Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2024 i Hot Rod

If you work long enough in this business, you think you’ve seen it all—then you’re proved wrong. Such is the case with this pro street 1963 split-window Corvette. The fire-breathing, tire-smoking ride you see here was never meant to be driven, or even fired up. Turns out the previous owner commissioned Rad Rides by Troy to build a wild pro street ’63 split-window Vette to decorate his restaurant in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The plan was for it to hang on the wall like a rather large three-dimensional picture. Well, the insurance company said nope to that idea, but the car did hang out quietly in the eatery’s lobby for 8 years. Enter Rod Saboury. Saboury knew the owner of the pro street prop and it turned out that a black pro…

There are trends that fade away into obscurity and then there are trends that transcend time. The Pro Street movement is one that will always exist—born in the ’70s, it thrived in the ’80s, and was brought to the dragstrips en masse in the ’90s. Today, it is mounting a resurgence, from the showgrounds to the dragstrips. Credit Big Tire drag racing on TV and No Prep events across the country, and a generation of hot rodders that still build these fat-tire street machines. For David Freiburger, MotorTrend TV host and connoisseur of fine junkyard vehicles, Pro Street is a look he’s always enjoyed—not the fairgrounds style but the racing version. The HOT ROD Top 10 Fastest Street Car Shootout in the ’90s left a lasting impression on him. Those…

For the last thirty years, we’ve thrown HOT ROD Power Tour parties across the country, but it’s been almost that long since we’ve had a cruise on the West Coast. That all changed this past winter when thousands of enthusiasts and fans put a pause on their holiday preparations to join us for three days of cruising and racing during the inaugural HOT ROD Power Tour West. It is a spinoff of our wildly successful Power Tour as we are going bicoastal to give people another chance to fill up their cars and trucks with a full tank of gasoline and hit the road with us. Hot rodders from 31 states across the U.S. and Canada, some from as far away as New Hampshire and Massachusetts, answered the call to…

Excess—it’s a word we hear frequently in reference to the 1980s. Hot rodders were ready for some of that after slogging through the comparatively bleak ’70s. The factory muscle car era had come to an abrupt halt in 1973 for a combination of reasons including an energy crisis, oil embargoes, and a shift in Detroit’s priorities from audacious high-performance to cautious efficiency. At the start of the new decade, we were eager for something new in the hobby. What we got was a whole new trend—street cars built like Pro Stock drag racers, complete with wildly modified back-half rear suspensions, wheeltubs, rollcages, massive rear tires, superchargers (sometimes more than one), multilever racing transmissions, and even wheelie bars and drag parachutes. They weren’t drag cars. They weren’t practical street cars either.…

"I had a picture in my head … A guy had posted the body for sale. It was perfect, since my first car was a '70 Nova." What do you do to follow up an award-winning Pro Street 1969 Camaro and 1956 Chevy C10 pickup? Bradley Gray decided that his next move was to build a Funny Car for the street, and his 1970 Chevy Nova Funny Car shows us what lies beyond Pro Street. Concord, North Carolina, native Bradley Gray grew up in the ’80s Pro Street era and jumped headfirst into the trend with his very first car, a ’70 Chevy Nova that he fitted with a big-block. A local speed shop owner made a deal with him on a used supercharger and cashed Bradley’s weekly paycheck for…

Never one to mince words, pro car-builder Steve Strope says of the Pro Street look, “Everything just looks better with Mickey Thompsons and ’tubs.” He’s obviously a fan. Steve recalls many happy days at various iterations of the Car Craft Street Machine Nationals and HOT ROD Summer Nationals throughout the ’80s and early ’90s. Way before he moved to California and became known as a pro builder, Pro Street was his thing. He added, “We’re talking about something that’s an aggressive piece of machinery. It commands attention.” Whatever your aesthetic opinion of the Pro Street look is, there’s no denying the truth in that statement. Pro Street is brash. Steve grew up in upstate New York and regularly attended both the HOT ROD and Car Craft summer car shows, first…

What can you say about Rick Dobbertin’s J2000 that hasn’t already been said? Some people call it the pinnacle of Pro Street, some call it the car that put a stake in the heart in the Pro Street movement. Maybe those opinions are one and the same. Rick Dobbertin debuted his 1985 Pontiac J2000 at the 1986 Car Craft Street Machine Nationals and set the world on fire. Throngs of people and even a TV news crew flocked to the car, as much a work of art as it was an engineering masterpiece. For the next couple of years, the car made the rounds at all the major shows, including the HOT ROD Supernationals and Super Cruise, then it disappeared from the scene. It had been hidden in a storage…

Merely uttering the phrase Pro Street conjures up thoughts of the flamboyant show cars of the ’80s, but the Pro Street look actually goes back to the 1970s, when hot rodders began adopting NHRA Pro Stock suspension modifications in their street cars to fit larger rear tires, hence the name Pro Street. Some experts in the field will also point to a couple of notorious street racers from the Detroit area who relied on big tires to gain an edge in illegal street races in the late ’70s as some of the first to coin the phrase. Pro Street mostly spent the ’80s on the showgrounds, but by 1992, HOT ROD magazine would push to get the cars back to the dragstrip. The world-famous HOT ROD Top 10 Fastest Street…

Soichiro Honda apparently coined the phrase "Racing improves the breed," and this was never more evident than when we parked the Dos Palmas Machine Spl. alongside the Mooneyes dragster at the Mooneyes New Year’s Party. Though separated by little more than a year, the difference between these two Gas dragsters was amazing. Wait—Gas dragsters? Who cares about Gas dragsters? According to National Dragster (and this is no joke), “On April 1, 1957, a consortium of SoCal tracks—including Santa Ana, Lions, Pomona, San Gabriel, Kingdon, and others—voted to ban the use of exotic fuels and called for NHRA to support it, which President Wally Parks did. The so-called ‘fuel ban’ officially lasted until the end of the 1963 season, although NHRA experimented with its return at the 1963 Winternationals but ran…