Innehållsförteckning för February 2022 från Hot Rod

@john.mcgann Never in a million years would I have guessed that Chevrolet Performance would be bringing a mega-sized big-block Chevy crate engine to market, yet just this week, it announced the 1,004-hp ZZ632. Insane! And insanely cool. In a time when all you seem to hear about are EV conversions and hybrid drivetrains, many of those agendas coming from GM, Chevrolet socks you in the jaw with this. Our own Steven Rupp was quick of keyboard and got a piece up on HOTROD.com with just enough tantalizing insider info about this engine, and it blew up our website and social media pages. Why is that? Well, I think there are several reasons. First, it’s just plain cool. Big-block Chevys have always been held in high regard from the second the…

Some pills are more bitter to swallow than others, but imagine receiving a prescription from your primary care physician recommending a course of treatment comprised of a five-day road trip in your favorite car. Sign me up! Anyone reading this would find that pill to be very easy to swallow. That’s the remedy we had planned for the 2021 HOT ROD Power Tour Presented by HP Tuners and Driven by Continental Tire. After a hiatus last year due to the global pandemic, the Power Tour returned to offer an octane-fueled remedy for gearheads looking to cure the COVID blues. Normally held in June, we bumped the Power Tour back to the end of August to have extra time to plan the event and to also gauge the climate of the…

One of the earliest dragstrips in California is fading from memory. For more than two decades, Santa Maria Dragstrip, on California’s Central Coast, was the main place to go in the region if you wanted to drag race. Locally, legal drag racing had been done at the airport in nearby Goleta since 1948. That stopped in 1952, and in the words of founder and speed shop owner Jerry Gaskill, “We didn’t want to drive all the way down to Santa Ana to race, so we decided to get a strip started up here.” Jerry was also president of the Dragons car club and worked with them to acquire a lease on part of an abandoned wartime air base. Racing started in 1953, and the new strip was an immediate success.…

Almost eight years after the build-up and dyno test of our 500ci Indy Max Wedge, we have had ample opportunity to live with this extraordinary street beast, both on the highway and to a lesser degree, at the dragstrip. Remarkable for what is ostensibly a detuned race engine, the Indy Max continues to put forth strong, reliable performance, after all these years, even on California’s notoriously bad 91-octane pump fuel. In the intervening period, the Indy Max was installed into our Valiant using TTI’s 2-into-2.125-inch long-tube step headers (PN 400SR-218) and 3-inch X-pipe with turn-downs, then drag tested down Fontana’s quarter-mile with a best e.t. of 11.25 seconds at 121 mph. The Valiant is driven to shows and cruise events on a regular basis, and though other problems have arisen…

Roadkill @davidfreiburger My first byline in HOT ROD magazine appeared in the February 1992 issue. Now, 30 years later, the February 2022 issue will likely carry my last. This is my final editorial column. My life in print began in 1989 when Kevin Wilson accepted a story of mine for 4WDrive Action magazine, and soon I also wrote for Roland Osborne at Chrysler Power. That freelance work helped me get an interview at Petersen Publishing in mid-1991. Hours before the meeting, I got my hair cut figuring they wouldn’t hire a guy who looked like he sang for Warrant. My interview was simultaneously with Pat Ganahl for Rod & Custom magazine and Jeff Smith for HOT ROD. I’d also interviewed with Jeff when I was 18 and he was the…

SEMA vehicles often negotiate a very curvy, and often curious, path from obscurity to having a spot in a manufacturer’s booth on the floor of the Las Vegas Convention Center. Many display cars at the show are privately owned and loaned to the various companies for use. Others are built specifically for the show and are owned by individual companies to show off their wares with the intention of drawing attendees into their booth. This 1969 big-block Chevelle falls into this second category. When TMI was searching for display cars to fill their booth, there were two paths they could have taken. Either find a project and build it from scratch or find a car that was as complete as possible and work it over to display their custom interior…

In the spring of 2013, we set out to equip our 1968 Plymouth Valiant project car with big-block Mopar power, something the lightweight A-Body compact never came with from the factory in any significant numbers. Big engines in lightweight cars are the secret to big performance, and we wanted to be a part of that, so we turned to the Mopar experts at Indy Cylinder Head for advice and inspiration. What started out as a desire for a junkyard rehab on a low-deck 383/400 wedge big-block turned into a full-blown Chevy-killer when Indy’s Ken Lazari informed us about the company’s aluminum alloy Indy Maxx block. Combined with Indy’s other performance-optimized breathing components, it looked like we might end up with a ground-pounding big-block Mopar that weighed less than the Valiant’s…

The unsung hero of your driveline is the rear axle, specifically the center section or third member. It takes all the power your engine is spinning out and makes it do a 90-degree turn to your wheels. It’s a brutal job that’s made even more demanding when turning left and right enters the mix. Yet, given its importance, people often put far less thought into it than they do sexier driveline items such as the engine. If their car simply putts around town, they might get around this oversight for a long time, but the harder the car is driven, the more important the rear becomes. Building the right third member is about more than just the parts. It’s also about how those parts were put together. The best parts…

Steering gearboxes are set up with ratios that affect how many times you have to turn the steering wheel to get the front wheels to pivot a given number of degrees. In a wide-ratio box you have to turn the steering wheel many times to get the front wheels to rotate to full lock. In some cases, this could be 4.5 revolutions to turn the wheel from lock to lock. With a close-ratio steering box with a ratio of 12.7:1, it will only take about three revolutions of the steering wheel to go from lock to lock. What difference does 1.5 revolutions make? The answer is a lot. You may not notice it much when driving down to the grocery store, but if you ever find yourself on a long…

Stock car racing got its start in the rural South, but by the time NASCAR arrived at Riverside International Raceway in the early 1960s, the sport had achieved national success. Southern California was a long way from the sands of Daytona Beach, Florida, and the dirt tracks of the Deep South, but the bright lights of Hollywood and the deep pockets of big sponsors and bigger purses lured fans and racers westward—specifically to what would become the town of Moreno Valley, California, in Riverside County. These images—some of them never seen before—come from the Petersen Publishing archives and show some of racing’s legends in their prime, including Fred Lorenzen, Richard Petty, Buck Baker, A.J. Foyt, Mario Andretti, Ned Jarrett, Parnelli Jones, Dan Gurney, Joe Weatherly, Fireball Roberts, David Pearson, LeeRoy…

Have you ever hidden away some cash and forgotten all about it, only to find it years later? Well, that’s Bill Wyckoff’s story, but instead of cash it was the 1937 Ford truck that he cruised in during high school. “Fifty-five years ago, I parked my high school ride (a 1937 Ford) in an old barn behind my parents’ home,” Bill told us. “I had pulled the motor for rebuild, but otherwise it was still complete. Time flies, and the truck sat in the old barn becoming a home for various critters. My oldest son had been after me for some time to start work on rebuilding the truck since we had done several such projects for my grandsons. More time went by until one Saturday my son said, ‘If…

LS7s make great engine swap candidates, but what if 427 cubic inches just isn’t enough displacement for you? Well then, what you need is a stroker. With that in mind, American Heritage Performance (AHP) came up with a recipe to turn this LS7 into a 442-inch (7.2L for the metric crowd) powerhouse. This “LS-More” was getting dyno-tested at Westech Performance, and Steve Brule, of Engine Masters fame, knew we would like to be given the 411 on it. Sources Aeromotive; 913.647.7300; aeromotiveinc.com American Heritage Performance; 310.326.2399; americanheritageperformance.com Cam Motion Crankshafts; 225.926.6110; commotion.com CP-Carrillo; 949.567.9000; cp-carrillo.com Edelbrock; 888.799.1135; edelbrock.com Holley; 866.464.6553; holley.com Lucas Oil Products; 800.342.2512; lucasoil.com Meziere Enterprises; 800.208.1755; meziere.com Westech Performance Group; 951.685.4767; westechperformance.com…

Rarely does an automotive part offer the best of both worlds, but we think exhaust cutouts can often deliver on that promise. Generally, we all like loud exhaust, but there are times when 90 dB is just not cool. Cutouts give you the option to shatter eardrums at will, then sedately slip away from the scene of the crime. Exhaust cutouts are not a new invention. In fact, they’ve probably been around as long as mufflers have, because there always seems to be a time when you wish your exhaust was a little louder. Basically, an exhaust cutout is an opening in the exhaust system between the headers and the mufflers. The opening is normally capped and sends all the vehicle’s exhaust through the mufflers and out the tailpipes. But…