Innehållsförteckning för Fall 2025 från Hot Rod

“It’s like some kid in the ’60s got ahold of his dad’s roadster and wanted to go racing. the guy who restores and maintains them all. He also does customer work out of Galpin’s warehouse He didn’t change the color or the stripes; he just threw the hood away, put the Hemi in, and put the wheels on.” That’s how Dave Shuten describes his recently completed ’32 Ford Roadster. Shuten is a custom car builder and restorer who operates in the little-known annex of Galpin Ford, SoCal’s biggest Ford dealership. Galpin CEO Beau Boeckmann is a custom car enthusiast and collector, and over the past couple of decades, Galpin has quietly amassed an impressive collection of cars and memorabilia from the ’50s and ’60s, including several original Ed Roth and…

OVER 6,000 DAILY PARTICIPANTS AND TENS OF THOUSANDS OF FANS MADE THIS YEAR’S POWER TOUR ONE FOR THE RECORD BOOKS. HOT ROD has been cruising around the country with its famous Power Tour since 1995, and it keeps getting better. We thought last year’s record-breaking event was the pinnacle, but the 2025 version proved that assumption wrong. This year’s Chevrolet Performance HOT ROD Power Tour Driven by Hagerty route began in Indianapolis and worked its way eastward, took a brief offshoot to the north on the second day, and finished in Norwalk, Ohio. More than 6,000 vehicles participated each day of the tour, with most of them earning the coveted Long Hauler honor. The famed Lucas Oil Indianapolis Raceway Park, a motorsport facility steeped in drag-racing history and home to…

Wanting and doing are two very different things in life. Sure, you can want to be an Olympic athlete, but do you have the will to push yourself to that outcome? Wants are easy. Getting there is hard. And taking home a Ridler Award comes down to pushing yourself in terms of talent and treasure to build something that stands out among other builds crafted by people who want the same thing you do: to win. For those out of the loop, the Ridler Award started in 1964 at the Detroit Autorama to honor Don Ridler, who died in 1963 and was known for his unbridled creativity. Since its inception, the award has arguably become the top custom car award on the planet. IF YOU WANT TO WIN A RIDLER…

In the nearly half century since the rise of the Pro Street movement, the genre has produced perhaps the most eclectic mixture of vehicles in all of hot rodding, spanning makes and models from every era, over-the-top engine combinations, and flashy paint schemes and themes. It could be argued, then, that we’d seen it all. Yet a one-time blue-collar mechanic from Texas with empty pockets but loaded with mechanical ability and big dreams who looked on with envy during Pro Street’s heyday has successfully carved out a niche of his own in the modern-day Pro Street scene, and he’s done so by drawing influence from Super Stock drag racing’s all-time giant. Bill Hugill owns three 1968 Plymouth Barracudas, each one built with a similar yet distinct personality and each executed…

Scott Sullivan’s tubbed Chevy II is credited with igniting the Pro Street movement upon its debut at the 1979 Car Craft Street Machine Nationals. It was a show-quality car with trend-setting style and great attention to detail. But was it the first car to hit the streets with a narrowed rear axle and other strip-oriented aesthetics? No. Not at all. It wasn’t long after NHRA’s fledging Pro Stock class adapted back-halved chassis setups and narrowed axles that the designs migrated to the boulevard. That was especially true within the fiercely competitive street racing scene around Detroit. About three years before Sullivan’s Chevy wowed the crowd at the Indiana State Fairgrounds, Steve Lisk was decimating Motown comers in a tubbed Challenger. His only reported serious competition was the Jack Roush–built Mustang…

“Take a look; it’s on exclaims. “Today is down, and we’ve the ground!” Mike Ring the first time it’s been got the clamshell and doors in place.” Why is that important? Easy—the Ringbrothers are building a 1971 Astin Martin DBS for an unveiling at The Quail during Monterey Car Week, and we have the exclusive inside scoop. “This is easily the biggest project we’ve ever undertaken,” says Mike, one half of the dynamic car-building duo from Spring Green, Wisconsin. Mike, his brother, Jim, and their talented team of metal-shaping specialists have created some of the most talked about cars of the last 20 years. How does this project stack up against their recent radical creation, Enyo, the 1948 Chevy Loadmaster that was treated to an IndyCar makeover? “It’s another level!”…

DEAN NESBITT’S 1963 FAIRLANE REPRESENTS THE CULMINATION OF HIS AUTOMOTIVE EXPERIENCE. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE MINUTIAE AND FINISHING THE JOB RIGHT. NOTHING LESS WILL DO. For many people, hot rodding is their hobby. It serves as a reason to get in the garage to tinker, build, or detail their car, to get them away from work and daily pressures. Better yet, of course, is to get behind the wheel, fire up the engine, and roll out onto a back road or even pull onto a track. Either way, hot rods are key to stepping away from the day-in, day-out doldrums. Then there are guys like Dean Nesbitt. His days are spent concentrating on wiring and the final assembly on the amazing hot rod builds at AVS Fabrication in Oceanside, California.…

Murray Pfaff’s photorealistic renderings have appeared in HOT ROD and many other enthusiast outlets for more than 20 years. Some 400 vehicle designs have gone from brainstorm to so-real-you-can-almost-touch-it illustrations since he opened Pfaff Designs in 2004. Many of the finished vehicles that began on Pfaff’s drawing board have gone on display at the SEMA Show. Some were done for celebrities, such as musicians Sammy Hagar and Toby Keith and NASCAR superstars Richard Petty and Rusty Wallace. Pfaff also designed a few cars for himself. He is a down-tothe-marrow car guy with very eclectic tastes. His best-known creation, the Imperial Speedster, is a 1959 four-door Chrysler that he and a team of co-conspirators whittled into a twodoor convertible that looks just like a midcentury concept car. “The process of building…

The two men sit, one hand on the butterfly steering wheel, the other on the brake handle. To their left are tens of thousands of fans. Immediately in front of them, a nitro-burning, snarling Chrysler Hemi engine, and beyond that, a flagman. The date is February 17, 1963. The two men had come all the way to Pomona, California, to compete at the NHRA Winternationals seeking the same prize, the first trophy carrying the name of Top Fuel Eliminator. Not only that, but they had also come from the same hometown, Tampa, Florida. Their names are Art Malone and Don Garlits. Friends who morphed into rivals, both vying to etch their name into what would become a landmark moment in drag racing history. Just over 62 years later in Concord,…

The HOT ROD Power Tour came from humble beginnings; it was just an idea thrown out to the readers in 1995 to join the staff for a cross-country drive. The editorial staff at the time, led by Drew Hardin and including Rob Kinnan, Gray Baskerville, Will Handzel, Cole Quinnell, and Jeff Smith, came up with the concept to help promote the company’s booming HOT ROD Power Festival, a drag-racing and car-show series that came out of the Fastest Street Car movement from the early 1990s. They tuned up Crusher Camaro, Cheap Thrills Dart, Budget Beater Model A, and Baskerville’s ’32 Ford roadster for the journey. And with the fleet in good working order, the editorial staff rolled up to the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles on May 13, 1995,…