Indholdsfortegnelse for September 2016 i Hot Rod

The first HOT ROD I ever bought was the Sept. 1992 issue. I was a kid in Massachusetts looking for cool stuff, and HOT ROD jumped out at me from a magazine rack in CVS. The words on the cover, “Fastest Street Cars in America,” piqued my curiosity. I’ve stayed hooked ever since. Twenty-one years later, David Freiburger asked me to run HOT ROD, and I’m honored to have been entrusted with this audience. For the 33 issues I edited HRM, my goal was to treat it like the flagship that David and the editors before him made it. As I wrote in my first column, “HOT ROD is an aircraft carrier. And like aircraft carriers, HOT ROD has had many captains who have served their…

Drag Weekend is essentially a 500-mile, short-course version of HOT ROD’s five-day Drag Week™ format that we’ve been running for a dozen years; we ask drag cars to travel hundreds of miles each day to a new dragstrip and run the quickest e.t.’s they can. The quickest single time doesn’t matter. Instead, drivers turn in their best timeslip at the end of each day, and those times are averaged to determine the winner at the end of the event. This is not only a test of how quick you can go but how long you can keep it together. You may think drag racing is tough on cars, but it’s usually the highway miles that take their toll on cars and drivers. In 2015, we ran our prototype HOT ROD…

When William “Kid Billy” O’Brian started collecting castaway speed parts for a budget-build 1929 Dodge, he never imagined that rat rods would become such a sensation. O’Brian just wanted to put together a cheap ride with all his swap-meet finds, but along the way he learned a ton about hot rod history, and by looking at the car, we can too. O’Brian was born in a quiet town in northern New Jersey. By the time he was a teenager, he had acquired a job at the local grease-pit repair shop doing tune-ups, oil changes, and tire changes. His first car was a 1970 Chevelle that was known for its weather-changing burnout clouds. How did he afford to keep replacing the tires? He’d keep all the old tires from the customer…

Is it better to have one project you work on steadily or multiple projects so you can fiddle with one while waiting on another? In theory, I like the idea of being able to move from one car to another as new parts arrive, but in practice it just seems to involve waiting on everything. Why? Well, to start with, nothing ever fits. The new radiator for the Charger has the wrong mounting tabs, so while emails go back and forth with the Griffin over whose fault that is, I figured it would be a good time to start the Challenger 505ci stroker assembly. Somehow the two weeks I thought had elapsed since I got all the parts back from the machine shop was more like 18 months,…

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Most factory experimental cars are never seen again once they have served their purpose, but occasionally one gets released from a manufacturer’s confines to an afterlife as a race car. Few have been put to such productive and historic use as Studebaker Avanti number EX-2143. Released to the engineering department of Studebaker, it was delivered to the HOT ROD offices on Hollywood Boulevard for advertising executive and land-speed racer Bill Burke to break records for Studebaker in November 1962. It was equipped with a destroked, 259ci, factory-supercharged engine. Burke brought the car to the Granatelli brothers in Santa Monica, California, where the beginning of its never-ending racing career commenced. On and off for nearly 50 years, this car has set more than 30 records for Bill, his son, Steve, and…

I’d been driving around with a friend I call “Pops,” exploring some of the neglected cars he knew about in the tiny towns of North Carolina. At one of our stops, we saw a bunch of cars sitting in the yard. The owner came out and showed us a 1969 Chevelle that only had 21,000 miles on the odometer. In the same area was a cab-over-engine (COE) rig that was being set up as a car hauler using mid-1990s Chevy truck suspension. Next to that was an old 1950s Pontiac hearse that was still in good condition— no casket in the back, thankfully. But sitting next to the hearse was something special: a supercharged Kaiser Manhattan. From what the owner told us, at the time, Kaiser didn’t have the development…

Jim Forbes is an engineer, and it shows. He’s competed with his 1962 Chevy II in two consecutive HOT ROD Drag Weeks and our first two Drag Weekend events, and we find a new, interesting bit of fabrication in the homebuilt time capsule each time we see it. On top of that, the Chevy II has won its class multiple times while being homebuilt using ingenuity rather than a big budget. The nose-high stance, tube axle, and rearend moved 8 inches forward all pin the Chevy II squarely as a mid-1960s-style altered-wheelbase. Jim carefully picked the rest of the components to reflect that era. The 6-71 blower that peeks through the hood was cast in 1961 and the cylinder heads are legit Chevrolet L88 aluminum castings complete with the Winters…

Day broke over Lake Michigan’s eastern shore, the late-winter March morning was all blues and grays. Clouds scurried low from the Great Lake, and just a handful of miles inland at Gingerman Raceway, two snarling Mopar track monsters posed for glamour shots on the asphalt, still damp from early morning rain showers. The shrill winds off the lake tested the Stevens-Miller Racing Trans-Am Series team and HOT ROD testdriver Kevin Wesley. The Stevens-Miller crew toweled down their TA2-class Dodge Challenger sitting tail-to-tail with our 2016 Dodge Viper ACR, the exact car that set 13 production-car track records and that Wesley will pilot up the 2016 Pikes Peak International Hill Climb in the TA2 class in June 2016. Both cars cost in the low six figures and their performance envelopes are…

Did you know that besides Chevy, Buick, GMC, and Cadillac, GM has a unicorn division? By “unicorn,” I mean a division of GM’s design studio created to make the most stunning cars in all of GM-dom. This division’s most recent cars have been the Avenir, Avista, Ciel, Miray, Elmiraj, and Sixteen, just to name a few. Almost everyone wants this division’s cars immediately when they see them. There’s just one problem: GM’s unicorn division never actually produces these wonderful cars. And that’s the puzzling part. If the unicorn division can make a business argument for creating its cool-looking progeny, then why can’t GM make a case for actually producing them? Or said a different way, if GM is serious enough to invest the time and resources to create these involved…

If you’re the type who reads a magazine from the back, then I’ll be the one breaking the news: This is the last issue with David Kennedy as the editor-in-chief. He’s taken the position of media director at the National Hot Rod Association—serendipitous, as the NHRA was founded by HOT ROD Editor Wally Parks in 1951, right from the HOT ROD offices. Wally’s story is well known, while others are less documented but no less important to the legacy of HOT ROD, an American icon founded by Robert E. Petersen and launched in Jan. 1948. Petersen and Robert Lindsay ran the mag in the early days, but referred to themselves as publishers or associate editors. That’s why Wally is remembered as the first editor, though…

You’re in a vehicle that’s stranded upside down, stuck under water, or had its roof crushed in so far you can’t even see daylight. Scary thoughts, right? Tragic accidents happen every day that leave drivers’ lives in the hands of the rescue teams that respond. Every second is crucial—especially when you’re trapped in a race car. But don’t worry, there’s a hot rod tool for these horrible situations. It’s a tool that’s capable of cutting a person free from the crumpled metal carcass of a crashed car. That’s how its name, Jaws of Life, came to be; these are devices that use powerful jaws to save lives. The need for such specialized equipment on racetracks led to the creation of a line of tools (now offered by multiple manufacturers) that…

HOW TO SEE IT Havana Motor Club opened in select theatres in April, but you can download it from iTunes for $12.99. Well worth it. Bent-Jorgen Perlmutt got the idea to do a documentary about Cuban car nuts and their attempts to organize a drag race at a party celebrating the kidnapping of Argentinian racing legend Juan Manuel Fangio. Yeah, he admits it sounds weird too, but in 1958, Fangio was kidnapped by Cuban revolutionaries the day before the Cuban Grand Prix in an attempt to embarrass the Batista dictatorship. Fangio was released unharmed after a few hours, and was quoted in the New York Times saying that his kidnappers treated him well and were “even friendly.” Some Cubans mark the anniversary of the kidnapping with a parade and party,…

We love it when a cool car falls into the HOT ROD Drag Week™/Drag Weekend narrative. Steve Wing’s 1955 Chevy Gasser came to fruition after he read about HOT ROD’s Drag Week™ and got the subsequent urge to participate. “It’s your guys’ fault,” he told us. Once the retired police officer decided he wanted to join in the stomp and romp of Drag Week and Weekend, he knew he would only do it in the Gasser class—and only with a 1955 Chevy. “I love those radiused wheel openings, and they only look good on a ’55,” he says. Steve was searching for a 1955 sedan in 2012 when he discovered a clapped-out hardtop sitting for more than 20 years in a field in Eagar, Arizona, not too far from his…

I have a 1972 Camaro with a 383 stroker that at idle or slow speeds creeps up slowly in engine temperature. It has an Edelbrock high-flow water pump with standard-size pulleys. The block is a 1996–2000 factory casting, bored 0.030 over with about 10:1 compression and 400 hp with 450 lb-ft of torque on the dyno. The radiator is a threecore aluminum unit from Ledfoot Racing and is supposed to cool up to 800 hp. It has a 160-degree thermostat with about eight holes drilled along the outside to increase flow. It has electric fans installed with a sensor that was chosen for a 180-degree thermostat that I originally installed but changed out. It also has the Evans waterless coolant and at this time has no heater core installed. Driving…