Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2023 i Hot Rod

Each spring, the Strip at Las Vegas hosts one of the best-kept secrets of the muscle car world—Muscle Cars at the Strip. Initially started about 15 years ago as “Mopars at the Strip,” promoter Phil Painter’s annual event has grown to encompass all brands of high-performance vehicles, even though it is still principally known as a Mopar-heavy event. As one of the first outdoor hot-rodding events of the season, the spring opener is held every March in Las Vegas, the city known as a premier entertainment and vacation hot spot. For this year’s event, held March 17–19, 2023, attendees got an extra surprise as the MotorTrend Presents Roadkill Nights Powered by Dodge added to the festivities with the reveal of Dodge’s final “Last Call” model, the SRT Demon 170 on…

The Chevy Tri-Five cars (1955-57) have undoubtedly captured the hot rodder’s imagination through the decades. Well-built, they offered good looks and great performance, thus landing Chevrolet products in the top sales spot in America, swapping places year to year with Ford. Buick wasn’t far behind in the ranking, being either third or fourth during the same 1955-57 period. These cars also ran potent V8s, which replaced the dated inline-eight-cylinder engines in ’53. In fact, early 322ci Buick V8s have become favorites in the traditional hot rod world. The 1957 models have a style of their own, but ’55s and ’56s show only minimal differences. Bob Mazzolini happens to own a 1956 version, though its underpinnings have little to do with Buicks of this vintage. That year, clients could pick between…

Sebring International Raceway ranks among the oldest permanent road racing facilities in the world, and it’s the birthplace of American endurance racing. In 1950, the circuit was created at Hendricks Field, a World War II United States Army Air Force base where B-17 Flying Fortress and B-24 Liberator pilots and crews were trained. The first Sebring 12-hour endurance race was held there in 1952, and for the past seven decades, the best teams, drivers, and cars from around the world have converged on central Florida in March to battle one another for one of the biggest honors in racing—victory in the Mobil 1 12 Hours of Sebring. This year, as in the past several years, sports car racing enthusiasts got a double dose of fantastic racing with the “Super Sebring”…

What is the best way to weld two body panels together? This is one of those topics that many people have strong opinions on. It could be argued that the exact technique doesn’t really matter if the end result meets the need, so let’s start by defining what the end result should look like. First, the general level of restoration work being done today far exceeds what was being done when most of these cars were “restored” the first time around. Muscle Car Restorations (MCR) in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, has probably seen it all when it comes to restoration techniques. Everything from pop rivets to wire mesh has shown up in cars they have worked on. Even the formerly approved method of welding overlapped panels has become unacceptable today. The…

Sebring International Raceway is one of the oldest continuously running race tracks in the United States. The first race at Sebring was held in 1950. The location was originally Hendricks Army Airfield, a training facility for the U.S. Army Air Forces B-17 pilots. After 1946, aeronautical engineer, motorsports enthusiast, and entrepreneur Alec Ulmann was looking for locations within the U.S. to stage an endurance race similar to the 24 Hours of Le Mans and ultimately landed on Sebring (pun intended). The first 12 Hours of Sebring endurance race was held on March 15, 1952. Originally, the circuit measured 3.5 miles of mixed concrete and asphalt surfaces. The track’s current configuration spans 3.74 miles, and the lap record of 1:41.800 was set by Kamui Kobayashi in 2019 in a Toyota LMP1…

Today’s OEMs have mastered the art of the long public-relations product reveal, often stringing out information on a high-visibility halo model for months at a time. When it’s a car like the Dodge Demon 170, capable of a 1.66-second 0-60 time and a quarter-mile e.t. of 8.91 seconds—all in street-legal trim—people can come unhinged during the wait. With the big pieces of the puzzle answered, folks are now looking for the finer details—the Easter eggs—that the design and engineering staff has placed on, inside, and under the new Demon. We’ve only been allowed very short, at-a-distance glances of the Demon 170, so we’re learning this right along with you, but we do have a lot of photos we’ve pored over looking for clues, and we’ve found a few! • The…

To many muscle car historians, the “Black Ghost” needs no introduction. Hot rodders have been hearing rumors for decades about a mysterious black Dodge Hemi Challenger street racer running the streets of Detroit in the early 1970s. However, knowing how rumors have a life of their own and how they seem to spontaneously propagate, some had dismissed the Black Ghost as urban legend. Deepening the mystery was a singular, odd trait: The car never hung out long enough for anybody to meet its driver. A few things were clear—the Black Ghost always knew when and where to show up, and it was amazingly able to avoid the police. It did this with complete stealth between 1970-1975, then disappeared into the night for more than four decades, cementing its reputation as…

Remember when the coolest thing you could do to an engine was bolt two or, even better, three carbs to the top of it? Remember when 400 hp was a lot for a street car? Today, it’s all about EFI systems and 600-plus horsepower, but many hot rodders just want something simple and supercool. A great example is this 383-inch Chevy small-block stroker recently dyno tested at Westech. Steve Brulé runs the dyno operations there, and he thought this pump-gas stroker was worth a second look. Sources Aeromotive; 913.647.7300; aeromotiveinc.com Brodix; 479.394.1996; brodix.com Edelbrock; 888.799.1135; edelbrock.com Summit Racing Equipment; 800.230.3030; summitracing.com Superflow; 262.252.4301; superflow.com Westech Performance Group; 951.685.4767; westechperformance.com quickjack.com theabsorber.com…

Ever since Dodge came out with the 707hp Hellcat Hemi in 2015, hot rodders have been trying to break the code on how to convert a naturally aspirated third generation Hemi to a supercharged Hellcat. It’s not a question of whether it can be done. There’s always going to be that person who just keeps swapping OE Hellcat parts onto a 5.7-liter or 6.4-liter Hemi until it finally works, throwing cost and trouble to the wind in an irrational bid to be the first. That’s fine for Mister Money Buckets with more ego and cash than smarts, but what about the rest of us? We don’t have the complete answer on that yet, but at the 2022 SEMA show, we did see important progress on that front from a company…

Presented By: Craig Breedlove, who passed away in early April at age 86, is best known for setting overall land speed records in the 1960s. He first made his mark on the national stage in 1963 when he broke Englishman John Cobb’s longstanding record by averaging more than 407 mph in his three-wheeled, turbo-jet-powered Spirit of America. He later became the first man to break both the 500- and 600-mph marks at Bonneville and survived an infamous dunking in a salt pond in 1964 when Spirit’s parachutes failed on the way to setting that year’s 526-mph record. Yet HRM had its eye on Breedlove well before he made those headlines. He was the quintessential Southern California hot rodder, getting his first car, a ’34 Ford coupe, when he was just…

Bumpers. Does anybody really give a darn? Well, yes, anybody building a race car or a show car gives a darn. Race car builders care about weight more than looks, while show car builders usually care more about looks than weight, so both give a darn for different reasons. Recently while touring Mick’s Paint in Pomona, California, we came across several cars that exemplified both race car and show car qualities. Mario Villegas’ 1970 Plymouth GTX was there to have the hefty factory chromed steel bumpers replaced with lightweight carbon units that cost $239.95 each from Unlimited Fiberglass Products in Hesperia, California. I was lucky enough to be able to throw the rear bumper on the scale. The stock bumper weighed in at a hefty 24 pounds, while the carbon…

Nobody said hot-rodding was easy. It’s hard work. It’s physically hard work to contort in and out of tight spaces. It’s physically hard work to lift heavy axles, bodies, and blocks. And it’s mentally hard work to pull together disparate parts that were never meant to go together, made even more frustrating when dealing with parts that are faulty or just not quite right straight out of the box. Such is the lot of the hot rod builder. So, can you imagine doing that all week long for a living, then on your one day off each week, you decide to, well, build yourself a hot rod? We hope you’ve enjoyed following the saga of Troy Ladd, owner of Hollywood Hot Rods (HHR) in Burbank, California, as he built this…