Innehållsförteckning för December 2016 från Hot Rod

I’ve spent a good chunk of my life and career around drag racing, but this summer—for the first time—I spent seven days on the salt for the famed SCTA Speed Week at Bonneville. This was the first time the salt had been good enough to support racing in three years, and the pent-up energy in the pits from racers hell bent to test the boundaries of speed was palpable. People were so happy just to be back. From my quarter-mile frame of reference, the pace of Speed Week is decidedly different. It’s… slower. Longer runs make for a longer return road, and the distance from the pits to the starting line is pretty big, too. The general expansiveness of the place certainly slows down the pace, but it’s…

Sometimes you get lucky and two worlds collide. In addition to traveling the country hunting old Detroit iron, I’m also into everything from steam to streamliner diesel trains—especially old/abandoned train lines and equipment. Following up on a lead, I ended up at a private yard that included an old railroad right-of-way and even the station! The owner allowed me to walk around and photograph the place. He walked me through one of the old barns where there was an old 1950s Ford truck and a first-gen Firebird reposing in wooden stalls. But the old train station was in the yard. When the railroad line was discontinued, the owner bought the line next to his property, including the station, and expanded around it. At the time the line was pulled up,…

One of the best things about hot rodding is that you can take the road less traveled. If you’re crafty, with a good imagination, you can combine that with a car considered less desirable and end up with something more appealing than your typical Mustang/Camaro/’Cuda build, just because it’s not “typical.” While we love all the ponycars and they are the most popular platform to build your dream on, they’re abundant at places like Power Tour® all the way to the local cruise-in. To be fair, the 1966 and 1967 Fairlanes are not a bad start at all. We often wonder why certain great project candidates like the ’Lane aren’t more popular. But you have to go well beyond the effort you’d put into a popular pony to get the…

Cheap turbos are nothing new. The thrifty, yet potent, snails have been on the market for quite some time. You’ve read about them before, probably seen one at your local dragstrip, and have maybe even pondered buying one. Before you do, HOT ROD brings you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about cheap turbo kits. A few years ago, eBay was the place to go for dollar-store turbochargers. It still is, with plenty of bargain performance parts, but the cheapest turbo kits we found came from another website: Amazon. The kits, sold under the brand Auto Dynasty, come in five tiers based on the amount of pieces included— you know, like ordering fried chicken. The base kit (five-piece) includes the turbocharger, exhaust manifolds, gaskets, wastegate, and…

No, this is not about why Funny Cars should look like their reallife counterparts, though that’s a common discussion around HOT ROD and drag-racing circles, in general. Instead, this is about proportion and stance. You might hear these terms come up from time to time dealing with the overall appeal of a particular car design, but it’s a bit fuzzy on what it refers to and how important it really is. Our example is the Rambler (soon to be AMC) Rebel from 1967 and its fantastic Grant Rambler Funny Car replicate of “Banzai Bill” Hayes from that epoch when Funny Cars were just morphing from real car body shells to fiberglass flip-top facsimiles. Race Car Specialties’ Frank Huszar and Roy Steen built a chassis about 10 inches longer than a…

If X is the amount of cars you own, then X + 1 = how many cars you need. I think there are many car people who live by the formula, and they are almost categorically the ones like me—i.e., the ones who don’t finish anything. I harken back to the wise words of former Editor-in-Chief David Kennedy, who taught me, “It’s always the next car that will solve all your problems.” It’s the gearhead version of “the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.” For some reason, I always have more passion about the car I want to own next than I do for the ones I’m already working on. I live in the fantasy that the next car I buy…

Behold the best great attempt at what has become the archetype for Top Fuel dragsters: the rear-engine race car. HOT ROD related Tom McEwen’s catastrophic Lions crash in a rear-engine Barracuda a few years back; it flew, you know, like an airplane. But that didn’t stop racers from continuing to tickle the rear-engine Funny Car paradigm. “Big” Jim Dunn and Joe Reath had Woody Gilmore construct this ’Cuda Funny Car in late-1971. Dunn was well aware of the idiosyncrasies, shall we say, of rear-engine floppers having crewed on Doug Thorley’s Javelin I, witnessing driver Bob Hightower flip over backward launching at Irwindale in 1969. Gilmore built that car, too, so everyone involved knew the spookiness factor. Still, it was met with great success in Top Fuel, keeping the driver out…

Here’s a trend we can get behind. Take a car that’s already low and wide, make it even lower and wider, give it supercar levels of naturally aspirated power, a suspension that can put it to use, and more Hoosier race rubber than you can scrape off all four lanes at zMAX Dragway. That was the basic formula the Roadster Shop used to build “Rampage,” a 1970 Camaro, in its Mundelein, Illinois, shop. Here’s how it went down. CONCEPT The path that led to the Rampage Camaro began years ago when Roadster Shop co-founder Jeremy Gerber had an idea for a “wicked widebody” car. Jeremy selected a second-generation Camaro because it wasn’t quite as blasphemous to cut one up as opposed to a moreiconic 1969 Camaro or Mustang SportsRoof. Artist…

In September 1967, American Motors Corporation (AMC) had no performance parts, no performance engineering group, no racing group, no engine-development program, and absolutely no plan for what it was about to embark on. With only months left before the introduction of the company’s AMX and Javelin ponycars, AMC decided the best way to market them was to enter into Trans-Am road racing, NASCAR, and Pro Stock drag racing. Let’s just say it was highly optimistic AMC believed it could dive into any form of racing, as it was the manufacturer of sensible, compact cars and a few other things like Marlins. Look it up if you don’t know about Marlins. They were the little Wisconsin car company that could, as long as it didn’t involve speed, racing, performance, or impressing…

Q: I am looking to replace a 1989 LA 318 with a Gen III Hemi. I am wondering what the physical dimensions of the Gen III Hemi are compared to the LA 318. A: What Chrysler calls the “Generation III Hemi” family was first introduced in 2002 and includes 5.7L, 6.1L, and 6.4L variants. Depending on exact configuration and model, an assembled, OE Generation III Hemi can be as much as 5. inches wider, 5 inches taller (top to bottom), and 25⁄8 inches longer (including front drives) compared to a traditional LA-series small-block engine. The enginemount lugs are completely different. However, the Gen III’s rear block-face bolt pattern is identical to a Chrysler LA small-block minus the LA’s top bolt. It is also close to the old 392 Generation I…

The sun rose with the growing volume of idling race cars. At 4:30 a.m., the cold mountain forest was lit by a patchwork of headlights and trailer-mounted flood lamps as teams unpacked their hill-climb machines. The HOT ROD Special team had already been awake for nearly three hours as they unloaded a 2016 Dodge Viper ACR, the HOT ROD Special, for qualifying at the 100th anniversary of the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb (PPIHC). Even though it was a rookie entry at PPIHC, this particular ACR was the same unit that stole 13 production-car track records last year—it was battle-proven. Still, our crew chief, SRT Motorsport Engineer Tom O’Dell, still eyeballed every detail of Thursday morning’s prep from dipstick to lug nut. Though we had a permission slip from SRT…

If you’re wondering why HOT ROD is featuring a boat, here are two reasons for starters: 1) It’s powered by a 1,600 lb-ft of torque, 12-cylinder Allison monster and 2) HOT ROD Magazine sponsored this for four years when it competed in 1960s marathon racing. Now that we’ve got your attention, we’ll let “Cream Puff” owner and restorer John Fell from Yorba Linda, California, start this off: “I raced crackerboxes for 10 years and said I’d never build another dang boat, and then I thought, ‘Wait, nobody is driving an Allison-engine boat down the river, and there I was into another boat project.” This was back in the early 1990s. If that sounds cockeyed, understand that John’s body and brains have been pounded from racing boats a bit too much.…

The scene: Stop-and-go traffic on Interstate 405 North in Los Angeles. I’m sweating to death in the Dodge Polara in the fast lane—“fast” being a misnomer at this point. The windows are down in the Dodge, but there isn’t much breeze. A white Plymouth van is beside me in the carpool lane, the only other car with open windows. Two guys are inside, laughing, music bumping. Van Guys: Hey! Hey! You like Banda music? We are listening to Banda! Me: I know, I can hear it. Van Guys: What are you listening to? Me: Uh, the engine? Radio doesn’t work. Van Guys: We will stay next to you so you can listen to Banda with us. Me: OK. Van Guys: You want to sell that car? Me: No.…

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