Super Stock NA Big-Block AVG.: 11.017 @ 122.594 BEST:10.678 @ 125.60 OMER PHELPS ’90 Chevy Corvette NA Small-Block AVG.: 11.410 @ 120.914 BEST: 11.312 @ 122.21 DUSTIN HAASE ’72 Plymouth ’Cuda NA Small-Block AVG.: 11.447 @ 118.322 BEST:…

You’ve probably seen the shtick by now: Two years ago, HOT ROD reined in the street-car racing scene with the first ever Pump Gas Drags™, an invitational where 50 cars met at Comp Cams in Memphis, got loaded with Rockett Brand 93-octane pump gas, drove 30 miles in traffic to Memphis Motorsports Park, and blasted three laps without touching the engine. The car with the lowest average e.t. won. It was bitchin’. But then we trampled ourselves a bit. If you read the story on this year’s inaugural HOT ROD Drag Week™, also presented by Comp Cams, then you probably figured out that Drag Week™’s 1,500 road miles and five different tracks kinda blew the doors off the 30-mile drive and three dragstrip passes at the Pump Gas Drags™. So…

It’s a time-honored tradition that went away for a few years and was resurrected last year: The HOT ROD Top 10. We get the HOT ROD staff in a room (actually, on a conference call since we’re spread out all over the country) and vote on what we think were the 10 most significant, most inspiring, and just plain coolest hot rods that graced the pages of the magazine over the past 12 issues. The only requirement is that there had to be at least one photo of the car in any issue in 2005. Plenty of arguing and insults are the norm, and we’ve seen fistfights nearly break out in years past, but when the shouting is over we come away from it with a list of the 10…

Not long ago the ability to monitor and record vehicle performance data was available only to those with big enough budgets to dole out huge dollars for a full-featured data-acquisition system, which pretty much limited it to auto manufacturers and professional racing teams. Whether you’re a drag racer, a road racer, or an enthusiast with no interest in racing at all, any performance car owner can benefit hugely from the information that’s just a fingertip away with any well-equipped data-logging system. Equipment ranges from devices as simple as an Auto Meter Playback tachometer, which records the engine’s rpm stream throughout the full course of a dragstrip or top speed run, to handheld GPS-based units, all the way up to $250,000 Pi Research data systems with telemetry that can tune a…

A HOT ROD KINDA TOWN It’s not often that city fathers in host cities to HOT ROD events join in the festivities, but imagine our surprise when Springfield, Illinois, Mayor Timothy J. Davlin and Survivor All Star Rupert Boneham decided to kick off the 26th Annual O’Reilly Auto Parts HOT ROD Super Nationals, which took place August 26-28, 2005, by fryin’ the hides off this fourth-generation Camaro convertible. Over 1,200 hot rods and street machines rolled into the Illinois Fairgrounds for a weekend full of events including The Miss Hot Rod Super Nationals Contest, the DynoMax Dyno Challenge, the Family Fun Zone, Pro Street Cruise, and the Performance Marketplace. Sponsors Toyo Tires (the “Official Tire”) and FC Customs (the “Official Performance Headquarters”) were on hand as the Springfield Convention and…

HIGH SCHOOL DAZE? ’55 Chevy 210 Chuck Bosman Hume Lake, CA After buying this 210 while in high school 17 years ago, Chuck decided he wouldn’t become one of those guys who regretted selling his first car. He says, “Since then I have done a complete frame-off restification because I wanted a classic car that drove and operated like a newer car.” Under the hood is a 350 small-block with Holley EFI and an Edel-brock intake. Inside, it has power everything, A/C, cruise control, and even a remote-operated trunk release. Despite long-legged 3.07:1 gears that deliver 22 mpg, it still roasts the meats from a stoplight. “It’s a fun driver that drives as well or better than a lot of new cars out there.” BEEP BEEP ’69 Plymouth Road Runner…

“It could be lighter, smoother, simpler, and hopefully through development, more fuel efficient.”—retired chrysler engineer Bill Carry describing the appeal of the turbine over a piston-driven engine DRIVING CHRYSLER’S TURBINE CAR Hybrid cars and trucks are all the rage these days, with various domestic and foreign automakers scrambling to develop the technology into the next big thing in vehicular propulsion. In the ’80s and ’90s, automakers toyed with electric cars as a replacement for traditional internal combustion engines. But striving to reduce our dependence on petroleum is nothing new. Back in the mid ’50s, with the era of jet-inspired automotive design at its peak, Chrysler began experimenting with turbine-powered cars in hopes that the technology would eventually replace piston-driven internal combustion engines. Although there were some early teething problems, Chrysler…

DEATH OF THE COUNTRY’S OLDEST DRAGSTRIP Drag racing lost a treasure this summer when the FAA unexpectedly and permanently shut down the Inyokern Dragstrip east of Bakersfield, California. For fans of true nostalgia racing, this was a hard hit. Inyokern Drags opened in October 1954 to give street racers a safe and legal place to speed. Bernie Partridge, one of the founders of the local Dust Devils car club, led a successful campaign to turn this once-abandoned airport runway into a popular dragstrip. Partridge would go on to become an instrumental figure in the NHRA, and the Dust Devils and their descendants continued to run the track until the very end. The Dust Devils also assisted the NHRA Safety Safari. Five NHRA annual record meets came to Inyokern in the…

Kansas City International Raceway, founded in 1967, was the site of MSD Ignition’s kickoff party for the first-ever HOT ROD Drag Week™. Racers met, registered, ate, and tested their cars on Sunday, September 11, before the first official race day on Monday the 12th from 9 to 2. Forty cars hit the staging lanes that day, but only 39 lived to tell about it. With three cars in the 8s, we knew we were in for a show. “The tow bill was a killer. I almost could have covered my bar tabs for that much.”—Bill Fowler…

The wear was starting to show as racers slowly gathered in the pits of National Trail Raceway on Thursday morning. And then it happened. The specters of Carl and Troy Scott arrived at 9:45 a.m. with the red Nova thumping under its own power, trailed by the other four guys who helped get him there. Everyone in the pits gathered for an impromptu celebration, and the race was on. “If you can build it, Burcham can break it.”—Eric, Justin Burcham’s helper “Everybody thinks my car is some kind of a resto job.”—Jay Brown RACER PROFILE: JAY BROWN Jay Brown is nuts about FE Fords. How else would you describe a guy who bought his own SuperFlow dyno just so he could dream up and test his own engi ne creations?…

WINNER! DAILY DRIVER Brian Corrigan ’83 Mercury Capri This Fox-bodied Capri was easy to overlook until Brian made one of his snap-shifting passes and high 11s showed up on the scoreboard. There were some accusations of sandbagging, and it certainly seems that his combo could be a tad quicker, but the numbers game was the deal in Detroit Locker Daily Driver, and Brian played it well. He tied with Tom Fauglid at a five-day average of 12.005 but won thanks to an extra 0.476 mph in the tiebreaker. The Capri is pretty much stock except for a cast-crank 351 short-block with an intercooled ATI Procharger cramming 9 psi through out-of-the-box Trick Flow Track Heat heads. It’s a blow-through-carbureted combo using an 850-cfm Holley HP carb to meter the fuel. The…

Springfield, Illinois, has hosted some of the wildest and craziest shows in the history of street machining, especially back in the glory days of the Car Craft Magazine Street Machine Nationals in the late ’70s and through the ’80s. In those days, the 5,000-car attendance limit was hit within days of tickets going on sale, and there are stories of workers on the magazine’s printing presses grabbing copies of Car Craft literally before the ink had dried to get at the registration forms inside. The Street Machine Nationals, and later the HOT ROD Supernationals, were the places to be back then. Long before street car drag racing was popular, and before there was such a thing as Power Tour™, it’s where the top street machine builders debuted their latest creations,…

JAY LENO’S ’66 OLDSMOBILE TORONADO FEBRUARY ’05 Yes, it belongs to Jay Leno, one of the richest and most famous guys in an industry littered with gazillionaires. And yes, he wrote a series of enormous checks to get this car done [although to be fair, the car was built entirely in his own shop by his employees). But the money spent certainly doesn’t make him unique in hot rodding, and it frankly doesn’t mean squat when you look at the finished product. Was this the nicest and most well-executed car of the year? That’s debatable, but it’s certainly up there. Leno’s Toro has top-notch fit and finish, an incredible 1,070hp twin-turbo Corvette engine and drivetrain [including the rear-mounted Vette IRS), and attention to detail that rivals any car we’ve seen,…

Here’s the challenge: make a carbureted 408ci small-block run 260 mph in an ’80 Camaro. Easy, right? We actually thought it might be. After all, we set a record in 2005 at 243.015 mph with the same engine and the same car. Since we were running a Vortech centrifugal blow-through setup, we figured we’d just step up the boost and go to town. But we learned quite a bit. The engine uses a Dart block and a Pankl crank with a 4.165x3.750 bore and stroke for 408.73 ci. The rods are 6.00-inch Olivers, and the pistons are custom JEs for 8.52:1 compression with unported Dart Pro 1 227 CNC heads. The cam is a Crane custom solid roller with 260/268 degrees of duration at 0.050, 0.651/0.651 lift, and a 114-degree…

SHEER INSANITY Byron Dragway, northeast of Chicago, is a small-town, family track with some big claims to fame. Opening on the Fourth of July in 1964, the track is still extra wide—evidence to the fact they used to run cars four at a time. Byron claims to have invented bracket racing, or at least having brought it to national attention through a $5,000-to-win race with 703 entries in 1974. In the early ’90s, the track was home to Chuck Samuel, Spiro Papas, Nick Scavo, and other early purveyors of 10.5W street-car racing. And for 11 years, Byron has been home to the World Power Wheel standing Championships featuring insanity the likes of which you’ve never seen. Guys pull off the wheelie bars and make like monster truck drivers, pulling wheels…

After reading the May ’05 Hidden Treasure of the Month about the score-of-the-century ’67 Corvette, I wondered why this couldn’t ever happen to me? Within a month I was at a job in a neighborhood 2.5 miles from my home and I saw this car in the garage. I took a chance and knocked on the door and talked to the owner’s wife. She told me the car wasn’t for sale, but to come back when her husband got home. So I did, and he said the same thing—“not for sale, no way.” Over the next four months I called him a couple more times with the same results. My birthday was coming up at the end of August, and my wife asked what I wanted. I told her I…

GOODMARK INSTALLATION CENTER OPENS Finding replacement sheetmetal for all but the most oddball musclecar is no longer a problem, but getting it installed can be a real pain in the neck. Body shops are notoriously slow, and it’s rare you’ll get a firm price quote. Goodmark Industries is changing all that with the opening of its Installation Center in Cleveland, Georgia. Why would you want to ship your car to Georgia for panel replacement? For one, it has fixed prices for removing and installing sheetmetal panels and floors, so you know exactly what it’s going to cost. The company also gaps the panels according to factory specs, duplicates the factory welds, and gives you a photo CD showing the work that was done. Best of all, Goodmark claims a turnaround…

“It’s the coolest blood, sweat, and gears event in history.”—Bill Fowler Man, they just don’t make adjectives strong enough to describe this one. HOT ROD Drag Week™, presented by Comp Cams, makes any other so-called street-car race look just plain effete. Check out the basics: We hit five dragstrips in five days, the race vehicles drove 300-plus miles a day from track to track with no support rig, and the quickest average e.t. won it all. It was a concept that couldn’t lose, but it turned into a grand dramedy that we couldn’t have scripted better if we’d tried. Drag Week™ starred a cast of crazies driving 8-second Pro Street cars hauling cargo trailers at 80 mph on the highway. We had 10-second sleepers, a Vietnam vet with a 12-second…

Arriving at Gateway International Raceway, we had several racers complain about the brutal drive on small two-lane roads the previous night. We had no pity. Real-world driving is part of the competition, and it didn’t stop most of the racers from improving their e.t. moving into the second day. We also caught the first wave of breakage, with a few racers getting replacement parts Fed-Ex’d to the track. “I may have broker, but I wouldn’t trade this experience for the world.”—Tom Hogshead “I love the drive as much as the racing. The small-town route was perfect”—Rob Keller “I saw where Drag Week™ started and where it ended, and I just had to go. Plus mu car fit perfectly into NA Small-Block.”—Eric Niefert RACER PROFILE: ERIC NIEFERT Clean enough to win…

What a letdown. The last day of Drag Week™ started dark and wet. The weather radar looked bad, and by noon, we’d cancelled the event. No one was happy as they gathered in the dragstrip’s office for the final awards. Then a miracle happened. We spotted a patch of blue sky to the north, and the wind was blowing south. The track officials thought we were stupid to order the $1,000 track drier, but a rousing vote from racers demanded that we try and run this thing at all cost. Another miracle: The wind dried the track before the jet drier even got there. But then the Christmas Tree broke, and just when we were about to go to a flagman start, the US 131 team got ’er fixed. Nothing…

Before Drag Week™, Carl Scott’s fiberglass-fendered, Lexan-windowed, tubbed-and-tubed Pro Street ’67 Nova was exactly the kind of car magazine guys have for years belligerently screamed is not a street car. But Carl made fools of us all, and we’ve seen the light. The Pump Gas Drags™ can never be the same after this. Everything about the Killer Red Tomater, driven by a soft-spoken oildrilling supervisor from Oklahoma, was the opposite of what you’d expect of a machine that could make a 1,500-mile trip on its own, let alone do it pulling a trailer and swilling 87-octane pump gas. It was loud, it rattled, it had wheelie bars and a parachute, it had no windows or any other creature comforts even in the most generous interpretation of the words—except carpet. But…

With plenty of guys these days building show cars on seemingly unlimited budgets, you have to do more than just spend money to stand out from all the rest of the dudes on airbags with 20s. You need a better plan than simply throwing the Summit catalog at a car to make an impression, which is why even Summit Racing enlisted a builder with a reputation for making an impression when the company set out to do something a little different for its most recent high-profile project car. Denny Terzich Jr. and his father Denny Sr. are no stranger to the pages of HOT ROD, and they aren’t shy about making impressions with their cars. Their early creations, starting with a ’56 Chevy we featured in 1994 followed by an…

Location: John Force Racing, Yorba Linda, CA A DATA LOGGER YOU CAN USE PG.96 If Matt King can make the AIM Sport Mychron Gold data logger work in his road race Mustang project, you can do it too. It also works on drag cars, street cars, and, hell, even a bread truck if that’s what floats your boat. 1030 HP AT THE WHEELS PG 100 In his quest for 260 on the Salt, Freiburger spent many sleepless nights at Westech’s DynoJet searching for more power in his blown small-block. He found it, and then some, and spills the beans on how the HOT ROD Magazine Spl. grunted out 1,030 hp at the rear wheels. 531HP LSI BOLT-ONS PG 104 Marlan invades Memphis! This time it’s to hang out with the…

For 50 years, the classic Chevrolet small block V-8 has held sway over the performance industry. An American icon, it is easily the most popular powerplant for hot rodders and racers alike. Reasonably durable even with production-based components, it responds easily to basic affordable modifications, yet the basic architecture has also proven itself in the crucible of professional competition. Thus it was with some trepidation that, starting in 1997, the original Gen I and II small-block Chevys began to be superseded in favor of the totally redesigned, high-tech Gen III small-block. Initially appearing in the Corvette, the new architecture spread to the Camaro/Firebird for 1998, then throughout GM’s truck and SUV line by 1999. Today the engine and its descendants power most of GM’s rear-drive vehicles, with over 8,200 new…