Innehållsförteckning för December 2011 från Hot Rod

I can’t give you another reason for why we worked so hard to limp a barely running car down a racetrack, but I guarantee I’ve never been so thrilled to run 32 mph. It had been two years since I ran at Bonneville Speed Week, and that proved intolerable. Ignoring finances, Keith and Tonya Turk and I decided to bring back the HOT ROD/So-Al Racing Camaro for another shot at a record. I cobbled together a 492ci big-block with our Vortech Ysi blower and made 1,099 hp. Not 1,100, but all 1,099 were really serious about it. Keith hauled the car to California from Alabama, and it took all hands on deck to get it going. A few all-nighters, too many pizzas—all the usual stuff. I continued my tradition of…

Moal Coachbuilders (Moal.com) has been in the same building for 55 years. With master coach builder Jimmy Kilroy willing sheetmetal to do his bidding and a massive CNC machine that can whittle the most intricate shapes you can conceive, the crew at Moal has fabricated everything from a one-off sports car to a land speed racing streamliner. Among the various street rod builds and rare engines sitting around the shop waiting for a home, this ’55 Ford caught our eye. It belongs to actor and car fiend Tim Allen and should be quite a nice sleeper when she’s done at the end of 2011. A custom chassis from Art Morrison uses A-arms in the front, a triangulated four-link to locate the 9-inch in the rear, and coilovers all around. Brakes…

In 1949, then SCTA President and soon-to-be Editor Wally Parks forever entwined HOT ROD and the racers of Bonneville by creating what’s now known as the HOT ROD Top Time trophy. He had the perennial brass engraved with the intent: “Awarded annually by HOT ROD Magazine for the fastest one-way time recorded at the National Amateur Speed Trials.” The term one-way refers to the fact that records were then set based on a two-way average, with the cars literally running down the course one way and then the other. Today, a record is established with two passes in the same direction. The critical point is that the honor is bestowed on the team that posts the fastest flying mile time regardless of whether it generates a record. It’s a recognition…

Tony Vestuto resembles a movie character who mobs around town in a tow truck Monday through Friday and does angry, block-long burnouts in a hopped-up hot rod on weekends. He is that guy He’s an imposing figure who doesn’t need to go out of his way to attract attention, yet getting you to lock your eyes firmly onto his profile is the sole reason he built his street freak ’55 Bel Air. Everything about it is unnecessary, yet it makes perfect sense to anyone with grease under his fingernails, high-test in his veins, and a project in the garage. The ’55 began its second life in 2009 as an $18,000, big-block-powered, straight-as-an-arrow, primered street car that begged for a shiny skin and a new attitude. The interior was stock, the…

Hayden Groendyke can identify the exact instant he hatched the wonder featured here. He and co-driver Charles Samples were flying back from the ’09 edition of La Carrera Panamericana, known to us gringos as the Mexican Road Race. They’d just run the grueling, seven-day, 1,800-mile event—one of the great automotive adventures—in a mildly modded Hudson Hornet, and after a slew of mechanical problems, they were licking their wounds. Bag this, Hayden decided right then and there on the plane. “We’re doing this next year at the front of the bus,” he informed his co-piloto. Dusting off a restored ’49 Cadillac Sedanet parked in the garage, Hayden delivered the road hog to Jim and Jason Smith of the Hot Rod Shop in Sand Springs, Oklahoma. The Smiths began the makeover by…

CENTER LINE AUTO DRAG WHEELS In the ’70s, Ray Lipper virtually launched the spun-aluminum wheel industry with his lightweight, two-piece drag racing wheels. The Auto Drag was an instant hit with the racing community, a favorite among the Top Fuel and Funny Car ranks and muscle car fanatics alike, who wanted the look of speed for their street machines. Pro Street lovers embraced the riveted, machined finish hoops, and eventually, like every other trendsetting wheel, the knock-offs arrived. But the original is still in production, and was a shoo-in for the Hall of Fame. MICKEY THOMPSON SPORTSMAN PRO TIRES Mickey Thompson held more than 480 international racing records and was a pioneering driver, engineer, and racing promoter. In 1963, engineer Gene McManus left Goodyear and started Max Trac Tire Inc.,…

Snatch that jaw back off the floor. Youbetcha—in 1967, Tasca Ford had ragged GT350 and GT500 Mustangs stacked up like they’d been pitchforked into the back lot. The sign at the upper left of the lot says, “Bargain Basement.” Just freaking wow. Now check that inset photo. The cars were so dusty that the local punks, Bow Tie lovers that they were, finger-scrawled their tags: “Ford Sucks, Buy a Chevy, Vett’s (sic) Forever, 327.” Billy Sharpe, are you still out there? You left your prints, and the cops are looking for you. This was photographed by HOT ROD’s Eric Dahlquist in July 1967, behind the famous dealership at 777 Taunton Ave. in East Providence, Rhode Island—the hallowed ground where Bob Tasca Sr. spurned FoMoCo racing at the corporate level, famously…

LANDMARK CAR OF THE MONTH In 1957, Sputnik sketched a wobbly orbit around the globe, and the Atomic Age was under way. Ford Motor Co.’s vice president of styling was the inimitable George Walker, who Time magazine called “the Cellini of chrome.” Under his watch, the ’49 Ford, the ’55 Thunderbird, and the Edsel were developed. An enthusiastic futurist, Walker encouraged his designers to take a long look down the road of automotive progress, and this is what they thought they saw: an atomic-powered car. Never built as a running prototype (no fooling), the ⅜-scale model of the Nucleon employed a cab-forward layout with a modular pod in the rear to house the nuclear powertrain, which could be swapped out at 5,000-mile intervals to refresh the spent uranium fuel. Or…

No one has a neutral opinion on T-buckets. Love them or hate them, simple as that. OK, so maybe hate’s a strong word and there’s a category for strongly dislike. But have you ever noticed how stuff that was hot 40 years ago and horrible 25 years ago is awesome today? Case in point: When was the last time you saw a T-bucket in HOT ROD? If you’re younger than 30, it’s probably never. Youngsters may not have even heard the term Fad T, which refers to the style of Ford Model T roadsters that boomed the day after the first cheap fiberglass body left the mold. The craze kicked off in the early ’60s and thrived through the ’70s. Readers always lambaste when they feel we’re trying to ramrod…

Nose draggin’, tail waggin. Mismatched wheels, squirrelly rubber, HWH a knee-busting clutch, and a gnarly rumble. Yeah, street machines are back. Guys of the Car Craft Street Machine Nationals generation have slipped into a state of dementia, forgetting the mechanical horrors of their gearhead youth and smokin’ it back to the days when Gabriel Hijackers were hip. You can still buy those, by the way From JC Whitney, no less. The Lynyrd Skynyrd years were the heyday of spray-can car detailing in driveways nationwide, so when aerosol king Rust-Oleum came to HOT ROD for project car ideas, Publisher Jerry Pitt made the retro connection and enlisted Steve Strope and his Pure Vision shop to find and build a car using easy paint-detailing techniques to make an everything-new-is-old-again street machine. Strope…

KENT ASKS: The 9-inch Ford rearend is always mentioned as almost bulletproof. Why is it so strong and what did it come in? Are there other differentials that are as strong? MARLAN ANSWERS: In a nutshell, the 9-inch Ford rearend had an unusually long production life span, at one time was installed in nearly every Ford passenger car and truck, it has an excellent strength-to-weight ratio, certain design features make it a good fit for nonstock performance applications, and it enjoys huge support from aftermarket vendors. Ford 9-inch rearends were produced for nearly 30 years—from 1957 through 1986—for most Ford cars and trucks. That’s a hell of a lot of available junkyard fodder. The 9-inch ring gear is larger than all competitive passenger car performance rearends (except for the Dana…

PRECIOUS METAL ROADSTER Roy Brizio Street Rods in South San Francisco, California, has built cars that have graced the covers of several magazines, including HOT ROD. The shop had a number of projects when we dropped by, but it was John Mumford’s Track T roadster we were drawn to. It’s set to be built in ’50s-period style, with hard-to-find vintage racing parts taking center stage. It will debut at the Grand National Roadster Show in Pomona, California, in 2012. There’s a lot of fabrication to do, including the interior that will be handled by Sid Chavers in Santa Clara, California, but the potential is clearly visible. You can see more projects at Brizio’s website (RoyBrizioStreetRods.com).…

Times they are a changin’. Not very long ago, a guy could build something radically different from what his friends were building just by dropping an LSI into his car instead of the throwback big-block. But the LS is now the rule and not the exception, and Chad Moscrei is one of many hot rodders purposely avoiding Chevy’s latest and greatest small-block just to shake the herd. Instead, his ’66 Nova is reinforced to carry the heft of Chevy’s contemporary workhorse big-block, the LBZ Duramax diesel. This one packs a wallop to the tune of 585 hp and 790 lb-ft of torque. It doesn’t get much further from the norm than that. The wagon also wears a motif that we are seeing more of lately: a weathered stock exterior and…

Bonneville is not a bucket list item, it’s a lifestyle. That phrase has been circling the land speed racing community and is attributed to 200 MPH Club Office Manager Allison Volk and perpetuated by 200 Club President Dan Warner and the guys in the White Goose Bar racing team (WhiteGooseBar.com). A tight group of Salt Flats diehards who survived for decades without an audience now has spectators outnumbering racers—mostly due to the retro craze and the media that propagates it—and participation has risen sharply over the past five or six years. That’s good for the survival of the sport, but the message from insiders is that in-and-outs and rent-a-ride drivers are not as appreciated as those who experience Bonneville and get smashed with the epiphany that ’ they can’t ever…

THE PREMISE “Once you’ve put headers and a bigger cam into a 2010 Camaro, short of bolting on a blower or building a stroker, the only thing left to do is to install better cylinder heads.” Those were the words of Horace Mast of Mast Motorsports. The quote came in a pitch for his head and cam package, so we tried it out. The results are relevant for anyone with a GM 6.2L LS3 engine. THE STUFF The cam kit we tested was PN 963-102, which includes the hydraulic roller cam and matching springs for $680. The cam specs are 225/231 degrees of duration at 0.050, 0.602/0.607-inch lift, and a lobe-separation angle of 115 degrees. Mast’s LS3 head castings are available in three different trim levels for small-, medium-, and…

IT’S DRAG WEEK™ TIME By the time you read this, HOT ROD Drag Week™ will have already happened back on September 1116. Will Larry Larson win for the fourth time in a row? Or will he be taken down? We don’t know as we’re writing this, but you can know as you read this. Consider this your reminder to go look at all the coverage and photos on HOTROD.com (click on the Drag Week™ logo in the righthand column, about halfway down) and to see the videos at HOTROD.com or at YouTube.com/HotRodMagazine. That should get you drooling for the Jan. ’12 issue of HOT ROD, where you can get a deeper look at the stories and the cars of the most grueling street car drag flog in the world. SEE…