Indholdsfortegnelse for January 2024 i Hot Rod

The Nugget Casino is the impromptu host for a weeklong car show during the entirety of Bonneville Speed Week. Because of the nature of Speed Week, the days with the largest number of cars in attendance are on the weekend prior to the start of racing. Though many of the cars on display are racers hoping to set new records at Bonneville, this show isn’t limited to land speed race cars. There’s a wide variety of cars in attendance from gassers, to customs, and old-school muscle. If you like traditional hot rods this is the show, and the setting, for you.…

Time to hit the button on the wayback machine: Arnie Gonzalez grew up in Miami where exotic (code for expensive) cars are the norm. He wanted to stand out, so he ended up gravitating towards trucks. He worked for a race team and wrenched at a shop called California Custom Sport Trucks, and his dad worked at a high-end car dealership. So, as you can see, he was surrounded by custom and performance cars, and when that passion collided with his love of old trucks, well, this event was the result. “My vision of a Pro Touring truck is having one that can hang with a Porsche on some curvy country road in England,” Gonzalez recalled. He went on to start a company called OBS Chevy Racing that specializes in…

Progress on our 1986 Mustang T-top coupe remains on course and at a pace that should have us firing the engine and taking a maiden voyage soon. For those just getting up to speed with this build, HOT ROD Senior Editor KJ Jones recently reintroduced a former 5.0 Mustang and Super Fords project car that has been out of commission for the last 10 years. Since the reveal, KJ and Saul “The Surgeon” Gutierrez have revamped the coupe’s fuel system, and during that process, started disassembling the Paxton Novi 2500-supercharged, 350ci Ford engine. Yes, the blown small-block really measures 350 cubes. The combination was achieved with a 4.145-inch bore size, with a 3.250-inch stroker crankshaft and 5.400-inch rods. We opted for the horsepower and torque of a big-bore stroker 302,…

Manufacturers of modern V8 engines have realized that we don’t always need all eight cylinders all the time, and that’s why cylinder-deactivation technology has been incorporated into many newer cars. If the vehicle is cruising along with a low-torque output, there are plenty of cases where half the engine would be enough to get the job done. After all, plenty of four- and six-cylinder cars are also capable of cruising along at the same speeds on the same roads, right? The whole reason we have the “extra” cylinders is to satisfy our need for on-demand power whenever we mash the accelerator. Admittedly, this is only a fraction of the time the engine is running, so being able to dial torque back to something that mimics a smaller engine when loads…

The Bonneville Salt Flats in Western Utah are so flat that people say you can see the curvature of the earth, yet they are so barren that not even the simplest life forms can exist. However, there is one thing that does thrive there: speed. Every August, racers are drawn to the salt from around the world in their quest for speed. This year, the 75th annual Speed Week, Mother Nature threw a wrench in those plans. The world’s fastest racetrack was brought to a halt before a single race car even went down the course by a rainstorm that blew across the Bonneville Salt Flats just days before the event, leaving the racecourse under several inches of water. There was cause for concern as anyone who was there last…

One of the stars of the 2023 Grand National Roadster Show in Pomona, California, was the stunning 1969 Camaro belonging to Phoenix resident Michael Shields. The story began at SEMA 2019 when Shields was inspired by a Camaro unveiling and decided to contact the man responsible for it, Sean Smith at Sean Smith Designs. Shortly after agreeing on a design direction, Smith put pen to paper while Shields delivered the donor vehicle to Mikey Dascoli at Driven Speed Shop in Gilbert, Arizona. The car was already bare metal and sitting on a Roadster Shop chassis, providing a sound foundation for the build. A 20-year design veteran, Smith graduated from ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California, before joining American Honda. He later worked with Saleen Automotive and Rockstar Games, as…

Fresh off a convincing victory at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park two weeks prior, Corvette Racing traveled to beautiful Lime Rock Park for the FCP Euro Northeast Grand Prix presented by Liqui Moly on July 22. Lime Rock is the shortest track on the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship schedule, and that, along with its narrow width in places, makes it one of the most challenging. “This is a very intense and physical race, usually,” said driver Antonio Garcia. “It’s so hard to pass, and if we are stuck behind GTDs, especially early, then it can be a long and frustrating day. This race is all about track position, so we need to arrive at the track with everything right on our Corvette so we can start fine-tuning immediately. That will be…

Hot-rodding has always been about personalization, but not many of today’s rodders understand that one of the early drivers of the hobby was the desire to make a cheap car look expensive. Hence the trend of damascene or engine-turned dash inserts like those found in expensive cars such as Bugatti, Lincoln, and, of course, the 1931 Auburn dash that found itself swapped into many a hot rod. Heck, the 1932 Ford V8 had an engine-turned dash insert. As Mick Jenkins of Mick’s Paint in Pomona, California, began to detail his stack-injected, Chevy big-block-powered Deuce roadster, he decided to recess the dash panel and install a full-width, engine-turned insert in the style of the famed Doane Spencer Deuce roadster. The engine-turned inserts are available from several hot rod suppliers in many…

There are a few concepts that send my brain revving above mental redline. One is infinity. Another is time travel. The third is trying to define the difference between hot rods, street rods, traditional rods, and rat rods. When the first issue of HOT ROD came out 75 years ago, the name they chose for the magazine was a new term, only a few years old and still loaded with negative associations. Every car that appeared in HOT ROD in our early years was a ’40s-style hot rod for the obvious reason that it was the 1940s. It would be a couple years before ’50s-style hot rods, and more than a decade before ’60s-style cars were included. Makes sense, right? Eventually, the pre-World War II American-made cars that made up…

If you’ve watched any movie over the last 20 years with any automotive action, you’ve probably witnessed the handiwork of Dennis McCarthy. With eight Fast & Furious movies to his credit, as well as Hobbs & Shaw, The Green Hornet, Death Race, Day Shift, Batman v Superman, Bruce Almighty, and many more, Dennis and his “creative” crew at Vehicle Effects make sure the cars meet the needs of the script, perform reliably, and look cool on screen. That last element doesn’t happen by accident. Take The Green Hornet for example. Dennis and his team built a total of 29 Chryslers, most equipped with a brand-new Chevrolet Performance 454 crate engine, TH400 transmission, and Ford 9-inch axle. For an upcoming action film being shot in Atlanta, a half-dozen brand-new Chrysler Pacificas…

With the eye-popping performance of Mopar’s latest supercharged Gen III Hemis, it’s all too easy to forget the stunning capability of the old-school street Hemi. It’s worth remembering that a smidge of compression, a few extra cubic inches, and some carefully curated airflow in a naturally aspirated Gen II Hemi can top the output of a Hellcat Redeye. That’s exactly what the Michigan-based Mopar engine specialists at Valley Performance delivered when customer Honda Joe Fuentes (yes, that’s his legal name) brought them a truckload of parts, including an aluminum Indy Maxx block, and asked them for some big street/strip power. “Figures tossed around during our initial discussion included 900-1,000 horsepower, naturally aspirated. But getting there took careful planning, and not all the parts Honda Joe delivered were going to work,”…

This time on Car Craft Video, we take on the task of rehabilitating a 1965 Dodge Coronet that has been sitting for nearly 30 years. Lynn Hart has owned the Dodge since 1969, and because of that, it has a special meaning for him. For a variety of reasons, he parked the car nearly 30 years ago, and it’s been sitting ever since. Originally a V8 car, Lynn replaced the engine with a more economical Slant Six sometime in the ’70s and had ambitious plans to turbocharge the thing for stealthy, V8-fighting power, but those plans never came to fruition. Here’s where we swoop in. Lynn’s son Kendall works for Kory Holmes, owner of a shop we’ve partnered with before. When he heard we were looking for a Dodge to…