Innehållsförteckning för January 2021 från Hot Rod

Editor-in-Chief @john.mcgann In the midst of what can technically be called a pretty bad year, it’s encouraging to see professional motorsports persevering, which in this year should be seen as a raging success. Initially many NASCAR and Indy Car events were canceled or rescheduled, but as the year has progressed, it seems that those organizations have gotten pretty clever in how to complete their schedule by combining events at the same track on the same weekend or running double-header races. I’ve especially been enjoying the IMSA Weathertech SportsCar Championship series this year and the success of the Corvette Racing team with the mid-engine C8.R, which competes in the GT Le Mans (GTLM) class. The team is comprised of the yellow Number 3 car driven by Antonio Garcia and Jordan Taylor,…

Paul Brunner fell in love with 1969 Camaros the first moment he saw one, all the way back in the fall of 1968. He would have bought one brand-new but was unwilling to give up his 1967 427 Corvette, and at the time, he couldn’t afford both. Over the ensuing years, his love for ’69 Camaros continued unabated, but it took exactly four decades before he actually bought one. “In 2008,” Paul remembers, “I was looking through an Internet auction site and found a 1969 Camaro for sale in Texas. It was a ZL1 clone that looked really good. I was in New Zealand at the time and called the man who had built the car. This car had an aluminum 427 engine and a rock crusher M22 tranny.”…

The overall state of the muscle car restoration industry has never been better. Cars are being returned to like-new condition today that would have been good for nothing more than parts donors just a few years ago. This is due to a variety of different factors, among them is the fact that there are more reproduction parts available today, and these cars have become much more desirable and valuable, so they’re worth fixing in spite of the damage. Still, restoration shops encounter many old repairs, or many home-brewed fixes that are less than desirable. Imagine, then, what the guys in the metal shop at Muscle Car Restorations (MCR) must have thought when they saw the roof of this 1970 ’Cuda when it came back from being chemically stripped. The…

The finish line was in sight on the build-up of the Lokar/Street Rodder Road Tour 1934 Ford coupe. In this final installment of the project, we’re starting at Precision Hot Rods in Macedonia, Ohio, for body prep and paint, then moving to Speed & Design in Nashville, Tennessee, for the interior installation. The two-tone paint design on this year’s 25th Road Tour car was directly inspired by the blue and white design on the “Blue Skunk,” Lokar’s 1933 Ford coupe that was the first Road Tour car 24 years ago. Precision’s painter, Mark Mindzora, was responsible for the paintjob on that first Road Tour coupe in 1996, and pulled the paint gun trigger on this year’s car as well. He used PPG products on both cars, with incredible results.…

Roadkill @davidfreiburger One of the reasons I’m so proud to work for HOT ROD is the legacy of accomplishments of the staffers who came before me. I recently wrote about how HRM was “The Original Influencer” for readers, but the magazine has had incredible impact on the industry as well. It’d be disingenuous to claim that Robert E. Petersen founded HOT ROD in 1948 for any reason other than to capitalize on advertising for the burgeoning speed-equipment marketplace, but when he did so, HRM quickly became the largest and loudest voice to help sell products. Companies like Edelbrock existed many years before HRM began, but many pioneers have credited Petersen for making their business thrive, which led to more companies springing up. So, while HOT ROD didn’t create the industry,…

“AS the lights come down, you squeeze the engine toward six grand, slide your left foot off the clutch, stab the loud pedal between the last yellow and the green, and bang!— 375 horses (a 425 Performance Rating via NHRA’s new system) launch you off the line for a near record run. Right? Wrong! At least that’s the way it was on every run we made with this month’s drag test vehicle, a ’68 Chevrolet SS396 Chevelle hardtop.” Drew Hardin explained that Car Craft’s John Raffa was obviously frustrated while testing Chevy’s all-new A-Body at the Irwindale dragstrip in November 1967. That frustration boiled right to the surface in the paragraph above, which opened his Drag Test in the magazine’s Feb. ’68 issue. “Oh, the horses are there all…

Bill Jones refers to the 1960s as “my day” and remembers the hot rods that were all over the streets of Southern California when he was a teenager. He was driving a 1956 Chevy Bel Air back then and (not surprisingly) got into the occasional stoplight showdown. You had to be smart about picking your competition. Most of the time, the fast cars were easy to spot. Some of the time, though, they could fool you with a mild outward appearance that hid their potential to humiliate challengers. “In my day, we called them sleepers,” Jones said. The dictionary defines a sleeper as a hot rod intentionally built to look milder than it is, at least that’s how it would sound if we were writing the dictionary. A few…

Knowledge is power is an often-used phrase, but real data from a computer with no ego can give you the good, bad, and sometimes ugly details of your last time around the track. Track data loggers were once something only professional racers could afford, but thanks to the aftermarket you can get pro-level data at a weekend warrior price point. Racepak sent us one of their new Vantage CL1 track data loggers to play with, and we loved being able to see what we did right and wrong at the track. Since then, Racepak has come out with the even more affordable CL2 OBDII based data logger. Either way you go, this technology can make you faster at the autocross, road course, and even dragstrip. So let’s take a…

We think of electronic engine management systems and multiport electronic fuel injection (EFI) as primarily responsible for the improved air/fuel distribution and performance as Detroit clawed its way back in the mid 1980s, but—good as they were for that day—initially the new electronics were just Band-Aids grafted onto carryover engine designs. The big change started in the 1990s, when the OEs started tinkering with cylinder head design to induce swirl and tumble in internal combustion engines. The changes were first evolutionary, but around the dawn of the 21st century, new ground-up engine designs like the GM Gen III LS small-block, Ford Modular engines, and Chrysler 5.7/6.1 Gen III Hemi appeared. The goal of 21st-century cylinder head engineering is controlling and managing the combustion process by combining radical combustion chambers with…

Don’t be fooled by its understated appearance, John McClintock’s 1967 Mustang Coupe is a purpose-built race car. To give perspective to John’s build, it’s important to understand that in 1966 and 1967, Shelby American built a handful of Mustang coupes to compete in the SCCA’s fledgling A-Sedan (amateur)and Trans Am (professional) classes. Shelby’s GT350 wasn’t legal to race in either class since it was homologated as a two-seater for B-Production, so the Group II coupes were essentially built to GT350 R-model spec and met the rules of the day. For 1967, 25 coupes were built, according to the Shelby American Automobile Club, with four used as team cars and the rest being sold to privateers. Shelby team cars were key to Ford winning the Trans Am title that year,…

If you have the cash, a shiny new LS crate engine is the way to go. But what’s the best way to add big power to your otherwise-stock crate engine? Well, we picked up an LS3 offering from BluePrint Engines (PN PSLS3760CTF) and decided to find out. BluePrint now offers a crate engine that has all the GM goodness we’re used to, but with a few nice features that, to be honest, we typically end up doing ourselves to our stock crate engines. This engine already comes with a fairly healthy cam from Comp sporting 225/238 degrees of duration at 0.050, 0.612/0.585-inch lift, and a 113-degree LSA. Though not huge, those specs are good enough to make power and still have great street manners. The new LS3 crate engine…

Q: I have question about Hydroboost brakes. The cam in my 1940 Ford Coupe doesn’t make a lot of vacuum. I would like to put power steering and Hydroboost brakes on the car. My son has an early 2000 Chevy Tahoe with Hydroboost brakes. There should be a lot of those in junkyards. Could I pull off the power steering pump, Hydroboost unit, and hoses and install them on my car? I know the hoses won’t fit but there is a place in town that can make just about any hydraulic hose. A: Rich, we see problems like yours quite often on a variety of cars, and there are several solutions, including your proposed Hydroboost brake system. Technically known as a hydraulically boosted brake system, instead of vacuum, a…