Indholdsfortegnelse for February 2006 i Hot Rod

THE WAY IT WAS WHEN I WAS YOUNG This is the way it was when I was young. I am so tired of the folks who are into the “rat rod” craze saying that their way is the way hot rodders wanted to have their hot rods. That is so far from the truth that it is an insult to us “old-timers.” Yes, you could find primered rods running around the streets of L.A. where I grew up, but those were few. For most of us, having a primered car was only a stop in the road toward our vision of the perfect rod. And that included a decent paint job. As evidence, I submit to you photos of a couple of hot rods belonging to my future brother-in-law and…

1961 TOP-SPEED MOPAR Coincidences are cool. Just a few weeks ago, we found this photo crammed in a stack of unrelated junk down in our archives. We immediately recognized the car and the engines. A week later, we were bench racing with former staffer Dave Wallace Jr. about the origins of Funny Cars, and he said, “I’m not so sure you couldn’t put Norm Thatcher’s blown Mopars in with the first Funnies—they were door-slammers with blowers through the hoods!” True. And they were hairy and they were successful. They were also land speed-racing Bonneville cars. That’s Norm on the left (we’re not sure who that is on the right), probably around the time of the photo shoot for the story, “Dart for the Salt” in the June ’61 issue. HOT…

BUILD A BRAND-NEW ’53-’62 CORVETTE Musclecars aren’t the only American cars going for big dollars. Have you priced an early Corvette lately? Thankfully, if you want a ’53 to ’62 Vette, you don’t have to spend huge money for a shell that needs 200 hours of bodywork, since you can now build a brand-new one, thanks to the aftermarket. Shown here is Art Morrison standing next to job number one of his GT Sport chassis for the C1 Vettes. The new frame embodies many of the attributes found in Morrison’s popular GT Sport chassis for ’55’57 Chevys, such as through-frame exhaust, Corvette C5 front suspension, and a triangulated four-bar rear suspension, and it’s engineered to be a complete bolt-in with no special fabrication required. It is also designed to accommodate…

For years we’ve said that Pro Touring is becoming too much like Pro Street. Big-inch wheels framing pizza-pan brakes with sway bars thick enough to hold a dump truck flat through a corner remind us an awful lot of the days when an 8-71 through the hood, a four-link, and 16-inch-wide Sportsman Pros signaled the high probability that a car couldn’t actually make a quarter-mile pass if it tried, let alone one worthy of all the bolton hardware. Most Pro Touring cars strike us the same way, even if we do find the look infinitely more tasteful. The typical Pro Touring machine with the latest C5 Corvette-derived front suspension, 18-inch Fikses, and 14-inch rotors with more pistons than engine cylinders certainly talks the talk, but can it walk the walk?…

When I set out more than two years ago to go road racing, I knew it would be a lot of work and I hoped it would be a lot of fun. With my first full season of racing in NASA’s Camaro Mustang Challenge series behind me, I can now say it was at least double the work and three times the fun I expected. The buildup of my ’84 Mustang GT was covered in depth in our How to Build a Budget Race Car series (January-July ’05), including the inaugural event of the ’05 racing season in NASA’s Ohio-Indiana chapter at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course last April, where we persevered through a bizarre weekend that featured 4 inches of snow. Including Mid-Ohio, I competed in six of the seven…

Cars and movies go together like peanut butter and jelly, and for more than a century Hollywood has commingled cars with cinema, each time forcing us to flock to heaters like the obedient lemmings we are. And when affordably priced DVDs started showing up, a lot of us started accumulating collections of car movies that rival our collections of stolen road signs, rubber scraped from defunct dragstrips, and Hot Wheels. There are literally hundreds upon hundreds of films that could fit into a loose definition of “car movie,” so we pared this list of 40 indispensable titles down to include only films available on DVD and only films that were first released in theaters. We stuck with DVDs because the digital transfers are (generally) better than tape, and VHS tapes…

About once a generation, Buick awakens, staggers out of its crypt, and produces a kick-butt performance package that attracts living, breathing, flesh-and-blood hot rodders back into its showrooms. Unfortunately, like a groundhog that’s seen its shadow, Buick inevitably shuffles sleepily back into hibernation, ushering in a new Dark Age and leaving yet another generation of Buick performance acolytes slowly twisting in the wind. So it was with the ’70 455 GS Stage I and the mid-’80s turbo Buick V-6 Grand National: great sexy performance packages, but no long-term commitment. Fortunately, guys like Mike Tomaszewski at TA Performance and Ken Duttweiler at Duttweiler Engineering exist to provide life-support. TA has long supported classic Buick V-8s, and more recently has tooled up its own aluminum V-6 blocks and heads. That’s critical, because…

HOT ROD’S CRATE CAMARO ON TOUR In case you didn’t get your fill of our gleaming greenie in the massive editorial section in the Dec. ’05 issue, now’s your chance to scope it out in person. HOT ROD 1, also known as the Crate Camaro and the world’s first ’69 made from nearly all reproduction parts, will be on tour with the Motor Trend Auto Shows circuit along with other cover cars from Street Rodder and Super Chevy magazines, plus Popular Hot Rodding’s Project X ’57 Chevy. Here’s the schedule for shows that will include HOT ROD’s Camaro; there are other Motor Trend shows where the Camaro will not be on display. Learn more at http://www.motortrendautoshows.com. A PEEK INTO HOT ROD HISTORY In the December issue we showed you the…

ENDURING SEMA The anticipation that precedes the annual SEMA show in Las Vegas overtakes the entire automotive aftermarket industry, as well as most of the OEs, around early August, putting a stop to progress on anything that is not absolutely critical for SEMA. Parts companies scramble to finish catalogs, booth displays, and fabrication or machine work on their newest gadgets. Buyers begin polishing their bargaining skills to get the best deals possible. Independent “project car” builders enter into their final panic phase to make sure all the free parts they scammed are integrated into something that people actually want to look at, and that all the companies that provided stuff are taken care of via signage. And media salespeople are creating stacks of proposals and sales materials in an effort…

Well, that was a bit of a surprise. Our foray into the world of vans in the November issue and the mention of a potential project van (in Holeshot and Where It All Began) was thrown out there with more than a little expectation that we’d create a major fuss. But surprisingly, we’ve gotten almost no hate mail on it. Instead, van lovers are coming out of the woodwork begging us to get into vans, and others are reminiscing about something they hadn’t thought of in decades. Hmm, maybe we’re on to something here. The good news (or bad, depending on your viewpoint) is that we have bought a ’74 Chevy van and already have plans to make it extra sweet. But don’t worry, the Levis/Coca Cola Denimachine shown here…

DRIVING THE WICKED ZO6 From the moment GM revealed its monstrous 505hp Corvette Z06 at the ’05 Detroit Auto Show, rumors were flying about mid-11-second quarter-miles, near-200-mph top speeds, and trips around Germany’s Nurburgring that blew the doors off the loftiest offerings from Ferrari, Porsche, and just about every other exotic nameplate. Now that Z06s are hitting the streets, those rumors are proving to be true. All the buff books have tested it heads-up against the Dodge Viper and Ford GT, and the inevitable Ferrari comparos will come later. But so far the Z06 has put up numbers that are nothing short of staggering for any production car, let alone one that starts at 65 grand. We’ll crib the basic stats from our sister pub Motor Trend because we were…

THE $10 MILLION CAR SHOW When it was all said and done, 85 of the nastiest machines to ever come down a production line were squeezed into the Gaylord Opryland Convention Center in Nashville, Tennessee, on October 21-23. The 3rd Annual Forge Invitational Musclecar Show featured premier vehicles from around the nation, gathered for one weekend in an unjudged setting. The roaring Hemis, R-Code Fords, and big-inch GM iron from the era were highlighted, accented by vintage Funny Cars and restored Super Stockers. The assorted eye candy, estimated at somewhere around $10,000,000, was impressive. Chevy fans saw the only street-driven ’68 Camaro to actually get a Smokey Yunick 302 hemi back in the day, the real Indy 500 pace car from 1969, numerous dealership specials, and the first ZL1, among…

“It’s pretty scary to cut up one of these cars. How could you make one any prettier?” —Jim Ring Updating classic sheet-metal with modern technology is nothing new. It’s the essence of what hot rodding has been about since the pre-World War II dry-lakes era. But every generation of hot rodders redefines the parameters of what’s old, what’s new, what’s hot, and what’s not—sometimes more than once. Right now the hot thing is slamming musclecars with 19s and air bags and drop-ping in a fuel-injected late-model engine with an overdrive transmission. It’s a simple formula that appeals to the baby boomers at the top of the hot rod demographic bell curve, and we’ve seen some really trick examples of the trend spread across our pages in the past few years.…

What happens in Memphis apparently doesn’t stay in Memphis. The first running of HOT ROD’s Drag Radial Showdown, held in conjunction with the PRO Edelbrock Drag Racing Series’ finale at Memphis Motorsports Park in 2004, was won by Innovative Turbo’s Rick Head and his turbocharged ’89 Camaro. After murdering the competition in Memphis with a 7.76 at 181 mph on Mickey Thompson ET Street Radials, Head made the trek to the annual Orlando World Streetnationals in Orlando, Florida, the next weekend and cleaned house there too, with a quicker and faster 7.66 at 186. The ’05 event was more of the same, only with a different racer, a little slower e.t., and a new name for the same sanctioning body. Wade Hopkins of Southern Speed in Tupelo, Mississippi, was the…

EXCLUSIVE LS7 DYNO TEST PG.94 Finally, GM Performance Parts releases the ultimate small-block Chevy crate engine, the 427ci LS7 from the new Corvette Z06. We get the first one and stick it on a pump, and it makes 540hp out of the box. There’s way more with a cam and headers. 700HP BUICKV-6 PG.100T Thanks to a few aftermarket heros, the Buick V-6 is back from its long hibernation. Watch as Kenny Duttweiler builds one with turbos and makes stupid power in an incredibly docile package. And it weighs nothing! 8000HP HEMI THRASH PG 108 You’ll think those NASCAR Nextel Cup crew guys are wussies after watching Clay Millican’s Top Fuel team rebuild his hemi in an hour. It’s the full thrash-fest. TEST AND TUNE PG 120 As promised last…

Top Fuel drag racing is famous for vulgar displays of speed: 0-60 in half a second, a quarter-mile in less than 4.7 seconds, and top speeds in excess of 325 mph. It’s an arena where brute force is worshiped, and the horsepower is so palpable it literally thumps you in the chest as the cars pass by. For most racing fans there is no better sight than watching two 8,000hp land missiles blast down the track with victory and defeat separated by only a few hundredths of a second. But the race against the clock doesn’t just take place on the track. A Top Fuel engine starts tearing itself apart as soon as the driver releases the clutch. Pistons, rods, bearings, the crank, you name it; when you are talking…

CADDY THAT REALLY ZIGS ’78 Cadillac Coupe De Ville Shawn Gilbert Lakewood, OH How’s this for a sleeper? Shawn’s land yacht relies on none other than Cadillac power-500 ci of it—to run 11.27 at 118 mph. A TH400 trans and 8.5-inch 10-bolt rearend handle the massive torque. “I want to show people that old Caddys aren’t just fat luxury cars,” he says. We think he’s succeeded, but his ultimate goal is 10s. KEEPING THE PEACE Military-Spec Hummer Sgt. Ed Lotak Camp Bondsteel, Gryncar, Kosovo We’re always flattered to hear that we can in some way entertain our troops abroad. Currently Sgt. Ed Lotak is deployed with the Kansas Army National Guard providing a safe and secure environment for the citizens of Kosovo, and he likes to read HOT ROD in…

JACK ROUSH GETS BACK TO THE DRAGS Younger race fans know Jack Roush as the man with the straw hat who runs all those NASCAR teams and builds wicked tuner Mustangs. But racing veterans associate Roush more with the glory days of NHRA Pro Stock racing when he teamed up with Wayne Gapp to run a series of Gapp & Roush Pro Stock Fords. We spoke with Jack at the SEMA Show and learned he’s getting back to the ways of the 1,320. First off, he is putting more support toward a few cars that race in the NMRA Ford series (such as his buddy Don Bowles’ Modular Muscle car, shown) and is considering building a car to compete in Edelbrock Hot Street. He also announced a new line of…

Drifting in America has begun to take on its own character, one that increasingly emphasizes domestic cars powered by V-8 and V-10 engines. The Formula D Drift was dominated by American power during the ’05 season. Rhys Millen drove his LS1-powered ’04 Pontiac GTO to one victory in the artistically judged six-race series during the year and took the championship. Just behind him in the season points battle was Samuel Hubinette who won twice in his V-10-powered Viper. And just behind Hubinette was Ken Gushi who drives Toyo’s ’05 Mustang with a blown 32-valve V-8. The majority of cars in drifting are still imports—rear-drive Toyota Corolla AE86s, Nissan Silvias of various vintages, the occasiona l Mazda RX-7—but they are at a natural disadvantage to the domestic brands—an American V-8 is…

Camaros have drag raced, road raced, roundy-round raced, street raced, and bench raced for nearly four decades. There hasn’t been a form of racing in North America in which some Camaro or other hasn’t succeeded—except drifting (assuming you think of that as racing). And, of course, the iconic Camaro is the ’69; the year Chevrolet sold the car in more performance variations than ever before or since, and a car so beloved by hot rodders that this magazine is guaranteed to sell several thousand more issues on the newsstand any month one is on the cover. A drifting ’69 Camaro is a track promoter’s wet dream. It’s like having Tiger Woods show up for your golf tournament or Bruce Springsteen decide to play a set in your bar. Tickets will…

“I’m absolutely having fun and I have no regrets. I have no idea what this car might be worth because I’d never sell it” —Chuck Cornelia On driving his SS/AA Barracuda, Joe Teuton r. says “There’s no other feeling like dropping the hammer on a ’68 Hemi car. Pro Stockers leave low to the ground. These things gel up in the air. When it does a big wheelstand, it may not be the fastest, but it’s the funnest."That, in one sentence, is what the Mopar Super Stock Hemi Challenge is all about for every SS Hemi owner who makes the tow to Indianapolis Raceway Park for the NHRA Mac Tools U.S. Nationals. It’s been written many times that there’s nothing like the U.S. Nationals, and no matter how’ they title…

When General Motors revealed the ’06 Corvette Z06’s 505hp LS7 V-8 engine last year, our first question was, “How detuned is it?” After all, despite its 500-plus horses, the latest and greatest 7.0L small-block only makes 1.18hp from each of its 427 ci, which seems tame for an engine with massive CNC-ported cylinder heads and 11.0:1 compression that spins to seven grand. But let’s give it a break and take a closer look at that power rating. Modern factory engines are built to pass mind-boggling durability standards that few race engines and virtually no backyard-built hot-rod mills could ever hope to pass. For example, GM’s standard durability test consists of nearly 300 hours of operation at wide-open throttle, with the engine cycling back and forth between peak horsepower and torque…

DURAMAX INTAKE K&N Engineering 800/858-3333 www.knfilters.com Dumping extra fuel into a diesel makes great power but can destroy the motor without the airflow to match. K&N’s new AirCharger intake system for ’04-’05 GM 6.6L Duramax diesels can help keep the air/fuel mixture in check. The kit includes a free-flowing intake tube and K&N’s famous cotton-gauze filter backed by a one-million-mile warranty. On the dyno, the system is good for a claimed 12.5 hp. STREET ROD COILOVERS Bilstein 800/537-1085 www.bilstein.com You expect street rod parts to look great, but Bilstein’s new coilovers for hot rods running Mustang II suspension perform great as well. Housed in a polished aluminum monotube is a piston that Bilstein says is two to three times larger than the competition’s. Each shock is dyno tested for optimal…

The iconic photo of Wild Willy Borsch and his famed Winged Express AA/Fuel Altered was shot back in the day by Bob McClurg, and who can forget the completely sideways-at-opposite-lock burnout as Willy had one hand on the wheel and the other on the body of the car? This one is nearly as dramatic, but for a different reason. On an exhibition run at the NHRA World Finals in Pomona, Mike Boyd was driving the Winged Express when it reportedly lost the left front wheel and tie-rod at half-track and went into the guardrail. It scrubbed off some speed but then barrel-rolled twice before coming to a stop. Boyd got out on his own and was OK, but the car was toast.…