Indholdsfortegnelse for October 2008 i Hot Rod

HEMI GODFATHER When I read the latest issue, it really brought back memories. During Tom Hoover’s golden years at Chrysler, I was editor of CARS magazine and spent a lot of time at the Chrysler proving grounds and press events driving specially prepared Plymouths and Dodges. I really enjoyed Bill McGuire’s story and the archival photos of the Mopar greats, especially the shot of the Strickler-Jenkins Dodge Boys Super/Stock. I was one of the 0.1 percent of people who were very well aware of Grumpy’s connection with Chrysler. The match race at Cecil County Dragoway between Bud Faubel’s Shively Motors Dodge Honker and Tasca Ford’s Thunderbolt (driven by Bill Lawton) that Tom references, was actually set up by me working with Dodge PR great Moon Mullins and was sponsored by…

HOT ROD 1948 2008 1994 You probably already know that NHRA Funny Car driver Scott Kalitta died in a crash during qualifying for the Lucas Oil NHRA Super Nationals at Old Bridge Township Raceway in Englishtown, New Jersey. Scott’s DHL-sponsored Toyota flopper blew the motor at about 1,000 feet and turned the car into a fast-moving fireball. It went off the end of the track at very high speed and hit an obstacle, bursting into a huge ball of fire. He was 46. Jim Hill wrote a touching obituary for Scott on HOTROD.com, and I recommend reading it. An excerpt of that piece is, “Anyone remotely interested in major event drag racing will recognize the iconic name Kalitta. For older fans, the name defines the family patriarch, Conrad “Connie” Kalitta,…

STONE SOUP CAMARO The JJ & Lynne Stone Soup Project is back for the sixth go-round, with all the ingredients coming together to cook up a ’69 Chevrolet 7/28 Camaro clone. You remember the story, right? Stone Soup refers to the fairy tale about hungry townspeople who work together and contribute what they can to create a hearty meal for their village, beginning with just water and a magic stone. In keeping with the theme, all components and work required for the build will be donated to the project. The Camaro’s body parts and panels, from floor pans to quarter-panels, cowl, dashboard, tail pan, bumpers, and mirrors will be replaced with parts donated by Sherman and Associates (www.shermanparts.com). Gentile Collision will be handling the bodywork. When finished, the Camaro will…

Speed Demon is the name of this streamliner, but it’s just as accurate a moniker for the two gear-heads who brought it to life. At 65 and 60, respectively, Ron Main and George Poteet have the drive and determination most guys half their age lack, and that’s why they’re ready to ask four little pistons to each provide 100 mph at Bonneville. “We’re really just a couple of overgrown delinquents,” Ron says with a smile. “I used to joy-ride in cars, but I always gave ’em back. I was actually on probation till I turned 21.” George didn’t fess up to any such youthful shenanigans, but he’s got a fun-loving nature, so we wouldn’t put it past him. It’s quickly obvious when chatting with both racers that there’s salt in…

THE PLAN Just where this scheme was first hatched nobody seems to remember, but it has hotel bar written all over it. It must have been after a long, beautiful day on the road on Power Tour(r) or on top of 14 hours of sensory overload at the SEMA show in Las Vegas. When the HOT ROD staff is spooled up into a state of giddy exhaustion and the second round of beverages has been ordered—only then can a story idea as extreme as this one begin to make sense. The high concept: Take a truckload of crate engines and race-test them all in the same car, at the same time, on the same drag strip. Yeah, right. Get real. Such a project would require a track thrash of heroic…

SAY WHAT?! When the NHRA made the decision to shorten the length of a competition run in the Top Fuel and Nitro Funny Car categories to 1,000 feet after the death of Scott Kalitta, it seemed like a sensible move to me. Apparently, we all don’t think alike. The response on the Internet ranged from supportive to completely sublime, with some people swearing off drag racing entirely and others stating this decision has | doomed the future of professional drag racing. I’d argue that the last two groups of people shouldn’t let the door hit them in the ass on the way out. What this decision did was spur a conversation less about the length of the racetrack and more about what drag racing is, or should be. Personally, drag…

LS7 SS ’66 Chevrolet Chevelle Randy Johnson Kewaskum, WI You may remember this one from the Feb. ’08 Project Garage. Randy has his LS-powered, Mist Blue SS clone all finished up and ready to roll its 18x12 Kinesis rear wheels in rage. With a Rockland Standard Gear Son of Tranzilla T56 and 4.11 gears, that should be no problem. It’s not just power, though, the Chevelle sits on a custom-made Schwartz G-Machine chassis with QA1 coilovers to make sure it sticks a curve like a sports car. RESTORED BETTER ’69 Plymouth GTX Lenny Lisenko Via e-mail Lenny scored this GTX from the original owner and kept it a matching-numbers car during the res to but did some parts swapping where it counts. With a sizable Comp cam and ported and…

INSIDE THE OES PACKAGE DEAL As HOT ROD went to press, Mopar was still finalizing its plans to launch the new Dodge Challenger drag race package car at the NHRA Mile High Nationals in Denver on July 13. However, a month earlier we were allowed to look in on the first private test session for the new factory race car at Mid-America Motorsports Park in Stanton, Michigan. On an unseasonably cold June morning, we saw a Challenger test mule run a string of easy passes in the 10.40 range at more than 120 mph. Of course, this new Challenger package car is a tribute to the ’68 Hemi Darts and Barracudas that were the kings of NHRA Super Stock Eliminator in the late ’60s. And like the original Hemi package…

CHOWCHILLA RIDES TO THE RESCUE The last time the Mammoth Orange graced these pages [May ’08], we bemoaned the closing of what is believed to be the last of the big oranges that served fresh-squeezed juices and hot meals to millions of motorists traversing California’s hot, dry Central Valley. Ironically, the same road that had kept it alive since the late ’40s was responsible for its death in 2007. When the adjacent stretch of Highway 99 through Fairmead was upgraded to freeway status, federal and state transportation agencies ended access from three directions. Business plummeted, and the beloved burger stand was reluctantly closed by the Stiggins family, who’d operated it since 1981. The next nine months were not kind to the shuttered structure. Graffiti artists, souvenir hunters, thieves, and vandals…

The title says it all. We went up on the high dive, waved to all the pretty girls, hollered “Hey, y’all, watch this,” and dove headfirst into the deep end of the pool that is Grand Am road racing, in pursuit of the Miller Cup. It all started with a bench racing session among your author, Publisher Bruce Miller, and Ford Racing Performance Parts’ head honcho Jamie Allison. FRPP had just introduced the new Mustang FR500S, a factory-built, ready-to-run race car tailored specifically for the Miller Cup, a series run in conjunction with Grand Am and brainstormed by Larry Miller, Ford nut and owner of a bunch of car dealerships throughout the west. Larry built his spectacular Miller Motorsports Park road racing facility outside Salt Lake City. He was using…

There’s been a lot written about optimizing header design, but most of us can’t afford one-off, custom-built, ideal-for-the-combination headers. Realistically, we use what we can buy over the counter. At least for popular V-8 engines and chassis, major header companies such as Hooker (a division of Holley) often offer a whole passel of tube sizes. This is definitely the case for the venerable big-block Chevy, on which we recently had the opportunity to put five different header sizes to the test on Westech Performance’s Super Flow 902 engine dyno. The headers had primary tubes ranging from 1 ¾ all the way to 2¼ inches, including one set with adjustable, variable length primaries. From past experience, we knew milder engines aren’t that picky about header design; on the other hand, full-race…

DIGITAL ART Bo Zolland +46-90-13 54 15 www.viztech.se Bo Zolland is a car guy full of more ideas than he has time to build, so he brings them to life in vivid digital renderings. He and his company, Vizualtech, have made custom car designs for the OEs, race teams, and numerous illustrations for big-time car magazines like ours. Want one on your wall? Bo’s more than glad to sell copies of current pieces or even create something to your spec. See a few of those for sale at www.imagekind.com. Just type Zolland in the search bar. Price: Starting at $ 23.49 NOSTALGIA DRAG WITH HAWAIIAN STYLE Matt Rider Clothing 949/338-3175 www.mattrider.com Funny Cars of the early ’70s and defunct drag strips of Southern California come together in the latest Hawaiian-style…

Fresh from applying the floor at Jay Leno’s Big Dog Garage, HOT ROD Television is honored to welcome U-Coat-It, the maker of do-it-yourself floor coatings, as a sponsor. Additionally, you’ll be able to see the Big Dog Garage on the Saturday, August 23 episode of HOT ROD Television. Tune in to SPEED at 9:30 a.m. Eastern, 8:30 a.m. Central, 7:30 a.m. Mountain, and 6:30 a.m. Pacific for an inside look at Hollywood’s most famous car enthusiast and his collection of performance and heritage vehicles. Additionally, join us in welcoming Lincoln Tech as a sponsor of HOT ROD Television. Tune in this weekend and consult your local listings for updates. WEEKEND SCHEDULE THE HOTROD.COM BLOGS The newfound gem of HOTROD.com is our blogging. While we’ve been told to add a new…

Women have always been a part of hot rodding. Look no further than Barbara Parks, Wally’s wife, who was an integral part of not only HOT ROD magazine but also the formation and growth of the NHRA. And she was just one of thousands who had an impact on our world of hot rods. Bill McGuire’s Second Opinion column in the Aug. ’08 issue called out for more women to be heard and for the community to embrace the fairer sex in an attempt to continue the growth of hot rodding in today’s antiautomotive climate and gloomy economy. Some readers agreed wholeheartedly, and others were way, way on the other side of the fence. Here is just some of the mail, from both sides, we received on the subject. HE…

NHRA NEWS There’s lots going on at the NHRA right now, with some of it relating to the death of Top Fuel racer Scott Kalitta. First and foremost, the NHRA has announced that beginning with the Mopar Mile High Nationals in Denver in mid-July, the Top Fuel and Funny Car classes will race to 1,000 feet, not the full 1,320-foot quarter-mile. The NHRA said, “This is an interim step that is being taken while NHRA continues to analyze and determine whether changes should be made to build upon the sport’s long-standing safety record, given the inherent risks and ever-present dangers associated with the sport.” The board members of the Professional Racers Owners Organization (PRO), led by Kenny Bernstein, “… wholeheartedly and unanimously support this decision,” Bernstein said. “We want to…

Smooth, nearly flawless, fast, and varied. All these words describe the fifth running of the HOT ROD Pump Gas Drags™, presented by Comp Cams and run at Memphis Motorsports Park on May 10, 2008. Our annual test of street car legality and drag strip dominance, limited to running a spec 93-octane gasoline, was the smoothest running, most competitive we’ve had and saw a wider range of vehicles competing than the first four combined. It wasn’t without a little weather delay, but let’s back up a bit. The Pump Gas Drags™ was created four years ago as an answer to what street legal drag racing has evolved into since the first days of the HOT ROD Fastest Street Car Shootouts of the early ’90s. As with any type of competitive motorsport,…

Photo: Rob Kinnan Location: DC Performance, Los Angeles, CA CRATE MOTOR COMPARO PG.86 We don’t think this has ever been done before: We. OO throw eight engines in one car at one track and run every combination down the quarter-mile. We have two small-blocks, two big-blocks, and four LS-series engines and tell you the right converter and rear gear to run with each. HEADER SHOOTOUT PG.110 Marlan chucks a 540 on the dyno and throws a. bunch of different size headers on it to see how they affect the power. GOOD NEWS FOR THE 409 PG.116 With the debut of Edelbrock’s new aluminum cylinder heads for the 409, this venerable engine has a new lease on life. We show its weak points and how to fix them. TESTANDTUNE PG.134 Check…

In the Aug. ’08 issue, we did a full rundown of Edelbrock’s new aluminum Performer RPM 409 cylinder heads for Chevy W-series 348/409 engines, in addition to a line of foundry-fresh dualquad intake manifolds, valve covers, and a high-efficiency water pump for the legendary W engine. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen a buildup of a serious 409 engine, so we followed along as Edelbrock put together a complete engine to test its new parts. We won’t keep you in suspense: Gulping 91-octane unleaded, the 421-cube mill (0.060 overbore) cranked out 466 hp and 461.9 lb-ft with a stock stroke, conservative 9.6:1 compression, dual Thunder-series 500-cfm carburetors, and out-of-the-box heads. Step up to a 470-plus-cube stroker kit, add a point of compression, swap on a set of 750-cfm…

A smart dude by the name of Frank A. Clark once said, “If you find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn’t lead anywhere.” That certainly applies to hot rodders. Overcoming obstacles and solving problems to improve our vehicles’ performance is what we’re all about. Not that we don’t occasionally need a little helping hand; that’s where Pit Stop comes in. I’ll answer as many of your tech questions as we have space for. When e-mailing, don’t forget to include Pit Stop in the subject line, as well as your real full name and hometown or military unit, base, or ship in the message. If you have quality digital photos of the car or problem, and if they’re at least 1,6d0 by 1,200 pixels (biggeris always better), send ’em…