Innehållsförteckning för August 2016 från Hot Rod

One of the founding principles of hot rodding is, if one is good— two is way better. Need more horsepower? Double the number of cylinders. Need more fuel? Add a second carburetor. Need to beat every other vehicle in the competition? Use two engines. I’m a sucker for twin anything in cars. It started when my dad pointed out trains have more than one locomotive and was branded into my brain when he took me to my first tractor pull. I’ve never owned a twinengine vehicle, but the first R/C car I assembled had twin 12-volt Trinity motors, and my daily driver was built with twin injection pumps, twin turbos, and twin drive axles as design requirements. But building hot rods with two engines? When I…

On my way to the Indy Mopar Swap Meet, I decided to take some extra time and follow up on some leads along the route. All of them turned out to be a bust, but when I pulled into a gas station and asked the person behind the counter if there were any cool old cars hanging around, she said, “There was one sitting nearby that looked like your Challenger.” I drove around for a bit, and out of the corner of my eye, behind some pickup cabs I saw it—the nose of a 1970 Plymouth ’Cuda. I knocked on the door and a gentleman opened it. I talked to him for a bit, told him what I do, and how I had heard he had a cool car. He…

Ford has entered four GTs in the 24 Hours of Le Mans for 2016, and they’ll run under the numbers 66, 67, 68, and 69. Do you know why the Ford GTs have those particular competition numbers? It’s because 1966 was the first year Ford won Le Mans with the GT40. Then it won again in 1967. And, you guessed it, in 1968 and 1969 as well. There’s some pretty cool history behind Ford’s return to sports-car racing, but a lot of pressure there as well. The first race, the Rolex 24 hours of Daytona, wasn’t awesome for the Ford GT, but things went much better at the 12 Hours of Sebring, and the Fords will soon head for France. Chip Ganassi Racing (CGR) heads up the Ford racing program,…

Things are never obvious at the beginning of anything—especially drag racing. Yeah, early drag racers understood the key to accelerating quicker was to increase displacement or reduce weight. They weren’t dummies. But they didn’t have 60 years of ideas to draw from either. Drag racing in the middle of the last century was sort of a Wild West frontier of increasingly radical ideas. One of those ideas was the twin-engine “Bustle Bomb.” BUSTLE BOMB MYTHOLOGY Just about every student of early drag racing knows about a guy named Lloyd “Scotty” Scott who built this crazy-looking contraption with an Olds engine up front and a Caddy in the back. It showed up at the Santa Ana Drag Strip in the 1950s and kicked ass. Then it went to some big meet…

Consider any random year, make, and model of car. I’ll say 1969 AMC AMX. The thing I realize is that I may not like all 1969 AMXs, but I may fall in love with one particular example if it’s in the right context. And that’s what I’ve been philosophizing about lately: context. The context that drives passions for the majority of older hot rodders is nostalgia: “I had one of these in high school.” I also find that situational circumstance is a major player in a car’s appeal; take a bone-stock restored 1969 Chevelle and plant it at a major car show and it falls to the background, but the same car showing up at a local gas station is cool. Spotting an old car on…

With the backdrop of Sears, Shrimpenstein, and psychedelia, you’re witness to the Hollywood Teen Fair held in HOT ROD’s hood at the Hollywood Palladium during spring break in 1967. If you wonder why HOT ROD, displaying our latest issue with Ford’s Super Mustang dragster drawing crowds, and hot rods like the recently crowned “America’s Most Beautiful Roadster” from the 1967 Oakland Roadster Show (Bob Reisner’s twin-engine “Invader”) would give a hoot about long-haired hippie kids, you should know that this Teen Fair scored record attendance of 301,000 visitors during its 10 days. Teenagers were a huge market and right in HOT ROD’s wheelhouse. Local car builders Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, Dean Jeffries, and Von Dutch displayed their crazy car creations and art, along with amusement rides, carnival booths, surfing clinics,…

Chevrolet invited us to an event at Spring Mountain Motorsports Ranch in Pahrump, Nevada, to show off the 2017 Camaro ZL1. Mark Reuss, executive vice president of Global Product Development for GM, took the stage as the cover came off the bright-red 2017 ZL1. What was immediately apparent was the aggressive new front bodywork, unique to the ZL1 from the A-pillar forward. BODYWORK—STYLE MEETS ENGINEERING Our eyes were first drawn to the new hood, with its carbon-fiber insert and sizable heat extractor to pull hot air from the engine compartment. We noticed a bit of resemblance to the Corvette L88 hood that managed to find its way onto a few Baldwin Motion Camaros. We had the chance to speak with Tom Peters, who has worked on Camaro and Corvette design…

We are in a period where shops that modify cars have to go deeper into concept-car territory with their projects than ever before. From where we stand, it’s great for enthusiasts and becomes an ideas treasure box for home builders and sometimes a source for components spun off of said projects the home builder can purchase for his or her own build. And the push for ever more inventive projects helps goose along the design juices of many pro shops, so it’s seemingly good for all. Traditional hot rodders may feel it’s hyperdrive overkill, but with so much noise in the world today, some shops feel the need to go extreme to grab extra attention for themselves and customers. The Roadster Shop in Mundelein, Illinois, has been churning out a…

Nostalgia drag racing has but a few events each year where we can savor some of the excitement that professional drag racing once held. The homogenized cars, burst plates, and electronics of today’s big-time drag racing results in less of a “show,” even though it comes with more “go.” But at the March Meet, held every spring in Bakersfield, California, part of the nostalgia is the return of unpredictability, crazy combos, and so much more to see both from an action and component perspective. Here are 10 of the things we love about the March Meet. NIGHT RACING To really experience a drag race, you need to see it in the dark, with the header flames and misty combo of damp night air and nitro all swirled together in an…

Traditionally, most of us define a dualpattern cam as a grind with dissimilar intake and exhaust duration and/or lift. But Comp Cams’ Valvetrain Engineering Group Leader Billy Godbold says in today’s usage, a dual-pattern cam is one that uses different intake and exhaust lobe profiles, even if its gross lift and duration numbers (be it advertised or at 0.050) are the same. “All our cams designed since the late-1980s have different intake and exhaust lobes. They have different acceleration rates; different opening and closing rates. If anyone designs a cam today with the same intake and exhaust lobe, they are probably being lazy. The engine won’t be all it can be.” But that begs the question: When should the intake and exhaust lift and duration “paper” specs differ? “It’s always…

The Camaro design and engineering team was proud to show off the performance of the 2016 Camaro convertible, the latest variant in the ponycar line to enter production. The Camaro team invited us out to Pahrump, Nevada, to drive the new cars with the top down in the desert to see how the sixth-generation’s evolution on the Alpha platform translated its hardtop driving dynamics into the most advanced Camaro convertible yet. We have racked up thousands of miles in the 2016 Camaro coupe, mostly in SS models, and have been impressed with how responsive it is. On stage at Spring Mountain Motorsports Ranch, Camaro Chief Engineer Al Oppenheiser promised that the convertible would continue to deliver the kind of handling we’ve come to expect. Like the coupe, the convertible benefits…

SpeedKore is no stranger to the B-body Charger. The custom-car shop has built a reputation for turning out top-notch cars and working almost exclusively with muscle-era Mopars. SpeedKore founder Dave Salvaggio has built about 20 of them, each one unique. The 1968–1970 Charger’s Coke-bottle styling is an icon among musclecar fans and borderline sacred to the Mopar faithful. Salvaggio and his crew of designers, engineers, and fabricators set out to show off their talents in car-building and carbon-fiber fabrication with this 1970 Charger that debuted at the 2015 SEMA Show, but knew they shouldn’t try to reinvent what Dodge had gotten so right. As its plan evolved, SpeedKore’s team decided that, unlike a lot of flashy SEMA builds, this car would require a close look before it gave its secrets…

The new neighbors invited us over for dinner. As we stood in their nicely remodeled home, their cat walked in, looked right at us, and took a giant poop on the living room floor. They were mortified, but we thought it was hilarious. Who here hasn’t been embarrassed by an ill-behaved pet, child, or in the case of us hot rodders, a car? What is it about a classic car that it will run flawlessly for months and then send a 4-foot flame out of the carb just as you’re heading out with a group for a canyon run or dump an overflow bottle’s worth of coolant right as you pull into the cruise night? I can’t count how many times I’ve had to soothe an apologetic car…

Q: What is the formula for cubic inches when an engine is bored 0.030 inch? I have always been told that when bored 0.030-inch oversize, a 283ci small-block is 301, and a 350 is a 350 [sic]. Is this true? I was at a car show in New Jersey last summer and got into a rather heated discussion about it. I really love HOT ROD. I’ve been reading and then subscribing to it since I was 14. Now I’m 70 and still enjoying it. I have a 1932 Ford five-window street rod I waited 40 years for (see photo). Keep ’em coming! A: Nice wheels and thanks for the kind words, Nelson! We all wish our high school math teacher had used real-world examples when explaining the concepts of circles,…