Indholdsfortegnelse for January 2011 i Hot Rod

GLORY OVER ADVERSITY I'm constantly amazed by the resilience shown by some people and how they overcome tremendous odds to not only keep going, but to succeed. Did you hear the story about the quadruple amputee who swam across the English Channel? Seriously, with no arms and prosthetic legs (with fins for feet), 42-year-old Philippe Croizon swam the cold, choppy, 34-kilometer channel in 13.5 hours. Everyone knows The Lance Armstrong Story—how he recovered from testicular and brain cancer, with a pretty negative prognosis from his doctors, to then go on and win perhaps the most grueling sporting event in the world, the Tour de France. And he did it seven times in a row! Do you know who Alex Zanardi is? He was a two-time CART series (as in IndyCars)…

STREET CARS? In this issue you'll read about HOT ROD's sixth annual Drag Week™, a trial that, in our opinion, delivers the truth about who really has the quickest street cars in the world. A number of events have claimed that result over the years, but they have been victim of “rules creep,” the ever-slippery slope of tech advancements that take out the street and ramp up the race. Specifically, we can recall the earliest HOT ROD Fastest Street Car Shootouts of the '90s that quickly regressed to cars that had virtually no guise of streetability. (Ironically, we hated the invasion of tube-chassis cars back then, but it's the tube cars that are now shockingly driving 1,000-plus miles and owning Drag Week™.) Rules creep has forever been evident in the…

Drag Week™ isn't a race as much as a drivetrain death match and a fight for survival. It's a war between road and machine and a true test of man's ingenuity, perseverance, and intestinal fortitude. Finishing the ungodly, 1,000-plusmile, mandatory HOT ROD Drag Week™ route while stopping to lay down passes at four different dragstrips in five days has become a badge of pride for anyone seeking dignity in his claim that his stupidly fast ride is a real street car. This year's event, sponsored by Gear Vendors, had 112 entries and journeyed from Hebron, Ohio, to the site of the NHRA U.S. Nationals in Clermont, Indiana, and then powered its way through the rain to Milan Dragway in Michigan before heading east through the hills to Pittsburgh Raceway Park…

No one builds rubber-nose Camaros. That's what everyone told us when we were planning this car—not directly, but through blank stares, euphemisms, and the damnation of faint praise. But now that it's done, fans are coming out of the woodwork. Roll up in our electric-orange '79 Z28 and all of a sudden it seems that nearly everyone used to own a late second-gen or at least thought they were cool but never wanted to admit it. In 1979, Chevy sold more Camaros than ever before or since. It was also the peak year for Z28 sales (84,000 and change were sold, later eclipsed in 1984 and 1986). The bad news was that Burt Reynolds and Hal Needham trumped the Chevy marketing and made this the only time that Pontiac Trans…

"Of the two seasons of Garage Mahal we've participated in, this is the largest redesign we've ever done. We had twice the help but this was really like designing four different garages, each with a different theme.—Jaime Dietenhofer HOT ROD magazine is staffed by guys who really do work on cars. Much of the time, we wrench in our own garages and sometimes on the street when we have no place else to go. Thanks to the relocation of our office to a nice, big building with a decent-size warehouse, we now have a spot to thrash on projects that is arguably too nice for us to abuse. This is because the folks from the television show Garage Mahal, including host Bill Goldberg, transformed our plain warehouse into a shop…

WHAT MOTIVATES YOU? It's been a provocative past few weeks here at HOT ROD. The collective editorial staff has flung itself into extraordinary bouts of bench racing about ludicrous story possibilities for future issues as we constantly seek to shape the magazine. There's been an influx of personality with the staff additions that we like to call Mike Finnegan (staff editor) and Jason Lewis (videographer). They've pounded on the cage, and Kinnan and I are trying to step off the hamster wheel. The conversation that most stuck with me was initiated by Jason, who hadn't been around hard-core drag racers prior to Drag Week". He asked, “What motivates these guys?” The inquiry was borderline touchy-feely, especially when we started answering the same question for ourselves. Why do we do the…

Welcome to the Hot Rods section of the mag, where all the car features live. Know of a great ride that should be here? Got killer photos of cars in action along with details about them? Tip us off: email HOTROD@hotrod.com or mail to HOT ROD Hot Rods, 831 S. Douglas St., El Segundo, CA 90245. Modifieds are some of the most powerful cars in local circle track racing. Getting one to run fast on the track is a tough job, but getting one to the street and keeping the lawman off of you might be just as tough. With a 7.25-inch, twin-disc clutch and retired Nextel Cup transmission, it's hard to keep this beast's 29x18.5-15 Hoosier Pro Street tires from spinning. The car, along with being street legal, is…

Drag racing is fun for sure, but for many people, the first experience they have running their car around a road-race course is life changing. A 10-second drag car is a blast, but imagine driving that level of car around a real road course for 10 minutes. The fun meter is off the chart, but the barrier to entry for a lot people is perception. Drag racing is inexpensive, easy on a car, and you can do it with any type of vehicle, whereas road racing is usually seen as expensive, dangerous, damaging lo the car, and incredibly intimidating. But just as in drag racing, or any type of racing, the level of complexity and expense depends on how fast you want to go and how competitive you want to…

The performance and racing fuel-hose market is on the verge of its biggest transformation in the last 50 years. Ever since the '60s, when aircraft-derived, rubber-core, stainless steel-braided hose and the familiar red-and-blue aluminum fittings began to replace parts store black rubber hose and worm-drive clamps as the performance and racing fuel hose of choice, the hot rod fuel-hose market has been relatively stable. True, the hose and fittings have evolved incrementally, with different manufacturers featuring their own pet design innovations, but until recently, the basic appearance and system functionality have stayed pretty much the same. And now that's become a problem: Similar to the flat-tappet cam failure problem HOT ROD reported on a few years back, a perfect storm of diverse factors have combined that under certain conditions may…

THE LOSS OF TWO MORE RODDING HEROS September 2010 saw the loss of more living history with the passing of Joaquin Arnett and Lenny Woods. Joaquin, who passed away at 83, has a name synonymous with the hugely successful Bean Bandits club and racing team out of San Diego, California. Those guys first gained fame in the early '50s, and Joaquin claimed the championship of the very first drag race sanctioned by the NHRA [in April 1953 at the dragstrip in Pomona, California, right). He was also a land speed racer at the Southern California dry lakes in the '40s. A more shocking loss was that of Lenny Woods, the son of Tim Woods of Stone-Woods-Cook Gasser fame. This black family is responsible for breaking racial barriers in the '60s,…

Many people will build a nice hot rod and keep it, while others will build something just for the joy of the work and sell it soon after finishing to finance the next project. Brent Jackson is an example of the latter. He built a twin-turbo '57 Chevy and a '69 Camaro, and after selling them both, he had the funds (most of them anyway) to buy his dream car, a midyear Corvette. He ended up finding a wrecked '65 with, in his words, “almost no front end and a bent frame” for a reasonable price. Because it needed a lot of work, and because he had fiberglass experience from working on boats, Brent made the decision to alter the car the way he wanted to, with some custom tricks…

Three years ago, in the Dec. '07 issue of HOT ROD, we inducted the first 10 aftermarket parts into the HOT ROD Speed Parts Hall of Fame. Working very closely with the Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA), we had SEMA members vote for the most significant, game-changing aftermarket performance parts of all time, and we've done the same every year since, inducting five new parts per year. Congratulations to the past and current companies and their revolutionary products. PAST INDUCTEES 2007 Iskenderian cams American Racing Torq-Thrust wheels Bell helmets M&H Racemaster tires Hurst four-speed shifters Hilborn fuel injection Cragar SS wheels Holley 3310 carburetor Flowmaster mufflers Auto Meter Monster Tachs 2008 Detroit Locker differential K&N air filter Garrett turbocharger M SD 6A ignition Nitrous Oxide Systems nitrous kit 2009 Sun…

There are a few things to pay attention to when you're at an open track event, but perhaps the most important is the flag man. Watch him at the start/finish line and in the corners and learn to understand the meaning of the flags he waves. That should be covered in the drivers' meeting, so pay attention. But as a clue, here are the typical meanings of the race flags.…

NEW 302 FORD CRATE ENGINES Speedway Motors 800/979-0122 SpeedwayMotors.com Forget about wasted trips to the junkyard, swap meet, and garages of questionable local purveyors of rebuilt engines for your next project and take a look at Speedway Motors' 302 Ford hot rod engine instead. This crate engine makes 300-plus horse-power and 320 lb-ft of torque reliably on pump gas. It has a balanced rotating assembly and a 9.6:1 compression ratio. The seasoned block is bored 0.040 inch over and filled with a cast crank and pistons, a hydraulic roller camshaft, and a double-roller timing chain. Modified cast-iron Ford heads feature 1.94-inch intake and 1.60-inch exhaust swirl-polished valves. Accessories include finned-aluminum valve covers, a polished aluminum oil pan, a polished dual-plane intake manifold, a performance HEI-style distributor, and a 157-tooth flexplate.…

D'OLIVO, PART TWO Dave Wallace's fantastic story on famed Petersen photographer Bob D'Olivo on page 54 of this issue will be followed next month by part two, showing more of Bob's amazing work with a camera. You've probably already seen this iconic image of Andy Granatelli giving Mario Andretti a big smooch in the winner's circle at Indy 1969. Did you ever think about who got the shot? One more time After last year's victory at Indy, Andy Granatelli had one thing on his mind. This year's “500.” So he put Mario Andretti back behind the wheel. And teamed him up with another proven champ: STP®. STP Oil Treatment to cut friction and wear to a fraction. STP Gasoline Treatment to keep Mario's engine in tune and improve gas mileage.…