Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2012 i Hot Rod

That’s what I’m wondering as I sit here writing this on December 7. No doubt there was hot rodding prior to the war, especially if you include things like the Indy 500 (started in 1911) and the numerous small-city road races of the teens, when cars were a novelty. The teens and ’20s also saw many larger board tracks popping up, as well as races on horse tracks. The Pikes Peak Hillclimb began in 1916. The land speed racers of the ’20s and ’30s, such as Brits Sir Malcolm Campbell and George Eytson and American Ab Jenkins, surely inspired the owners of what are considered the first traditional hot rods, the Southern California kids who ripped the fenders from their Model Ts and went all out for top speed on…

A mid-engine, all-wheel-drive Goat with a 2,000hp turbo motor? Yup. When we spoke with Nelson Racing Engines (NRE) owner Tom Nelson about his latest project, the details kept coming, and he kept us scribbling on our notepad as he listed all he has in store for this killer ’67 Pontiac GTO street car. Right now it’s in the initial fabrication stages after extensive design and engineering using Solidworks computer modeling. It’s being built for San Diego Chargers Outside Linebacker Travis LaBoy, and it should be about two years in the making. After finding the ’67 and getting it back to NRE, the chassis, exterior, and interior were scanned using a laser to create a 3D digital model of the car based on more than 12 million data points. The model…

DOUG FREELAND • JACKSON, TN What would you rather have: a corner-hugging, tire-scorching, satin-black ’67 Mustang, or a glossy new Porsche? If you say the latter, you might want to put down the magazine. Doug Freeland would take the former. He abandoned his search for a Porsche when he found this ’67 powered by a Ford V10 out of an F-250. The car was built by Mustang suspension company, Barts Works, as a test mule for suspension components and an R&D platform for V10 swap kits. Doug grabbed the first one and hasn’t looked back. “Bart convinced me to buy this one. It’s my Redneck Rocket,” he says. Unfortunately, the plan for more V10 swaps fell through, and so did the company. Doug’s V10 makes 300 hp and 428 lb-ft…

Imagine an event that tests not only quarter-mile speed but also endurance. Competitors roll in with nicely detailed paintjobs, immaculately engineered engine bays, and interiors stuffed with gauges, shift lights, lightweight racing seats and floor shifters. Then a bunch of overall-wearing hayseeds cruise up in a clapped-out, four-door Pontiac bubbletop with a blowup doll in the back seat. There goes the neighborhood. Brent “Buck” McCoy has earned a reputation for showing up at HOT ROD Drag Week™ with unassuming cars that clock times far quicker than you’d expect. In 2010, his four-door, small-block, Chevy-powered ’68 Buick Skylark sported one aluminum head and one iron double-hump head yet still ran high 10s on nitrous. He’s also known for his sense of humor and his reluctance to spill the secret of how…

For more than a decade, small-block Ford guys have argued the merits of the 331 versus 347ci stroker small-blocks. For the past several years there’s been a clear answer: Skip all that and build a 363. If you missed the debate, here’s a backgrounder. The Ford small-block Windsor engine family offers two block-deck heights: 8.2 inches for the 221, 260, 289, and 302, and 9.48 to 9.5 inches for the 351 (there are also aftermarket race offerings in 8.7 and 9.2). The factory-offered deck heights offer two dilemmas for hot rodders. First, the 8.2-inch engines require intakes, distributors, oil pans, and sometimes headers that are different from the 9.5-inchers. Second, the engines with the taller deck heights are also 2 or 3 inches wider and taller, depending on the parts…

THE COMBO Barry and Cathy Dooley have a ’64 Chevy Nova SS with a built 250 Chevy straight-six. Bored 0.030 over and equipped with flat-top pistons, its compression is said to be around 9:1 with its ported and polished 292 L6 truck head. Induction is handled by an Edelbrock 600-cfm four-barrel carb (PN 1406) with an electric choke, and it feeds the fuel and air through a Clifford Performance intake manifold (PN 42-4501WH). Valve actuation is handled by a healthy, hydraulic flat-tappet Isky 262 Supercam. A Performance Distributors DUI large-cap HEI distributor lights the spark, while Clifford headers exhaust the spent mixture. Output is fed through a TH350 auto trans with a mild shift kit and 2,500-rpm-stall-speed converter to a 10-bolt Posi rearend with 3.73:1 gears. THE PROBLEM Dooley complained…

MORE VERMIN Amazingly enough, readers still can’t get enough rat rods. They’re the red ’69 Camaros of now—guaranteed sellers every time we put them in the mag. For next month, there’s a spin: rodentia that dares to be different. Meaning they are not variants of Model As with small-block Chevys in ’em. In addition to that gallery of misfits, we’ll have a look at NASCAR—which has finally gone to EFI—and ask if it’s better now or if it’s lost the plot. You’ll also see an amazingly clean and brutally fast Drag Week™ Chevelle, and more testing with the Dart Ford 363 we introduced this month. SEE THIS AND MUCH MORE IN THE MAY ’12 ISSUE OF HOT ROD MAGAZINE On sale March 13, 2012 HOTROD.com Facebook.com/HotRodMag YouTube.com/HotRodMagazine…

As we hung out with Adam Carolla for this issue’s “5 Minutes With” installment, we bench-raced about how his old BRE Datsun 2000 roadster vintage race car couldn’t be restored in pure original trim because the safety equipment was so sketchy by today’s standards. That car first ran in 1969. The original safety stuff was paranoid overkill compared with some of the ’50s drag cars seen in the HOT ROD Archives. Look at this car, for example. Right in the middle of Wally Parks’ safety drive with the National Hot Rod Association, HRM photog Eric Rickman wrote a one-page story in the Mar. ’59 issue about the drag races at the Chandler Associated Drag Strip in Arizona. The title: “Drag Strips Afford Safe Competition.” One has to wonder if that…

Adam Carolla says things normal people either don’t think about or don’t have the balls to utter out loud, and 99.9 percent of the time he makes us bust a gut. He’s also a real car guy and one of our favorite comedians. You know Adam from The Adam Carolla Show on the radio, Loveline on both radio and MTV, and The Man Show on Comedy Central. He won’t cop to being a hot rodder, but he knows more about a wider range of automobiles than most hot rodders do. His tastes lean toward vintage Japanese stuff, like old Datsun 240s and 510s, which are cool in our book. Adam road races a few super-rare examples of these whenever he’s free, so extra points for that. Freiburger spent an hour…

A few years ago, drag racing legend Connie Kalitta told this writer that of all the Top Fuel engines he’d messed with and beaten on over the years, his favorite is the 427ci SOHC Ford. The oddball Cammer might seem like a weird choice, but Kalitta still sees untapped potential in the wide-open, deep-breathing design. You can see why the wild man from Mount Clemens keeps a soft spot in his heart for the FoMoCo V8. Landing a Ford factory deal in 1965 was an important step on the career ladder for Kalitta—and it’s been one hell of a career. In 1967, with SOHC power, his Top Fueler won the Winternationals within the NHRA, AHRA, and NASCAR sanctioning bodies (yes, NASCAR ran full drag seasons in ’66 and ’67). According…

Here are four reasons to hate Rick Duffin: 1) He didn’t need a welder to build this car, 2) there’s not a single used part on it (including the body and chassis), 3) the build didn’t cost six figures, and 4) it only took 15 days to complete. Feel like setting your checkbook on fire and stuffing your current Tri-Five Chevy project into the nearest Dumpster now? We understand. We’re a bit envious ourselves. GM isn’t building new ’57 Chevys again, so how did Rick get his hands on one? Here’s the skinny: Woody’s Hot Rodz (Bright, Indiana; WoodysHotRodz.com) is the primary distributor for Real-Deal Steel’s aftermarket Tri-Five bodies, which are lifesavers in the restoration world. Bare shells go for $11,500, and complete bodies with doors, trunk lid, and quarter-panels…

“This is my crowning achievement. It’s damn good if you can build something that makes so much power for a minute and a half.”—Ken Duttweiler Historically, the world’s fastest piston engine–powered, wheel-driven, ground vehicles have been the province of hulking, supercharged Hemi dinosaurs. No longer. That distinction now belongs to small-block Chevys built by Ken Duttweiler. Based on a Dart block and Dart Little Chief splay-valve heads, his twin-turbo, 300ci and 347ci engines pound out more than 2,000 hp on methanol. Both mills make nearly the same power and have a 4.125-inch bore, with stroke length accounting for the displacement differences: 2.80 inches for the 300 (actually, a 299); 3.25 inches for the slightly torquier 347. The 347 propelled the 4,200-pound George Poteet & Ron Main Speed Demon Bonneville Blown…

On the sweeter side of the fence sits a brick-and-glass showroom, looking shaggy with vegetation hanging off its roof like a mop-top. It’s a relic, a place that slipped into the cracks between past and present, where the familiar red, white, and blue AMC signs forgot to come crashing down along with American Motors 25 years ago. Pikeville, North Carolina—a town of 700 people—has rolled off the tongues and keyboards of AMC junkies for years, with this seemingly abandoned dealership attaining near-mythical status as a slightly more flammable Shangri-La for gearheads. Ten years of blog posts, newsletters, and gossip say the place is like 1987 frozen in time, and where untitled cars still wrapped in plastic and bearing window stickers relax as fresh and gleaming as the day they sat…

THE PREMISE Making noise with exhaust cutouts is big fun, but is there really a power gain? No matter how well constructed an exhaust system is, it still restricts flow with piping, bends, mufflers, and sometimes catalytic converters. The old-school solution is exhaust cutouts. Like a fork in the road of the exhaust, the cutouts empty the gases after headers but before the rest of the exhaust system. The original cutouts were made with simple block-off plates that were unbolted after climbing under the car. The new-school answer is electronically activated cutouts using butterfly valves, and Quick Time Performance (QTP) sells the highest quality ones we’ve seen. They can even be opened with a wireless key fob. THE STUFF A local friend, Mick Batson, from Yucaipa, California, threw us the…

JOE ASKS: I have a couple of project cars I could really use some answers on. I want to put a 3.8L Buick Regal V6 into a ’74 Chevy Vega. All I really need are the motor mount-to-frame brackets; I can fabricate the rest. I also have a ’61 Pontiac wagon with a 389 engine and a Slim-Jim trans that I want to change over to a TH400 or a 200-4R. This old engine uses an adapter bracket to mount the starter to the trans case. MARLAN ANSWERS: When I came of age back in the ’70s, dropping a small-block Chevy V8 into a Vega or Monza was all the rage. Maybe it was because of Grumpy Jenkins’ pioneering small-block Chevy Pro Stock Vega, or perhaps it was just because…

Those words bring a smile to some and fear to others—fear of losing too much money at the tables or having too much fun while there. For the last couple of years, the major national division in NASCAR, the Sprint Cup, has celebrated the end of the season in Sin City. It was formerly held in New York City and before that Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The big party includes three days of fan events, media interviews, and a Friday-night banquet and awards ceremony recognizing everything from the pit crew of the year to the overall series champion. The show in Las Vegas is unique in that after the National Motorsports Press Association’s Myer’s Brothers Awards Luncheon, the Top 11 drivers of the year take their Sprint Cup cars on a…

Computers and vinyl graphics are killing the sign-painting business and sucking the life out of distinctive improvisation. Retro-loving car guys aren’t going to let that soulless mediocrity happen to their quarter-panels, though, so there might be more airbrush and squirrel-hair brush artists today than ever before. Everyone is lettering everything. With those everybodies constantly seeking inspiration from history—and often unable to find it in color—we decided to throw together this collection of genuine, unrestored examples for your study. Remember, great art is just smart plagiarism well concealed.…

The soon-to-be-released Camaro ZL1 makes 580 hp. The next Mustang GT500, which we’ll see late summer, makes 650 hp. The GT500 is said to be a few hundred pounds lighter. The dominator seems to be a forgone conclusion. Or is it? We aim to find out and are calling all comers to the HOT ROD ZR1/GT500 Faceoff, a drag-and-autocross showdown of the two latest super-muscle cars. Maybe even a road course if we can pull it off. It’ll be a chance for owners to hammer their cars like they were meant to be flogged, and perhaps more important, for the performance tuners to show off their skills and prove what these cars are really about. As of now, we have dates reserved May 4-5, 2013, at Memphis International Raceway. That’s…

The title’s not a typo. In Italian the word for panther is pantera, but in Swedish it’s panter, and yes, this one’s got a Hemi. Göran Malmberg, from Bromma, Sweden, is a retired guitar builder, former Top Fuel fabricator, author, and full-time car tinkerer. He acquired his first DeTomasso Pantera in a trade for his 12-second, 454-powered ’71 Z28, and this ’71 is the second he’s owned, although he’s worked on nearly a dozen. In the 24 years he’s owned it, it’s gone through several iterations, every one a learning experience. It looks like this time he’s finally landed on the perfect combination of parts—at least for now. Göran bought this Pantera from an insurance company in 1988. It had been seriously damaged, and he picked it up for about…

The ideal engine would be free, make egregious power, be anvil-easy to work on, look better than any other, and have a legacy that leaves onlookers in awe. By those measures, what’s the greatest V8 of all time? We asked readers that very question, and about 2,000 participated in a poll, ranking 30 engine families on a scale of 1 to 5 in each category. We tallied up the results and hereby present the top 20 for what will likely be to your vehement objections. Are the results perfect? Nope. Most notably, the scoring categories of Affordable to Build Today and Performance Potential knocked some sentimental favorites way down the list. Spoiler alert: Flathead Fords ranked 10th place. Vintage Cadillac V8s—a retro hot rodder’s go-to—didn’t make the list at all.…

Sinking into the threadbare bench seat as we rumbled onto the floor of the Grand Canyon, toes numb from the cold, eyes burning from sleep deprivation, and haggard looks on our faces after dodging thousands of miles of roadkill, we didn’t feel like failures. True, this was not Plan A or even Plan B, but we were more than OK with finishing Plan C. The dead end of a dirt trail cut by Native Americans through the sheer rock walls of one of the most interesting American geological anomalies was chosen as a last-ditch endpoint of a road trip that nearly killed our spirits, emptied our wallets, and destroyed our sanity. We were supposed to be ice racing in Alaska, not bombing through the desert in Arizona. But GPS coordinates…

THE PREMISE Hardware can nickel-and-dime you when you’re trying to complete a project and you’ve got nothing but rusty old junk coming off your car, and missing a single bolt can grind your progress to a halt. That means frequent trips to the hardware store, dealer, or restoration catalog to search for the exact piece. We’re not just talking about the 100-point restoration guys either; we’re talking about guys like us who don’t want rusty bits and pieces ruining an otherwise clean engine bay. What if you could reuse most of the old hardware that’s on your car by cleaning it up and getting it back to looking new? THE STUFF We picked up Eastwood’s 5-pound-capacity Vibratory Tumbler (PN 13539, $99.99 from Eastwood.com) that includes two bowls and tumbling media.…

KOBALT TOOLS 80 0/445-6937 KobaltTools.com The cool thing about this kit is simply the price. It’s a four-piece, 18-volt cordless setup that includes an LED light, a 1,600-rpm drill, a 3,000-spm reciprocating saw, and a 4,500-rpm circular saw. No tools are required to change the blades and drill bits. Included are two batteries, a charger, blades, a belt hook, a bit holder, a contractor tool bag, and a double-ended screwdriver bit. This is the NiCd battery kit, but you can get the Lithium-Ion kit with a better/bigger LED light for a little more money. Kobalt has a huge new line of cordless tools such as a cordless impact, too. Price: Lithium-Ion $269.00; NiCd $169.00 WET NITROUS KIT FOR ’10-UP V6 CAMAROS Design Engineering Inc. 80 0/264-9472 SPATurboUSA.com Tired of getting…