Innehållsförteckning för February 2024 från Hot Rod

For the second straight year and the sixth time in HOT ROD Drag Week Presented by Gear Vendors Overdrive history, Tom Bailey has been crowned with America’s Fastest Street Car title by capturing the Overall win, in addition to winning the Unlimited category. His impressive accomplishments put him at the top of the list for the most Overall wins, a title he shared with Larry Larson for one year. Bailey completed the week by posting a 6.7149 average over the five-day, nearly 1,000-mile road trip, visiting tracks in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Tennessee. The pathway to the HOT ROD Drag Week victory was one filled with plenty of bumps in the road, figuratively and literally. Bailey’s pre-event testing could’ve gone better, the first problem being a pair of exhaust…

The Corvette Racing team has a long and storied history at Road America, the beautiful Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, circuit, including eight class wins in the modern factory program era. However, a complete repaving of the track’s surface following the 2022 season meant much of the data accumulated there would be of limited use going forward. In past years, Road America’s pavement was especially rough, which offered high grip in areas but led to very high tire wear resulting in traction loss over the duration of a typical racing stint. As expected, the new pavement is smoother, leading to more consistent tire wear, but also yielding lower grip in places. With a fourth-place finish at Lime Rock Park on July 22, team drivers Antonio Garcia and Jordan Taylor moved up to…

❱It’s safe to say that performance enthusiasts have embraced electronic fuel injection. That’s not to say that carburetors can’t do the job, but Detroit hasn’t rolled a new car off the assembly line with a carburetor in almost 40 years. Since then, we have seen the evolution of EFI systems move from crude to precise in their control of fuel metering and ultimately the air/fuel ratio seen by the spark plug in the cylinders. The fuel injectors themselves have also evolved. Not only has their physical size diminished enough to allow some creative placement options in the intakes, but manufacturers also offer flow rates that enable us to make amazing amounts of horsepower with just a single injector per cylinder. I fondly remember my early days of playing with fuel…

❱Car Craft is building this cool 1965 Dodge Coronet, completely transforming it from a dusty nonrunner to a show-ready vehicle. The catch is that it has to be done in time for the Roadkill Nights show in Detroit. We had about seven weeks to accomplish that task, and it took a crew of guys nearly every minute of that time to reach our goal. Spoiler alert: We made it, but you’ll have to wait until the third installment to see how we wrapped up our build. In our first installment, we introduced the project and highlighted the work needed to get this cool old Mopar back up and running. This time around, we tackled the major work the Coronet needed, namely some rust repair, a stunning new paintjob, and a…

Photos: The Author & Dylan Robertson Hot-rodders aren’t bound by phrases like “you can’t do that” or “that doesn’t seem possible.” They are creative, and this creativity leads to some very cool builds. Maybe you really dig the supercar-like performance of a 2023 ZL1 Camaro, but you want that in the style of something retro like an ’80s Monte Carlo. Well, many gearheads would opt to do an LT swap and call it a day, but there’s a lot more to a modern muscle car like the ZL1 Camaro than just its supercharged LT4 drivetrain and 10-speed automatic transmission. If you have a whole salvaged ZL1 Camaro to pillage, you might start thinking that it’s a shame to yank the drivetrain and throw away all that ZL1 technological goodness. This…

There are a lot of records and milestones in recorded drag racing history, and one that sticks out is an impressive run by a hotshot Top Fuel driver in the early 1960s. Don Prudhomme, a kid from Southern California, captured a stellar 81 round wins and just 8 round losses from June 1962 through May 1963. He was the driver of the Greer-Black-Prudhomme Top Fuel dragster and the team wreaked havoc at dragstrips up and down California with one side trip to Texas. Despite his success with dragsters, Prudhomme would add a Funny Car to his successful racing operation by the end of the ’60s and create one of the most iconic pairings in drag racing history with the Mattel Hot Wheels “Snake and Mongoose” legacy. On the advice of…

❱Finding an off-the-shelf exhaust system for your current hot rod project can be, well, problematic. The issue is that your new exhaust system must deal with a lot of variables, from engine location to header choice, and to make it more challenging, it has to wind its way around a lot of parts such as the rear suspension. Maybe you’ll get lucky and find a bolt-on kit perfect for your application, but chances are you won’t. That leaves two choices: Open your wallet wide and have a custom system built, or grab a universal exhaust kit from Summit Racing, break out your tools, fire up your welder, and make a semi-custom system of your own. Our problem was nobody makes a kit for our recent ZZ632 big-block swap into our…

Presented By ❱Jim McFarland, the multitalented, multifaceted Texan who enjoyed several careers in the automotive performance industry, passed away in October 2023 at the age of 88. I had the privilege of working with him off and on since my Petersen Publishing career started in the mid-1980s, and I spoke to him several times about his tenure at HOT ROD. McFarland came to HRM, and California, on a dare. In the mid-1960s he was working at the University of Texas as a part-time teacher, having completed a degree in mechanical engineering there. “I had two uncles who were professors at the College of Engineering at UT, and I was trying to follow in their footsteps.” He had been a reader of HRM ever since he was a young hot rodder,…

When you’re a teenager and the police know you by name, it’s not usually because of your volunteer work or class-topping GPA. Not at all. That was especially true for Jeff Kainz when he was behind the wheel of his 1975 Camaro. In the ’80s, while cruising his hometown in North Dakota, his buddies with police scanners often heard the police tell one another: “Kainz is out on Main Street.” “Yeah, I did some dumb things,” says an older and supposedly wiser Jeff. “I was on a first-name basis with all the cops in town, but I like to think I’ve matured.” By all appearances he has. Jeff went to college and found work as an automotive engineer, relocating to the Detroit area to take a job with Ford. He…

❱Hot-rodding is a game of trying to figure out how to get from idea A to result B. Having a vision of what you want is the easy part; figuring out how to make it happen is the challenge—but it’s also the biggest reward when you pull it off. Mark McDonald runs a fab shop called GforceFab and his mission in life is to turn ideas into reality. Right now, he’s working over a 1970 Mustang Fastback for customer Eric Vibe. Vibe wants his ’Stang to have a Boss 429 look, and part of that is fitting the engine under a flat factory hood. To complicate things, the engine is a 9.5-inch deck 351 Windsor punched out to 427 inches and running heads from Greg Brown over at Hammerhead Performance…

❱Since its initial build in 2007, Project T-top Coupe’s Paxton Novi 2000 supercharged, 350ci small-block Ford engine has been electronically fuel injected and operated by a then state-of-the-art, stand-alone engine-control unit and the tuning wizardry of Brian Macy of Horsepower Connection in Lake Havasu, Arizona. Since those early years, companies have made notable advancements in high-performance fuel injection. Holley is one of those brands, and at this point, its top-of-the-line Dominator EFI is recognized as one of the leading multiport fuel-injection systems in the space. It’s a veritable do-everything setup that is most notably used on the outlaw small-and big-tire rides that are wildly popular right now. Naturally, as the big dog in Holley’s EFI ranks, Dominator is the most expensive unit. Holley’s HP EFI slots in the product lineup…