Indholdsfortegnelse for July 2006 i Hot Rod

HOW TO BUILD AN ’09 MUSCLECAR The new GT500s are about to hit the streets, virtually everyone thinks a new Dodge Challenger will become reality, and if the dirt is legit, new Camaros will hit dealers as ’08 or ’10 models, depending on whom you ask. Musclecar buzz is huge: Our March ’06 issue with the new Camaro and Challenger on the cover was our biggest seller in years. The heyday is upon us. Or is it? Forgive me if I seem to join those who think a business card that says “Editor” grants the power to tell the Big Three what to do. We enthusiast media constantly beg for the good stuff from automakers then complain about it when it’s delivered; call it new-GTO syndrome. I’ll clarify that my…

No one asks for this. No one even discusses it. Guys neither plea for a comeback nor demand that we never print anything like it again. Street Freaks are the forgotten fad. Unlike today’s demand for Gassers and the outrage about vans, few readers seem to recall the Freaks, a trend that was either driven by Car Craft or at least amplified there, and which HOT ROD picked up on belatedly. By the time CC had special cover sections a few years in a row, HRM picked up the scent and jumped in with a May ’76 cover story, “The Wild Bunch,” which featured 17 cars built to the Freak style. Being garish was the only single element that defined the genre, with Street Freaks ranging from Corvette Summer-style weirdos…

UNTAMED Here’s one that’s gunning for the Goodguys Street Machine of the Year award, but not until 2007. Bernie Michaud, Barry Baxter, and Reid Beck get together on Thursday nights in New Brunswick, Canada, to work on Untamed, this ’65 Mustang fastback, and they’re sparing no expense on the buildup. It’ll have a 750-plus-horsepower Sean Hyland 4.6 DOHC Ford with FR500 heads and a pair of turbos backed by a paddle-shifted automatic, and the suspension will be all Griggs Racing stuff. Follow its progress at www.untamedfastback.com. — Rob Kinnan PAINLESS ELKY Painless Performance always cooks up something good for Power TourTM, and this year is no exception. Painless will be bringing this ’66 El Camino (illustration by Kris Horton) with an LS2 under the hood and plenty of attention to…

The new Shelby Mustang has SVT nomenclature on the wheels, sill plates, cam covers, and a few other places. The engineers at the ride and drive were wearing SVT shirts, and they stated emphatically that Ford’s Special Vehicle Team is still a living entity, but the actual state of SVT is rumored to be stagnant. That has been fed by several things, one of which is SVT’s lack of a dedicated public relations staff (which they used to have), but most notably by the news that you will be able to buy a Shelby GT500 from any Ford dealer. Previously, only 600 select dealerships were certified to carry the SVT line, but with the introduction of the new Shelby, all Ford dealerships will be afforded the privilege. Obviously, the regular…

Seeking to build a race car to help promote the Mustang and the performance parts for it, Ford worked with factory-backed Multimatic Motorsports to develop the FR500C (nicknamed Boy Racer), a complete, ready-to-road-race Mustang with a 5.0L DOHC engine and a Ford Racing part number. For $125,000, you can buy a fully prepped car that should run all season with no breakage and is supported (up to a point) by Ford Racing. Theoretically, all you have to buy are tires, brake pads, and fuel, and you’re ready to race for a season. The program was an astounding success, with the FR500Cs dominating the Rolex Grand American Cup series in 2005. In total, 27 cars were built and 23 have been sold, and the program is not just for glory—Ford Racing…

BUYCOOL VINTAGE PHOTOS We are constantly inundated with reader requests to buy prints of the vintage photos from our archives, and while we don't have the internal resources to dig out specific shots, you can still buy high-quality prints from the HOT ROD archives. Type hotrod.artehouse.com into your browser window (or click on the link from the hotrod.com home page), and check out the awesome vintage prints you can buy. The price is reasonable, and the selection of photos is good. These things should adorn every garage or den wall in the country! RELIABLE CAR CARRIERS MAKES IT HAPPEN The insanity of the Q Collegiate Power Challenge can be lived in glorious detail on page 66 of this issue, but none of it would have happened were it not for…

SO, YOU WANNA BE a Photographer? Ever since the inaugural March Meet in 1959, Famoso [California] Raceway has been famous for telephoto parachute shots. During qualifying for Goodguys' 47th-anniversary edition of the Meet, two of today's finest photographers got more action than they bargained for when Bill Burch's A/Gas Willys flew across the finish line, literally. The guy in the black shirt [arrow] is Mark Hovsepian, who captured the photo to the right before beating feet—just ahead of the fiberglass roof and metal debris. Mark's hasty exit [note the splash] and the main image was captured by Primedia's own Nick Licata while perched in Famoso's shutdown area. Video replays revealed that the 7-second Willys rolled 11 times, knocking out the driver. Burch, G3, was hospitalized fortwo days with a broken…

CAR SHOW ME Back in the late-’80s and early ’90s, top car builders chose the HOT ROD Super Nationals and Car Craft Street Machine Nationals to debut their latest projects, as these shows were where everyone went to see the latest cars and where all the magazines shot the majority of their car features. It was the place to see and be seen, and where you had to go if you wanted to get your car in the magazine. But other than last year’s Super Nats, I can’t remember the last time HOT ROD covered one of these shows, let alone shot a car feature there. And what about the indoor shows? With a few exceptions, we’ve stayed away from covering them. Is that a mistake? Are indoor and outdoor…

BEST OF BOTH WORLDS ’99 Ford Mustang 35th anniversary GT & ’87 Chevy Corvette ’vert Scott Hensley Norwood, OH The automotive world certainly has its loyalists, some more vehement than others, but Scott prides himself on being above such biases, as evidenced by the fact that he owns a Chevy and a Ford. So far, the Vette is mostly a custom cruiser with a body kit, wood overlaid dash, and chrome MOMO wheels. However, Scott reports the Mustang is now up to 290 hp.. WAR BIRD ’55 Ford Thunderbird Rex Marshall Via e-mail Vintage drag style is cool, but it’s a look you have to go full-on with or not at all. Rex Marshall nailed the look with his ’55 T-bird. Those velocity stacks sticking through the hood top a…

GMPP’S LS7 PARTS GM Performance Parts says if you dig the LS7 crate engine, you’ll like what they’ve been thrashing on over the past couple of months: THE LS7 7.0L VALIDATED ALUMINUM BARE BLOCK Translation: Put a 7.0L/427ci engine in place of a 5.3L, 57L, or 6.0L. This block can be used with any LS-series head and is based on C5R Corvette block development. Details about the production 319-T5 aluminum block include that it has iron sleeves, a production oiling system, and six-bolt dowel-located steel main bearing caps. The block has a 4.125-inch finished bore, is deck-plate honed, and has been seasoned and validated. There’s no provision for Displacement on Demand, but in a hard-core application, who cares? LS7 7.0L CYLINDERHEAD ASSEMBLY This new head design is ready to make…

MOTORSPORT OF THE MONTH AMEC ICE RACING IN THREE WORDS Sunshine is overrated. THE GIST Those who race in the rain and on dirt are pretty tough, but ice racers are the kind of guys who need custom-stitched underwear to accommodate their overwhelming manliness. Can you imagine trying to manhandle 500 hp on ice? Founded in 1954 by a group of engineers in Schenectady, New York, the Adirondack Motor Enthusiast Club runs races on the frozen lakes surrounding the Adirondack mountains from January to March each year. The courses span 1½ to 2 miles in length and are plowed by volunteers whenever the ice grows to at least 12 inches thick. Four-car-wide track widths make for some exciting racing, and an average of 60-70 vehicles turn out at each event.…

Before Shelby GT500 Job One even starts down the assembly line, Ford Racing Performance Parts is hard at work building speed parts for it, based on the company’s Performance Packs for the three-valve Mustang GT. There are three different versions for the GT: the Power Pack (PN M-2005-FR1/FR1A, $899) consists of mufflers, a new mass air, and performance calibration; the Drag Pack (PN M-2005-FR2/FR2A, $1,399) has gears, shorty headers, a 90mm mass air, and performance calibration; and the Handling Pack (PN M-2005-FR3, $1,149) has springs, shocks, antisway bars, and a strut tower brace. (The above part numbers are for ’05 Mustang GTs—substitute 2006 in place of 2005 in the part number for ’06 models). There is also a supercharger available for the GT (PN M-6066-463V, $4,995 in black, PN M-6066-463P,…

Give Greg Anderson $7 million and he’ll win a couple of (maybe three) NHRA Pro Stock championships. Send that same $7 million to Jack Roush, and you’re somewhere near halfway to being able to paint Greg Biffle’s Nextel Cup Ford Fusion any way you like. Chip Foose would probably be able to squeeze a few AMBR winners out of $7 million. What NBC Universal got for the $7 million they entrusted to Dennis McCarthy was more than 200 cars for use during filming The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. McCarthy’s job was to make sure this reported $50 million production had enough cars that looked right, that those cars ran right, and to fix the cars the stunt guys busted so they could go back and bust them up…

From the outset, it was a pretty complicated plan. HOT ROD got together with Universal Technical Institute to figure out a way to promote HOT ROD U, a special course taught at UTI campuses. After a lot of brainstorming, the idea for a campus challenge came up, and when all the handshakes were done, we had a bona fide shootout brewing. Factory Five Racing stepped up to donate four FFR Spec Racer Roadster kits, and UTI chose four campuses to build them: Avondale, Arizona; Glendale Heights, Illinois; Exton, Pennsylvania; and Houston, Texas. The Houston campus had the home-field advantage, as that’s where the final competition would be held—on the dyno at their campus and at Houston Raceway Park in nearby Baytown, Texas. Rules and testing parameters were determined, and the…

800HP FORD SMALL-BLOCK PG.94 Joe Sherman shows that you don't need nitrous, a blower, or a turbocharger to make big power. He does it the old-fashioned way, with lots of ratio, a monster cam, judicious parts selection, and some sick rpm. This one's all motor and all bad. HOW TO FIX DENTS PG.104 Our continuing saga of paint and body includes this month's treatise on how to repair dents. Drew Hardin goes into detail on hammer-and-dolly work, major dent removal, the basics of body filler, and all the tools you'll need to be a backyard body-working pro. DYNO TESTING DOS AND DON'TS PG.116 Dyno testing may seem like an unneeded expense, but it can make a huge difference in how your engine runs. Here are some tips on what you…

There's no shame in using filler on repaired metal. Even experienced body workers will skim on a light coat in an effort to build a smooth foundation for paint. Filler has a bad reputation because it's sometimes used improperly or is used as a shortcut for repair methods better suited to the da mage. Keep the filler layer to 1/8inch or less—whether you're filling a small dent or finishing an area you've worked out—and you're using it the right way. Most of the experts we spoke to said body filler should be applied only to clean, bare metal [that's been roughed with 36-grit paper) for best adhesion. Some will apply filler over epoxy primer, reasoning that since they are similar materials they will bond well. Others say the only bond…

This issue marks the second anniversary of the intense redesign that once again made HOT ROD Everybody’s Automotive Magazine, so we thought it fitting to reiterate what we said here two years ago. HOT ROD’s Bench Racing column is just that—a world of talking, gawking, and dreaming rather than doing. Think of this as one of those evenings in the garage when the work is done, a few pals have stopped by, and the 12-pack is working its way down to zero. A few guys are feeling mellow, others have a taste for an argument, and everyone’s living cars. This will be the place to air your opinions, get hugged or shot down by a magazine editor who’s had one too many, and park your ride for the admiration and…

One man’s junk really was another man’s treasure when Carlos Garcia picked up this ’57 Belvedere for $250 from Spencer’s junkyard outside San Antonio, Texas. He tells us the Plymouth is very solid for its age and still has the poly 301 and pushbutton automatic. He might swap in an Indy crate motor or unload the car on eBay—he hasn’t made up his mind yet. The good news is Carlos reports that the junkyard is planning to close, and there is plenty of vintage iron ripe for the picking. Better hurry…

HAROLD BETTES GETS LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENTAWARD Harold Bettes has worked at SuperFlow Technologies Group—you know it as the maker of engine and chassis dynos and flow benches—for 25 years and has hosted the SuperFlow Advanced Engineering Technology Conference (AETC) since it began in 1989. It’s only fitting that he finally was given the Lifetime Achievement Award at the conference held recently in Orlando, Florida. Harold was recognized for his contributions and dedication to the performance industry. Past award recipients include Don Sullivan, Zora Arkus-Duntov, Harvey Crane, Bill Jenkins, Ed Iskenderian, Jay Eitel, Neal Williams, Joe Mondello, and Dr. Dean Hill. In his characteristically humorous way, Harold said, “Although I don’t necessarily feel I belong to such a distinguished club of AETC’s previous Lifetime Achievement winners, I’m certainly not going to return…

It’s no secret that the mood around Detroit these days is grim; huge financial and union problems have Ford and GM letting people go and canceling nonessential (in the minds of the bean counters anyway) programs. We always knew the Ford GT supercar was intentionally short-lived, so when Ford recently announced that ’06 was the last year for the GT, it didn’t take anyone by surprise. But when the company followed it up with news that it would build neither the next-generation Lightning nor the highly anticipated Sport Trac Adrenalin super-SUV, we were left with some doubts about the Shelby GT500 Mustangs ever seeing the light of dealers’ showrooms. We were wrong. Ford is building them as promised, and after spending two days behind the wheel of a preproduction GT500,…

We have no doubt that the Dodge Challenger and Chevy Camaro are going to be hugely popular when they come out, and if they have the goods that were teased with the concept cars, they should prove to be good competition for the wildly popular new Mustang. But what about all the derivative models that haven’t been seen yet? The Plymouth badge is dead, but why couldn’t we get a Chrysler ’Cuda? Pontiac needs a musclecar, so why not build a Firebird and a Trans Am off the new Camaro platform? And what about the Mercury Cougar? It was originally an upscale version of the Mustang, then was based off the Thunderbird, and ultimately became its own front-drive sport-compact thing. No wonder it died. But the Mustang is the perfect…

Hollywood is determined to destroy every ’67 and ’68 Mustang fastback it can find. Back in 2000, about a dozen were destroyed filming Gone In Sixty Seconds, and last year, another half dozen or so were wiped out as the bad guy’s car in The Dukes of Hazzard. So it was already pretty much a cliche when Tokyo Drift’s producers settled on the ’67 Mustang fastback as one of the stars of their movie. What’s surprising about the Mustangs that survived the movie is that they ran so well. Five of the six Mustangs built by Dennis McCarthy’s Picture Car department were found in Southern California using the usual sources: the Recycler and eBay. Prices ranged from $14,000 for a good driver doomed for destruction to $22,000 for a clean…

We knew it would be fast. We promised you, dear readers, that it would be fast. And ya know what? It's fast. Damn fast. The HOT ROD Solstice was borne out of the hot-rodding tradition of the engine swap. Stick the biggest, nastiest engine you can in the smallest, lightest car, and go destroy everything else on the street. The combo plate with the new Pontiac Solstice and the unbelievable 505hp, 427ci small-block LS7 from the Corvette Z06 was just too tasty a meal to pass on, so HOT ROD conspired with GM Performance Division to figure out how to cook it. We showed you most of the build details in the last two issues of the magazine, but it all boils down to this month, when we put it…

This is not your father's Ford. It's not even your older brother's. And it's definitely not for your average part-time bracket racer. What it is, is Joe Sherman's latest monster that pushes the peak of conventional carbureted, normally aspirated, no-power-adder Ford small-block Windsor-head tech to the limit—816 hp and 531 lb-ft from a 14.5:1, 374ci engine equipped with wedge-style Air Flow Research aluminum heads that still maintain the original Ford inline, 20-degree valve-angle configuration. You heard that right: No rolled-over valve angles, no trick-of-the-week Cleveland, Australian, or Yates heads, and it's built off the standard Ford 302/5.0L deck height. Raising the venerable Ford Windsor small-block to a level that just a generation ago was reserved for Pro Stock big-blocks is no mean feat. It shows just how far technology has…

Given a choice between spending $500 for a day on the dyno and upgrading to a trick set of cylinder heads, most hot rodders on a budget would opt for the hardware. But a different view should be considered. “A good set of heads on a poorly tuned engine is simply a poor set of heads,” argues Harold Bettes of Super Flow. “The goal should be to maximize the stack of parts you have.” Engine dyno testing is most often viewed as a necessity for race teams and possibly a luxury for wealthy street-car owners. Yet the benefits for any modified street/strip engine, especially today's EFI motors, are easily justified for most homegrown projects. A dyno test can be as simple as a half day routine to properly break in…