Innehållsförteckning för December 2022 från Hot Rod

@john.mcgann Life is about balance. As human beings, we feel most fulfilled when we ride that line between chaos and order. If there is too much chaos, life is miserable. Too much order, life becomes stale and stultified. We need that sense of accomplishment gained when we tackle a problem, thereby restoring order to chaos. If there’s no chaos, there’s no innovation. It’s the struggle that defines us and moves us forward in life. That’s part of the appeal of our hobby. Cars offer us the pleasure and pain of life in a self-contained microcosm. There are parts to wear out and inefficiencies to improve upon. There is a lot of hidden science in cars—electrical theory, thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, metallurgy, physics, and geometry. They offer us practical applications of the…

One of the most unique events of the year is MotorTrend presents Roadkill Nights Powered by Dodge, an event that shut down Woodward Avenue and took over the M1 Concourse on Saturday, August 13th in Pontiac, Michigan. The single-day event included legal street racing on Woodward Avenue, mayhem inside the M1 Concourse gates with Dodge, a midway, car show, and many of your favorite TV stars from MotorTrend’s original programming. One of the most anticipated showdowns on Woodward Avenue was the Dodge Direct Connection Grudge Match. Eight social media influencers duked it out for a chance to race against HOT ROD Garage’s Alex Taylor and Lucky Costa. The influencer class winner will line up against Alex, who won last year’s competition, in a winner-takes-all drag race that went down on…

Sean Tobin had only the broadest strokes of a plan when he walked into a Dodge dealership in 1989, but he sensed his life was about to change in a big way. Did he buy a Dodge? Nope. Not even close. “I was driving down Van Nuys Boulevard. I saw the car out of the corner of my eye and immediately did a U-turn. It was on the front line, and I went straight for it. I knew the Grand Am. I’m one of those geeks. I knew it had to be only a 400 or a 455, that’s all they made it in. I knew if the emblem said ‘7.4 Litres’ then it had to be a 455.” The ER nurse from Mission Viejo, California, was 25 at the…

For the seventh straight year, Roadkill Nights Powered by Dodge rocked over 40,000 fans with street racing on Woodward Avenue, a massive show and shine, and an assortment of exciting Dodge displays of power and performance. The M1 Concourse in Pontiac, Michigan, once again hosted the unique event, which also served as the unofficial kickoff to the Woodward Dream Cruise. Dodge brought a collection of SRT Challenger and Charger vehicles for “thrill rides” on the skidpad and road course. New for 2022 was the addition of an off-road course that had the 702hp RAM 1500 TRX trucks giving joyrides for fans. Professional drivers raced over a tabletop jump and hit the curves in the makeshift racecourse, showing the capabilities of the TRX truck. The MotorTrend event team took over a…

Templar, Simon Templar. Nope—doesn’t have the same ring as 007, yet somehow Roger Moore managed to make both characters ooze cool. Granted Connery got the better end of the car deal with his Bond’s Aston Martin DB5, but Moore still scored with a submarining Lotus Esprit and Templar’s Volvo P1800 he drove in the television show The Saint. Cut to 2022, and we open on a Cerulean Blue P1800 streaking through morning’s first light. It’s a far cry from the original car that Moore would have driven, but Cyan Racing has reimagined this Swedish classic that Simon Templar would surely have been excited to drive. Building customer cars to support a racing habit remains a long-standing tradition in the automotive industry. The team at Cyan Racing, established in 1996 and…

Infatuation is a state of mind most hot rodders are familiar with. An idea enters the consciousness and holds you hostage until something breaks—your bank account, your family harmony, or your work/life balance. You’re flirting with a difficult and dangerous equilibrium between supreme emotional payoff and utter financial destruction, and Dodge’s mic-drop 840hp Dodge Demon illuminates this addictive fascination in a microcosm. Only 3,300 of these ultimate muscle cars were built in its single year of production in 2018—ancient history at this point. The Demon’s arsenal of high-performance goodies is tantalizing: 840 horsepower, factory-issued drag radials, launch control, power chiller, torque reserve, line-lock, trans brake, and, at the top of the pile, active drag suspension. It’s a street-legal race car with a bona fide 9-second pedigree. At its inception, Dodge…

It was the early 1990s, and a new guy at General Motors named Mark Stielow had an idea for a car build. At that time, Stielow had messed with Mustangs, AMXs, and even MGBs, but he found that first-gen Camaros looked, drove, and just worked better than anything he had worked with before. His first Camaro was a white (black vinyl top) 1969 RS that had 50,000 miles on the odometer. He stuffed a Doug Nash five-speed in it and had fun. Maybe a bit too much fun—that car left the equation after trying to clear a patch of trees. As Stielow stated, “I was only bruised and unhappy. The Camaro was totaled but proved its strength and safety as it protected me.” In 1991, Stielow, while working at the…

The news that 2023 would be the final year for the Dodge Charger and Challenger—as we know them, anyway—prompted us to go back into the archives and see what HOT ROD had to say about these muscle machines when they were new. Turns out, not all that much. Each car received one road test in 1969, then the fuselage-bodied Charger Super Bee was tested in 1971. Feature Editor Steve Kelly basically yawned through his review of a 440-powered Challenger R/T coupe in “Brute Force” (Dec. ’69), though he placed a lot of the blame for its “disappointing performance” on the “extra hard previous use by who-knows-how-many-drivers.” And despite his “And Super it Is” headline (Feb. ’71) review of the Charger Super Bee, “the car’s performance fell short of our expectations.”…

Lucky Costa’s 1966 Chevelle You’ve seen it on TV, you’ve seen it on MotorTrend+, you’ve seen it on the cover of Car Craft, on social media, and at various events in Southern California and the surrounding states. Lucky Costa’s ’66 Chevelle has been there, done that. He’s owned the car since 2012, and he’s constantly changing and refining it. At the time it was in Car Craft, Lucky’s Chevelle was powered by a junkyard 6.0L engine with a used T56 six-speed and Chassisworks control arms and Varishock coilovers. In the intervening years, Lucky added a Magnuson supercharger, upgraded the two-piston Baer brakes for sexy six-piston calipers up front and a set of four-piston calipers on the rear, with drilled rotors all around. He also installed Ridetech’s full coilover suspension, opting…

Every now and again we come across a barn or field find that’s extra special—one that has been carefully tucked away from time and is still in pristine condition. This isn’t that story, but what this car lacks in condition it more than makes up for in rarity and coolness. Meet a 1968 Z/28 Camaro that is currently being saved from the ravages of time. But how did this rare piece of Camaro history come to find itself abandoned in a damp field to be violated by Mother Nature for over four decades? Well, for that story we need to hit up the car’s current owner, JB Coppedge. As he told us, “The first owner didn’t have the car long and, in late 1969, ended up trading it in for…

There’s an old African proverb that says it takes a village to raise a child. At its heart is the sentiment that no one person contains all the necessary knowledge or resources to accomplish this important thing. We would also posit that when it comes to building a high-powered Hemi crate engine, the same is true. On paper, the third-generation Hemi V8 is a standout—exceptional flow characteristics and efficiency are wrapped in a simple cam-in-block pushrod configuration that defies obsolescence, and yet, 20 years after the engine’s debut, it oddly struggles for legitimacy among hot rodders and parts suppliers. We think the new DSR 1150 426ci Hemi crate engine from Don Schumacher Racing Performance (DSR) has the power to change that reality, and they have turned to the high-performance village…

Email us at hotrod@motortrend.com Follow us @ hotrodmagazine RIP, Pat Ganahl. Hot-rodding historian, author, and former HOT ROD Editor Pat Ganahl passed away Friday, August 19, while racing his restored Ike Iacono dragster at a nostalgia drag racing event in Washington state. Ganahl’s five-year tenure at HOT ROD in the 1980s represented a fairly small part of his lifelong involvement with cars and lengthy career writing thorough, knowledgeable, and deeply researched stories about hot rods, custom cars, and their history. He landed his first automotive writing job at Street Rodder magazine in 1973, joined the HOT ROD staff in 1983 (after a brief detour at Sunset magazine), and revived Rod & Custom magazine in 1988. After leaving Petersen Publishing, he helped Steve Coonan in the early days…