Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2023 i Hot Rod

Pro Touring is a label often slapped on any classic ride with plus-size wheels and a lowered stance, but that’s akin to calling any drag car with big ’n’ littles Pro Street. A real Pro Touring car is so much more—an amalgam of road-race handling tech mixed with enough street manners to make it nice to just cruise. It’s classic lines and cutting-edge technology in a car that can drag race, road race, autocross, or just haul ass down your favorite country road. Chris Smith, owner of Smitty’s Custom Auto (who we will just call Smitty), has built quite a few real-deal Pro Touring rides, and this 1970 Camaro has to be our favorite so far. The project started out as a donor shell from Gordon McGilton. It was from…

In the middle of January, Corvette Racing returned to the Daytona International Speedway, the track where the program began racing 25 years ago. In its 12 Daytona 24 Hour starts since the first in 1999, the Corvette team has won the race four times, the most recent coming in 2021, when Antonio Garcia, Jordan Taylor, and Nicky Catsburg led a 1-2 Corvette Racing finish in the final Rolex 24 for the GT Le Mans (GTLM) class. This year, for the first time in the team’s long history racing in the Rolex 24 at Daytona, only one Corvette was entered. Though there are profound changes taking place within Corvette Racing, most notably the coming addition of a GT3 class C8 that will start racing in 2024, this year’s Daytona entry looked…

If you’re a company that makes aftermarket cylinder heads for Detroit’s most recent powerhouses, you’ve found yourself in a bit of a pickle in recent years, as mass flow rates for OE cylinder heads have skyrocketed in a race for improved efficiency. Driven by the EPA, today’s Detroit-built V8s are wringing a lot more work from a gallon of gas than we ever predicted. A perfect example of this is the third-generation Hemi V8, which even in its most diminutive form, offers port flow exceeding that of the most powerful big-block V8s of the 1960s. This has been a boon to Mopar hot rodders, who can simply clean and refurbish their existing OE Hemi cylinder heads and save some money in the process. Stock third-gen Hemi heads are literally too…

Is it the journey or the destination? That’s a question worth asking when someone builds or restores a vehicle. In most cases, the simple answer would be the destination. A satisfying result at the end of that journey usually makes a person want to do it again, though maybe with a little less effort. For Shane McEllhenney, that meant searching for a completely different vehicle after the comprehensive restoration of his 1991 Camaro. The only criterion Shane had with the search was that it had to be Bow Tie flavored in some way, which was a brand preference ingrained in him at an early age. “I grew up in a GM family, working on cars and going to car shows and the local dragstrip. My grandfather worked as a mechanic…

This time on Car Craft Video, we venture into the world of direct injection and big-displacement modern engines that are readily available in the new and used marketplace. It used to be that one horsepower per cubic inch was pretty impressive in a street car. Now your average pickup truck is sporting that kind of power without even trying hard. We’re predicting Chevrolet’s new L8T engine is going to be a very popular swap very soon. It displaces 6.6 liters, or 400 cubic inches, and is rated at 400 hp at 5,100 rpm and 464 lb-ft of torque at 4,000 rpm. The bore and stroke measure 4.060-inches and 3.860-inches respectively. The crankshaft is a forging, which is great for power-adder applications, and the connecting rods are also promising, with a…

Funnies were money in HOT ROD in 1971. Not just Funnies. Drag racing was it, as far as cover cars were concerned. Eleven of the year’s issues had some sort of drag race car on the front cover, and six of those were Funny Cars. Don Prudhomme’s new Hot Wheels ’Cuda was not among them. In fact, The Snake was winless in NHRA Funny Car action throughout the year and into 1972 as well. It wasn’t until the middle of the decade, in his U.S. Army-sponsored Monza, that he dominated the FC ranks, winning 13 finals in 1975-76. But Prudhomme’s ’Cuda, along with rival Tom McEwen’s Mongoose machine, are near and dear to those of us who owned Mattel’s die-cast versions and put them through endless passes down those orange…

Is Erica Enders the best driver in the history of NHRA Pro Stock racing? You can decide for yourself, but there is mounting evidence to support her case. Before his untimely death in 2017, drag racing legend Bob Glidden publicly stated that Erica Enders was the best driver in the history of the Pro Stock class. Glidden was a 10-time world champion and an 85-time national event winner who wasn’t the least bit hesitant to freely offer an opinion. Glidden certainly knew a thing or two about Pro Stock, but was he correct? Is Erica indeed the best driver the Pro Stock class has ever seen? Better than Lee Shepherd? Better than Jeg Coughlin? Better than Bill “Grumpy” Jenkins, Ronnie Sox, Warren Johnson, Greg Anderson, or even Glidden himself? Now,…

When we left Project Groundhog at the end of Part 1, we had just finished assembling the short-block. To briefly sum up the scope of the build, we started with a down-in-the-dirt (literally) Gen III 5.3-liter truck engine that we bored out roughly 0.110-inch, to 5.7-liter specs. The approach was to build this engine correctly with no shortcuts, but also to try to maintain a reasonable budget. Our goal was a mild street engine that would make around 425-430 horsepower using a Summit Racing camshaft, their muscle car oil pan, and a carbureted intake manifold so we could stuff it into something like a Chevelle or possibly a 1948-1953 Chevy pickup. The additional performance parts bumped the price, but they were necessary to arrive at our goal. ASSEMBLING THE LONG-BLOCK…

Over the past several months, HOT ROD has tagged along as Troy Ladd, owner of Hollywood Hot Rods in Burbank, California, thrashed on his one-day-a-week coupe build. As the owner of the shop, Troy gets only one day off a week to work on his personal project, but as things got down to the wire on his self-imposed deadline, Brian Sloma, also of Hollywood Hot Rods, was coerced into helping with this bad-to-the-blown 1931 Model A coupe built mostly from Troy’s junk pile. Troy had the basic ingredients cluttering up his yard, including a 1931 Model A coupe that had already been chopped, a past project’s Brookville Roadster Lakester frame that hadn’t been used, and a 392 Chrysler Hemi block. He also had a lot of the parts on hand…