Innehållsförteckning för December 2023 från Hot Rod

One of the most innovative places on earth is the Bonneville Salt Flats—or, more accurately, the shops and garages of competitors getting ready to test their ideas on that hallowed ground. The quest for speed has inspired designs ranging from the sublime to the just plain weird. Howard Johansen’s twin-tank streamliners may not fall into either of those extremes, but they were definitely unusual and eye-catching. We can’t call them unique, because some Internet research showed there have been at least five land-speed-record contenders utilizing the twin-tank design. Johansen built two of those, one in 1949 and a second one he built in 1954. He brought the first twin-tank car to the SCTA’s very first Bonneville gathering in 1949. HOT ROD’s coverage of the event, in the October 1949 issue,…

“Rat rod.” You would have a hard time thinking of a term, or a trend, that has been as controversial in our hobby as that—except for a similar term from 75 years ago: “hot rod.” Rough, raw, and rusty rods have been around since the earliest days, but the “rat rod” tag entered the gearhead vocabulary about 25 years ago. The venerated HOT ROD staffer Gray Baskerville is credited with being the first to use the term in print. Back then, high-tech, ultra-smooth street rods, popularized and perfected by Boyd Coddington and other builders, were getting pushed out of the limelight by traditional street rods built in the styles of the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s. Rat rods seem to have shown up around the same time. Rat rods and traditional…

Some might call this a mulligan—you know, the term coined in golf when you screw up a shot so badly that your buddies take pity and pretend it never happened. And given the outright hate we felt after doing an EV swap on Project X, we can see why people would think that. But they would be wrong. You see, the EV swap on X was just another drivetrain in a long lineage of drivetrains that have been stuffed into our yellow 1957 Chevy 50-plus-year project car. Read on to see how we got Project X off the juice and back on the gas! As for the EV swap, we learned a lot about how those work and the questionable economics of performing one on a classic car. You could…

There’s no doubt that one of the hottest things in the street car world is the proliferation of drag-and-drive events. Started by HOT ROD’s own Drag Week in 2005, that style of competition has exploded in popularity recently. A part of the visual impact of Drag Week and its spinoff events is seeing a Pro Mod-style race car on the highway pulling a small trailer behind it. The real superstars of these events are the cars and the drivers behind the wheel. The recently organized drag-and-drive events, like Rocky Mountain Race Week and Tom Bailey’s Sick Week, draw packed stands and a lot of attention online and on social media. Sick Week recently finished its 2023 event and one of the stars of this year’s drag-and-drive race was the bright…

Those who live in California’s verdant Central Valley have likely seen the bright-red Panella Trucking rigs hauling freshly harvested produce from the fields to various processors scattered around the area. Drag racing historians, on the other hand, connect the Panella name with multiple race cars, including several gassers that tore up NorCal tracks in the ’60s and ’70s. What the two have in common is Bob Panella Sr., then drag racer, now trucking company magnate. In fact, these two sides of Bob’s life come together at Panella Trucking headquarters where he houses a collection that includes several of his race cars. Also on the property, his son and three-time NHRA Pro Stock Truck champion, Bob Jr., builds race engines, including some for his dad’s projects. Many racers who want to…

Building an engine right is all about the details. It’s an exercise where being off by a thousandth of an inch can lead to a catastrophic failure. This attention to detail is what separates engine assemblers from engine builders. Chevrolet Performance’s new tall-deck ZZ632 big-block (PN 19432060) is its biggest ever—and at 1,004 horsepower, its most powerful, as well. It’s a pump-gas-fed race engine for the street, and to make it bulletproof, it’s built at GM’s Performance and Racing Center in Pontiac, Michigan. We’ve already taken a deep dive into the RS-X heads that make this 632 behemoth possible, so now let’s take a walk on the wild side and build the whole engine. Oh, and there’s a ton of build shots in the gallery; look closely and you might…

We are working on the reintroduction of our unique 1986 Ford Mustang T-top coupe, a former project car that was put into storage for more than 10 years. As such, we’re ok with calling it a garage find. Newly emerged from its slumber and under the HOT ROD banner, we move forward with tackling a robust list of tasks that must be completed for our T-top coupe to have any chance of making it to Hot Rod Garage Day at Famoso Dragstrip in Bakersfield, California, later this year. A shout-out of thanks goes to Fabian and his family at ABRK Auto Repair in Northridge, California, for providing a twin-post hoist and workspace for staffer (and car owner) KJ Jones and Saul to perform this initial surgery, featuring Aeromotive’s ’86-’98.5 Eliminator…

Emilee Ballard is no stranger to drag racing, as her father was often at the tracks around her Chicago-area home, mostly running a series of bracket cars. She was usually there with him, for the most part just watching and being around to see what was going on. Seeing her growing interest in the drag racing scene, her dad tried to stick her in a Junior Dragster in her younger days, but that didn’t fly—as Emilee said, “It didn’t scare me, I just didn’t like it.” A dragster, if you’ve never driven one, can be a bit claustrophobic at times, so we get it. No, the dragster wasn’t her style; she wanted to be in a door car if she was going to be racing. So, in 2014 her dad…

Larry Dillon is one of those devoted Pontiac fanatics whose mission in life is to discover sad and neglected high-powered Pontiacs and return them to the streets where they belong. It’s something that’s been near and dear to his heart for the last four decades. Larry’s taste for Pontiac horsepower has put him in the seat of many top-tier muscle cars over the years. Countless GTOs, 2+2s, and Bonnevilles have made their way into his stable, and he’s always on the lookout for more rare rides. It was another prize from Pontiac that recently made its way into his collection, and it happened under the most bizarre circumstances. “I got this cool Latham blower from a friend of mine,” Larry said. “His dad had it on a ’60 Vette. It…

It’s the natural order for things to progress over time, but often you need to look to the past to build the future. The RSX heads on the new 1,004hp ZZ632 big-block Chevy crate engine are a perfect example of this. To get the lowdown on this high-flowing head we met with the guys who made this new big-inch, big-power, pump-gas crate engine possible, including Ron Sperry, the guy the RSX head is named after. Sperry is a legend around General Motors. He joined the company in 1968 after graduating from General Motors Institute. During his time with the company, he has mostly revolved around cylinder-head design and has been involved with some amazing projects including NHRA Pro Stock, NASCAR, and programs with legendary names like Smokey Yunick, Bill “Grumpy”…

This will most like result in me being kicked out of MotorTrend’s Jelly of The Month holiday bonus program, but it has to be said: There’s no compelling reason for you to convert your existing classic car, truck, or hot rod into an electric vehicle. Having been tasked with converting Project X to electric power, I learned a ton about the process, and my biggest takeaway from the project was that converting these cars to EV is, unless you have Tony Stark money, financially irresponsible. To be fair, our hobby is all about financially irresponsible endeavors, but the concept of converting classics to EV is built on several fallacies. Number one is cost. You’ll see an electric motor hyped as, “replaces a small-block V8 and only costs $4,999!!” OK, great.…