Table of contents for March 2022 in Hot Rod

@john.mcgann I spent the day today traveling the aisles of the PRI Show at the Indianapolis Convention Center. Of the two trade shows we typically attend, SEMA and PRI, I prefer the latter, because it is a smaller and more targeted show. PRI stands for Performance Racing Industry, and as you’d expect from that name, there’s no fluff here. The companies in attendance make performance parts. There are no gigantic chrome wheels, no neon underglow; instead, you’ve got engine parts, transmissions, chassis and suspension companies, and brakes, wheels, and tires. In other words, it’s awesome. It’s like taking a virtual walk through the Summit Racing catalog. In only the first day of the show, I was stopped by several people who asked about my project cars: Truck Norris, my ’67…

eBay Motors Powers HOT ROD Drag Week Presented by Gear Vendors Overdrive. Looking at the map, the 2021 HOT ROD Drag Week route looked a lot like the Bermuda triangle. The staging and starting point was U.S. 131 Motorsports Park in Martin, Michigan, followed by a shot over to Summit Motorsports Park, in Norwalk, Ohio, then down to Lucas Oil Raceway, in Indianapolis, and back up to Byron Dragway in Byron, Illinois. A sane person on the freeway could make the trip in about 12 hours and cover about 800 miles if they didn’t disappear into a triangle myth forever. There is nothing sane about Drag Week contenders. Instead of the direct route, they all volunteered to drive their race cars along four circuitous routes that added up…

There’s a running joke about America’s priorities. Since the development of the automobile just barely lags our development as a nation, the automobile pretty much defines our lives. Forget the day we can exercise our right to vote; we can’t wait for our privilege to drive. In fact, we’ll drive if it’s farther than a block away and even shorter distances if the weather doesn’t suit us. You could say we sort of have to, because nearly everything built within the past 100 years is automobile scale, it’s damn near impossible to walk to anywhere with any kind of significance anymore. We don’t have to look any further than where we live to see proof of our priorities. By and large, we’ll sacrifice the looks of our most…

For years, third-gen F-bodies, such as the Camaro, Firebird, and Trans Am, were looked down on, but as prices skyrocketed on the earlier generations, people put aside the mullet jokes and saw the true potential of third-gens as affordable, hard-charging hot rods. One company that has always been on the cheerleading squad for third-gens is Hawks Motorsports. In fact, it used to be called Hawks Third Gen but changed the name when it branched out to the other generations as well as performance GM cars in general. Hawks is a family-owned business that’s been around for 20 years, and recently we had the chance to crawl around the salvage yard and parts facilities. It’s a treasure trove of parts, especially if you’re a fan of third-gen, fourth-gen, and…

Air conditioning is one of those modern wonders that’s nice to graft into our classic hot rods. Yeah, you could get A/C from the factory back in the ’60s, but by today’s standards it comes up lacking. Thanks to the aftermarket, there are several companies that sell kits that let you add modern A/C to your classic car or truck. Just bolting on parts won’t get you there. These systems are complex, and even though they tried to make them easy to install, there are still several ways you can screw it up and wind up with a system that doesn’t work very well, or not at all. To help you navigate the pitfalls of aftermarket A/C installation, we hit up Vintage Air’s Rick Love to clue us…

The list of things to do keeps getting smaller as we push to get Truck Norris, our project 1967 Chevrolet C10 pickup, back on the road. Over the last few days, I got the engine started and ran the transmission through the gears. Minus a leak at the fuel pump outlet, there were no problems. The engine sounds great and has good oil pressure, the transmission shifts smoothly, and there are no scary sounds coming from the driveline. Let’s check out how we got the engine running. Sources BluePrint Engines; 308.236.1010; blueprintengines.com Concept One Pulley Systems; 877.337.0688; c1pulleys.com Earl’s Performance Plumbing; 866.464.6553; holley.com Holley; 866.464.6553; holley.com Lokar Performance Products; 877.469.7440; lokar.com Performance Rod & Custom; 812.897.5805; prchotrod.com Pertronix; 909.599.5955; pertronixbrands.com Spal; 800.345.0327; spalusa.com Total Cost Involved Engineering; 800.984.6259;…

When you’re a suspension company, you have a vested interest in getting people excited about driving their cars as God intended—hard! UMI Performance knows this, and it figured the best way to get people involved would be to host an event. Now, the company has done its UMI King of the Mountain race (with its $25,001 in prizes and $15,000 of that for the winner), sponsored by Air Flow Research (AFR), but it wanted to up how many events it was hosting at its motorsports park, so UMI hooked up with Optima Batteries to put on this DriveAutoX autocross event. Autocrossing, as opposed to road racing, is a much easier way for newbies to get into the sport. The speeds are a bit slower, and a proper autocross…

The Scotty’s Muffler 1934 Ford roadster was well known on the Southern California dry lakes and on the Bonneville Salt Flats for more than a quarter century. Now it’s in Massachusetts, part of Dave Simard’s collection. Running a Chrysler Hemi in its heyday, the historic hot rod is now powered by the Ford flathead that just might be the most famous Ardun engine ever built. For the last few months, we’ve been hanging out with you—virtually, of course—at East Coast Custom in Leominster, Massachusetts, David’s Boston-area shop, and the barn that houses his impressive corral of traditional hot rods. We’ve previously featured a few of David’s carefully preserved cars—the resurrected Hemi-powered belly tank racer, his lost-for-decades preserved ’50s era 1933 Ford roadster, and his survivor 1955 Ford Thunderbird.…

Why is the Gear Vendors Overdrive so popular on Drag Week? Racers know it will live behind 4,000 hp, can be installed in a weekend, and doesn’t share fluid with your transmission so it won’t get contaminated when your automatic detonates. To truly understand the function of the overdrive, we are first going to hit you with some basic drag racing concepts. On an ideal quarter-mile pass, you leave the line at torque peak, and shift through the gears at horsepower peak until you cross the finish line. The gear ratios in the transmission, rearend, and overall tire diameter determine the engine rpm as you pass through the speed trap. A higher overall numerical gear ratio raises rpm, and a lower numerical gear ratio lowers it. Simple, right?…

In 1993, Bill Reilly spent a bunch of time and money upgrading his ’69 Dodge Dart with bigger torsion bars, ’73-up disc brakes, and a healthy big-block. In his own words, “It was absolutely miserable to drive. It was all over the place. It was so hard to install the big-block—the headers and all that with the stock suspension—and then it drove like crap. I still remember the exact piece of road I was on when I first thought that.” Bill Reilly’s single-minded obsession to build a Mopar suspension that worked well and packaged all the popular engine combinations culminated in the AlterKtion K-member with coilover suspension ($4,995). That’s why he created White Haven, Pennsylvania-based Reilly Motorsports (RMS). Since designing and marketing the AlterKtion, RMS has added the four-link…

This is the continuation of a series we started several months ago, documenting the refresh of this 1972 Mustang convertible. The owners sent the car to Pure Vision Design in Simi Valley, California, for some basic upgrades. They wanted a V8 in place of the stock inline-six, a five-speed transmission in place of the stock four-speed, disc brakes, power steering, and air conditioning. When the car arrived at Pure Vision, owner Steve Strope summoned us to his shop to check out this cream puff. Some may quibble about the looks of this generation Mustang (your author included), but this car was such a nicely preserved time capsule, Steve wanted us to check it out before his guys began working on it. Sources American Powertrain; 931.646.4836; americanpowertrain.com BluePrint Engines;…

In the early ’60s, drag racing became a theater of the fantastic. Funny Cars still held very close to the original form, completely recognizable as the street machines from whence they came. Indeed, the normally aspirated pioneers engendered the deception. Though they might have appeared unmolested, leading technology seethed beneath a mild-mannered exterior. But that changed irrevocably when the hammer went down, the pipes burned red, and the still-exploding nitro spewing from them overpowered the senses and seized the lungs. That was the physical phenomenon. Was anything ever the same after experiencing this primal scream? In the fall of 1966, at his metal works in Floydada, Texas, (1) Don Hardy built two 1967 body-in-white Camaros, the first one for Kelly “The Professor” Chadwick and the other for Dick “Mr. Chevrolet”…

People often say that there are certain things in life that you can’t put a price on. While we can’t always know what material things will be bestowed with that significance, automobiles often end up in that category, and Steve Hinckley’s 1965 Dodge Dart embodies that sentiment. However, it took a long and crooked path to reach that status. His story started in 1965, when his grandmother, Lois Hinckley drove her 1957 Dodge Lancer to the ironically-named Hinckley Dodge to trade it in on a brand new 1965 Dodge Dart. Purchased as basic transportation, the Dart was decked out with a white exterior and white and gold interior and had a 273 small-block backed by a 904 three-speed automatic. It was used as a daily driver, and it…

On November 26, 1937, representatives from five amateur racing clubs gathered together and organized the present Southern California Timing Association. In almost a year of operation, it has experienced many ups and downs and plenty of hard knocks. This type of automobile racing, as sponsored by the Association, means nothing from the standpoint of profit to any individual whatsoever. Many long hours of hard work have gone into the preparations for these races, and the results have been very satisfactory. —Wally Parks, Editor, SCTA Racing News program, October 2, 1938 That statement marked the beginning of amateur hot rod racing, when Wally Parks and hundreds like him with their “hot irons” became one under the Southern California Timing Association (SCTA) banner. Their individual efforts were printed in the SCTA Racing…

With our classic rides, you have to keep in mind that the suspension was designed over half a century ago, and when new, they handled well compared to the other cars of the day. But, as they say, “That was then, and this is now.” Today we’re used to far better handling, and the classic chassis just can’t give us that. With unibody cars such as Camaros, Novas, and Firebirds, it’s a fairly straightforward job to remove the outdated factory front subframe, which would include its worn suspension, steering, and brakes, and swap in a new subframe with improved suspension, brakes, and most important, handling. For this, Heidts offers their Pro-G front subframe for first-gen Camaros, Firebirds, and Novas. The Pro-G bolt-on subframe and suspension lowers ride height…

Everyone knows Steve Brule from his co-hosting duties on MotorTrend’s Engine Masters show. While that always gets us thinking about cars, Brule’s other hobby is boats. Yep, Brule just loves a fast boat. That may be one reason a lot of very fast boat engines roll through Westech Performance’s dyno cell doors. We get that boat engines are built a bit different compared to the automotive versions, but they are far more alike than they are different. Most of those differences are designed to help the engine survive living in a marine environment. The overall principles of building them, and of making power, are the same. And while they aren’t built to be flung into the land of high rpm, they are built to deliver tons of torque.…

Email us at hotrod@motortrend.com Well, I’m honored to be tasked with penning this page for the first issue after David Freiburger’s final column last month. In a weird coincidence, it turns out that Freiburger and I both touched on the same topic in our latest columns: electric vehicles. His piece, which can be found on his Facebook page, delves into the question of whether EVs are really that great for the environment (spoiler alert: it’s more complicated than you think). For my take on electric vehicles, I want to talk about how EVs will or won’t change the face of hot rodding. To be honest, even a few months ago I hardly gave EVs a second thought—I saw them as a wealthy person’s second or third car. Then I went…