Innehållsförteckning för March 2012 från Hot Rod

Yep, as this issue goes to press, I’ve crested 20 years with the company. Failing the ability to do justice to all the people and memories in these 750 words, I’ll take this as impetus to answer a question I hear often: How did I get here? When I was 13 or 14, I was a magazine addict, buying old copies from a used bookstore. We’re talking 1980ish when most of the issues were only a dozen or so years old, but they spoke like ghosts from the ancient times of muscle cars and drag racing. I also subscribed to the usuals: HOT ROD, Car Craft, Popular Hot Rodding, and Muscle Car Review. I took all the 4x4 mags, too, and was thrilled when I found the occasional CARtoons. In…

PROJECT CARS (SHOW US YOURS: HOTROD@HOTROD.COM) In the early ’70s when the NHRA began cracking down on Hemi powerplants in Pro Stock, allowing much lighter Mavericks and Vegas to get into the mix, Chrysler’s Pro Stock program got creative. Dan Knapp, Dick Oldfield, and the guys behind Chrysler’s racing efforts decided to go all out and build a flyweight ’74 Duster. The body was acid-dipped until it was paper thin, magnesium and titanium were used throughout the chassis and interior, and aluminum motor plates were used at both ends of the engine as well as between the sections of the Lenco transmission. The unibody subrails were shortened to remove as much weight as possible and left no support at the rear of the car, so wires from the ’cage were…

It might be hard to believe today, but in 1969 this development generated incredible drama and trauma among Mopar fans down in NASCAR land. That was the season in which their hero, Richard Petty, the King himself, parked his Plymouths and—horror, shame—actually drove a F**d. Unhappy with his contract and the lack of speed of his ’68 Road Runner–based equipment, Petty had inked a one-year deal with the Blue Oval enemy. The arrangement went well at first, with a victory right out of the box at Riverside, but the relationship quickly soured, as other Ford racers resented the King’s (alleged) favored status. Meanwhile, Chrysler CEO Lynn Townsend was none too happy with the defection and ordered his racing execs to bring the King back into the fold at any cost.…

If you’ve followed the HOT ROD Drag Week™ event even casually, you know that Larry Larson has competed five times and won four in a row, all in his ’66 Nova that’s now a superstar. Thanks to his pal Terry Wycoff, we can now reveal the car’s humble days, back when our hero Larry was a diesel mechanic. (Today, he runs Larson Race Cars in Oak Grove, Missouri; LarsonRaceCars.net.) Here, in 1992, Larry’s showing off his guns and his Pinky Nova while getting an award at a Scott City, Kansas, car show. Do you remember when the car was, um, fuchsia or is this news to you? The Pro Streeter had 454 and a five-speed in those days. These days, he’s the guy to beat. Will someone? Please? Drag Week™…

Apart from his signature orange spikes and an SUV that briefly wore the same hue (a nod to his alma mater, Oklahoma State University), pro golfer Hunter Mahan always rolls in black. From his Bentley to his airbagged ’72 Chevy C10 to his latest project, a Mike Dusold-designed ’69 Nova, the menacing hue graces all of his modes of transport. It’s quite a contrast to the vibe of the old guard currently ruling the golfing world, but that’s no surprise. Hunter is part of a revolution of young ball strikers taking over the sport, and they are just as serious about their cars as they are their clubs. The Nova is the latest collaboration between the Texas-based Hunter and Dusold Designs (DusoldDesigns.com). Hunter bought the Nova at a GoodGuys event…

In the dark ages of this thing called hot rodding, you could go out in the desert, the farm fields, or along the river banks and find all sorts of old cars, bodies, and parts just lying there, free for the taking. Maybe you’d have to slip the land owner $10 or $20 to keep his dogs at bay. That’s exactly how Norm Grabowski and Tommy Ivo built their seminal, historic hot rod T roadsters: They drove up into the desert, found the T body with the fewest bullet holes, and hauled it home for free. Today we might call it recycling. But that was nearly 60 years ago, and the bodies were 20-some years old at the time. Think about that. A decade or two later, when roadsters and…

PLUG-AND-RUN COYOTE V8 ENGINE Turn Key Engine Supply • 760/941-2741 • TurnKeyEngineSupply.com Turn Key Engine Supply has ventured into Blue Oval territory, starting with the Coyote Boss 302 and Aluminator 5.0L engines, soon to be followed by the Ecoboost twin-turbo V6. The missing link in a ready-to-run 5.0L engine was Turn Key’s new Road Runner power steering and A/C compressor kit that allows a standard, beltdriven Delphi power-steering pump to be mounted low and close to the front of the engine, replacing the electric steering pump in the factory Mustang. It also adds a Vintage Air SD7 compressor to the beltdrive, working with the factory pulleys and tensioners. All of this along with a management system allows Turn Key Engines to sell a complete engine with a fuel pump, a…

The boys at Icon are at it again. After appearing on the Apr. ’11 cover of HOT ROD with their Chrysler/DeSoto wagon, Icon has another finished Derelict project—a ’52 Chevy. Like the wagon, this business coupe looks the part of a barn find from the exterior, but underneath it’s a different story. A full Art Morrison chassis with coilovers, ABS brakes, and an LS3/4L65E powertrain make for comfortable, cross-country reliability, while an interior upholstered in alligator and buffalo provides all the luxury anyone driving a ’52 Chevy could ever want. For anyone who wants a build in a similar vein, pick just about anything from the ’30s to the ’70s, and Icon will make your vision happen. A ’39 Nash and a ’67 Rolls are next in line to get…

How’s this for a bit of irony? You’d think after building seven Dodge Challengers, Scott Shanks might have ended up in the dog house with his wife when he brought home number eight, a beat-down ’70 model. Remarkably, she said to go ahead and build it right, giving her blessing to a project car that previously was literally a home for a dog. Scott had been trying to rescue it from the garage of a parts-peddler friend for years, but he wouldn’t budge and neither would the pup. In 1997, the seller finally gave in and the Challenger was towed home. The project stalled during a few family moves to different states, and during that time the Mopar crowd started to care as much about performance and handling as it…

Nitrous, Not Turbo: In the Jan. ’12 issue’s Drag Week™ coverage, we slipped a synapse when we identified Todd Maschmeier’s once controversial, always badass Camaro (shown) as a turbo car. It’s actually a proud nitrous burner. Topeka, Not Kansas City… Maybe Not Ever Again Kansas City: Suffering from the same sleep deprivation causing the blunder above, the intro of the Drag Week ’11™ story claimed we’d been to Kansas City. In fact, we started and ended at Heartland Park in Topeka. We’ll blame having Kansas City International Raceway on the brain, as that track (site of the very first Drag Week™) closed on November 27 and will become a city park. Peace-and-quiet-loving locals in houses erected after the track was already in place are thrilled. Drag-loving locals are irate. But…

A real hot rod gets driven. Plain and simple: no trailer, no car cover, no fresh coat of wax at every fill-up, no quarter-panels covered with painters’ tape. A road trip should consist of a bag of fresh undies, a big toolbox in the trunk, and the open road. That was Alex Roberts’ plan when he drove his ’34 Ford from his home in Commerce Township, Michigan, to the ’11 Bonneville Speed Week, joining up with the guys from Rolling Bones Hot Rod Shop (RollingBonesHotRodShop.com) from upstate New York. Imagine 4,000 miles in a rod with a short wheelbase, a ratty big-block, a four-speed, no A/C, no radio, and a gas pedal so high you have to stick your knee in your chest to drive it. That’s the core of…

For more than 20 years, Ted Moser has cut a wide path through Hollywood as a transportation coordinator (TC). In movie and television productions, the TC calls the shots on nearly everything with wheels. If sets or equipment need to be moved, it’s the TC who gives the truck drivers their assignments and call times. Moser drew this assignment for 2 Fast 2 Furious, the second of the Fast and Furious films. He set up and crewed a temporary shop and warehouse tasked with building some $6 million worth of tuner cars for the film, in addition to coordinating more than a $1 million worth of transportation to the various locales—on time and under budget. Along the way, Moser identified the need for a one-stop shop that could provide a…

THE PREMISE In the Dec. ’10 and Feb. ’11 issues we took a vacation from our senses and performed a good old-fashioned cylinder-head shootout. Part one compared all the cathedral-port (LS1/LS2) heads on the market, and part two tested the available rectangular-port (LS3/L92) heads to see which flowed best and made the most power. The cathedral-port heads were run on a 408ci stroker, while we stepped things up to an even more powerful 468 stroker to properly test the LS3 heads. Now we’ve gone even crazier to evaluate the almighty LS7 heads. Though the LS7 castings share the rectangular ports of the LS3 heads, they up the flow ante with raised ports, altered valve angle and locations, and even larger titanium valves. Not long ago these factory LS7 castings would…

SEE THIS AND MUCH MORE IN THE APRIL ’12 ISSUE OF HOT ROD MAGAZINE On sale February 14, 2012 HOTROD.com Facebook.com/HotRodMag YouTube.com/HotRodMagazine…

Bigfoot. The name is synonymous with monster trucks. Bigfoot was literally the genesis of a radically different form of racing, and we have Bob Chandler to thank for building the first real monster truck way back in 1979. By 1984, Bob had built three monster trucks and was crushing cars for crowds to promote his 4x4 shop. The trucks were so successful that they appeared in movies like Take This Job and Shove It, Cannonball Run II, Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment, Police Academy 6: Under Siege, Tango and Cash, Roadhouse, and most recently, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. Chandler’s monsters also pioneered the use of rear-wheel steering and a patented, CAD-designed, tubular racing chassis with cantilever suspension. Today, Bigfoot Inc. is still in the racing and promotion business, although…

We were invited to a filming of Top Gear USA in downtown Los Angeles, where stars Rutledge Wood, Adam Ferrara, and Tanner Faust gathered modern muscle cars and their vintage brethren to meet up for a tag-team battle in the concrete-lined L.A. River (locale of the race scene in Grease, among others). Between takes, we got a few minutes alone with each host and asked them the same questions. We say they’re a little too polished because we gave them all a chance to throw one of their fellow hosts under the bus, and none of them took the bait. See Top Gear on The History Channel or visit TopGear.com/US-Show Rutledge: The only thing I think I’ve been nervous about airing is that I wrecked a truck, a Superlite race…

On November 25, 2011, Margie Petersen passed away, closing the door on a long fight with breast cancer. She was 76. Margie’s name is not likely known to you, but to those of us on staff who were here during the Petersen Publishing days, she was the ever-present Mrs. P.—the wife of our founder, Robert E. “Pete” Petersen. She was a professional model and actress when she nabbed the hand of Hollywood’s most eligible bachelor in 1963. Pete and Margie seemed to have rarely left each other’s side until his death in 2007. They were inseparable even after the horribly wrenching experience of having lost both of their sons in a small-plane accident in 1975. In addition to the publishing company, the Petersens owned a restaurant in Hollywood, a small…

Every November, the performance industry gathers for a massive trade show, the SEMA Show, hosted by the Specialty Equipment Market Association. But you know that, because the show has gone global on the Internet and has a rep as the baddest car show/shmooze-fest/booth-girl/speed-parts frenzy on Earth—but one you can’t get into if you’re not in the industry. We’re happy that the business aspect of it seemed to show an uptick at the most recent show. Here are some fun facts about this massive undertaking at the Las Vegas Convention Center. More than 2,000 new products are introduced every year. SEMA claims 2,154 vendors this year. This is the largest annual gathering of small businesses in the United States. More than 3,500 media credentials were issued, a record. The 2011 attendance…

People tend to make assumptions about a car as wildly customized as this ’69 Road Runner. When the cover was pulled off at the ’11 SEMA Show in Las Vegas, the crowd that gathered around no doubt guessed that the one-off, carbon-fiber interior and custom aluminum wheels all pointed to a car that would spend its life as a trailer queen. The monster engine seemed to point to a drag car, but the chassis, suspension, and rolling stock all screamed track car. Is this where Pro Touring is headed—cars that are so customized and detailed that they’ll never run an autocross or see triple-digit speeds—the next step in the evolution of Pro Street? The answer, at least for this car, is a resounding “No.” OK, it will see its fair…

Six hundred fifty horsepower. You heard that right: The new Mustang Shelby GT500 will have 650 hp as it sits on the showroom floor. And it will run 200 mph, stock. Stunning. With the government hell-bent on forcing a 54.5-mpg corporate average fuel economy standard by 2025, you would think the OE engineers would be scrambling to create tiny engines. In fact, they are. But at Ford, they’re not letting that stand in the way of performance and cubic inches. Ford’s Special Vehicle Team (SVT) is working on highly efficient four-cylinders, such as the Ecoboost 2.0L, and is about to debut the way-fun Focus ST, Ford’s first global performance car, which has set the rally world on fire. At the same time, they’ve developed this beast for the ’13 GT500.…

Nitrous is a gift from the gods. It’s a passing gear. It makes average engines extraordinary and average hot rodders feel a foot taller when they are on the button. But like all great gifts, it doesn’t last forever, and therein lies the rub: The squeeze is fun while it lasts, but what do you do when the bottle runs out? The easy answer is to run to your local nitrous oxide supplier and have them refill it. That’s fine if you have a source nearby, but what if you live in the sticks or are at a racetrack that doesn’t offer that service? Relax, you can do the job yourself and save a few bucks while you’re at it. The key to refilling a nitrous bottle yourself is to…

TECH Q AND A (GOT A QUESTION? PITSTOP@HOTROD.COM) JIM ASKS: I am building a ’37 Dodge pickup fenderless hot rod. I intend to use it as a daily driver and for occasional 500-mile round-trips, for a total of 5,000 to 8,000 miles per year. I have a Pontiac 389 left over from a previous build that I intend to put into the Dodge. It will be mated with a 200-4R Grand National transmission with a Stage 1 competition shift kit good for 550 hp. y plan is to bore the 389 by 0.030, turning it into a 400. I will reuse the original crank, which I am told is sufficiently stout for my plans. I have collected the following engine parts to date: Edelbrock Performer RPM heads with 72cc combustion…