This guy has a really cool approach to going fast: Leave the engine stock and hop up everything around it. His formula has delivered an 11.62 e.t. at 117 mph from an untouched LS1 in a '99 Camaro. How? Traction, gears, and weight reduction. It reminds us a lot of how Hot Rod used to test muscle cars back in the '60s. The dude is Steven Mashburn of Independence, Missouri, and this SS is his first street/strip car. He got it for $11,000 two and a half years ago, scoring the hard-to-find, one-year-only Hugger Orange paint. This stripper also had perks like manual windows, no T-tops, and a stick. Drag-wise, it's the perfect fourth-gen F-body. When he got it, all it took was Mickey Thompson sticky rubber to get it running 12.85 in the quarter, though a previous owner had installed an aftermarket airbox and a 12-bolt rear with 4.30 gears. It was impressive for a near-stocker but not quick enough, so Steven installed his only horsepower parts, beginning with headers from American Racing (AmericanRacing Headers.com) and 3-inch Dynatech exhaust (DynatechHeaders.com), eliminating the catalytic converters and placing the turndowns ahead of the axle. With a computer tune, Steven says that change made the car about 0.400 quicker in the quarter-mile. Another 0.400 was trimmed with an LS6 intake and another retune, pushing the rev limiter to 6,800 rpm and adding LS6 valvesprings to the stock cam and rockers. The engine makes 317 hp and 350 lb-ft at the wheels at Revline Motors in Kansas City, Missouri.

With their standard Blue Flame six-bangers, the '53 to '55 Corvettes could never be called fast--not even remotely quick by today's standards--but that's not what made people love them. At a time when new cars were big and heavy, the Vette, and its Ford Thunderbird cousin, offered a smaller and sportier package that allowed the bucks-up new owner to score chicks at will. Even today, you'll get a lot more looks in an early Vette than you will a new one.

Admit it, somewhere deep inside you're either a Smokey and the Bandit guy or a Dukes of Hazzard guy. A Trans Am lover or a Charger fan. You had a crush on either Daisy or Frog. OK, both. But when it comes down to it, you've got to choose sides. We forced people to do just that, putting up the top two pop icons of gearhead entertainment for the vote with readers worldwide. Big-screen action comedy with Burt Reynolds, or little-screen Duking it out Friday nights on CBS? Here's what you said. If you want more, check out HazzardNet.com for all things Dukes-related and FunTrivia.com for loads of trivia on both Dukes and Bandit.

There's a time-proven formula for running 10s in a Chevelle: You build a fairly simple 496ci Rat motor. Done. Or you go even milder, then throw some nitrous on it. Easy. But some guys just won't roll that way--"bottles are for babies" and all that. Jake Stelter is that guy. He took the tough road, building a screaming, 8,500-rpm, 402ci, 730hp small-block. His car was all wrapped up for the first time in April 2011, then he subjected it to the flagellation of Drag Week" just five months later. And we love him for it. People say you can't build a let-it-all-hang-out motor and run 4.88 gears with a 6,900-rpm converter on the street. Well, meet Jake.

We're not certain why Danny's called Bubba, but he is--at least at Hot Rod Drag Week, where he's raced and finished every single one of the seven years we've thrown that party. Five of those thrashes have been in this '66 Ford Fairlane. It actually belongs to his father-in-law, who's known as nothing more than Pop. But Danny drives it, racking up something like 10,000 trouble-free miles. Oh, yeah--one time he needed to shim a U-joint with a slice of aluminum from a beer can.

Isaac Newton knew what he was talking about, and Randy Belehar can prove it. He's got a mountain of junk parts that scientifically demonstrate that a big hankin' Pontiac at rest wants to stay at rest, and it'll chew up a warehouse full of ring gears, Posi units, TH400 sprags, and rear control arms when you try to urge it into motion. Sir Isaac never planned on the mass of a 4,100-pound car and driver being accelerated by a 467ci Pontiac, but somehow his laws must explain the cracked block and pile of destroyed roller lifters.

Hayden Groendyke can identify the exact instant he hatched the wonder featured here. He and co-driver Charles Samples were flying back from the ’09 edition of La Carrera Panamericana, known to us gringos as the Mexican Road Race. They’d just run the grueling, seven-day, 1,800-mile event—one of the great automotive adventures—in a mildly modded Hudson Hornet, and after a slew of mechanical problems, they were licking their wounds. Bag this, Hayden decided right then and there on the plane. “We’re doing this next year at the front of the bus,” he informed his co-piloto.

No one has a neutral opinion on T-buckets. Love them or hate them, simple as that. OK, so maybe hate’s a strong word and there’s a category for strongly dislike. But have you ever noticed how stuff that was hot 40 years ago and horrible 25 years ago is awesome today? Case in point: When was the last time you saw a T-bucket in HOT ROD? If you’re younger than 30, it’s probably never. Youngsters may not have even heard the term Fad T, which refers to the style of Ford Model T roadsters that boomed the day after the first cheap fiberglass body left the mold. The craze kicked off in the early ’60s and thrived through the ’70s.

Richard Gilliam
Sarasota, Florida
The problem with a genie hot rod is driving it. Straight-axle front suspension designed in the teens can make for darty high-speed manners. But throwing the shifter in High gear and rolling down the interstate at 75 mph in Richard Gilliam’s ’32 coupe, as we did during the ’11 Power Tour®, was a sheer joy. The car was surprisingly effortless to drive, quiet, and comfortable. Instead of focusing attention on steering corrections, we just hustled down the road, shuffled songs on an iPod playing through the hidden stereo, and enjoyed the air conditioning while carrying on a conversation at normal volume.

Times they are a changin’. Not very long ago, a guy could build something radically different from what his friends were building just by dropping an LS1 into his car instead of the throwback big-block. But the LS is now the rule and not the exception, and Chad Moscrei is one of many hot rodders purposely avoiding Chevy’s latest and greatest small-block just to shake the herd. Instead, his ’66 Nova is reinforced to carry the heft of Chevy’s contemporary workhorse big-block, the LBZ Duramax diesel. This one packs a wallop to the tune of 585 hp and 790 lb-ft of torque. It doesn’t get much further from the norm than that.

Nose draggin’, tail waggin’. Mismatched wheels, squirrelly rubber, a knee-busting clutch, and a gnarly rumble. Yeah, street machines are back. Guys of the Car Craft Street Machine Nationals generation have slipped into a state of dementia, forgetting the mechanical horrors of their gearhead youth and smokin’ it back to the days when Gabriel Hijackers were hip. You can still buy those, by the way. From JC Whitney, no less.

Tony Vestuto resembles a movie character who mobs around town in a tow truck Monday through Friday and does angry, block-long burnouts in a hopped-up hot rod on weekends. He is that guy. He’s an imposing figure who doesn’t need to go out of his way to attract attention, yet getting you to lock your eyes firmly onto his profile is the sole reason he built his street freak ’55 Bel Air. Everything about it is unnecessary, yet it makes perfect sense to anyone with grease under his fingernails, high-test in his veins, and a project in the garage.

Yet another successful HOT ROD/Car Craft Cruise Night went down on October 28, 2011. Roughly 120 cars were on display and the crowds just continue to get bigger and bigger. Two Ferrari’s, a GT-40, several first generation Camaros, classic racecars, and a couple late models were on hand to keep this cruise night the best yet. Check it out if you are in the Los Angeles area the last Friday of every month. If you can't make it, check back here to see more photos.

There's something about this multipurpose hot rod you just have to love--whether it's the ultraflat tractor paint, the obnoxious hoodscoop, the tube chassis, or the fact that it has all that in a '59 Jag Mark 1 four-door sedan. Bet the Brits never saw this coming. This isn't just a street car, it isn't just a drag car, it isn't only a land speed record holder--it's all three at the same time.

There's nothing particularly right about this hot rod, but we defy you to find anything wrong with it--unless, of course, you're married to paint, polish, period-perfection, pulchritude, and all those other fun-killing pains in the patoot. None of that stuff has Jason Barringer's name on it, but his map does have his scrawl all over it. Every blue road in that sucker has seen the tread prints of this '24 Ford Model T Phaeton, which gets driven more than any retro rod we've seen in many moons. And that's the point.

Rubber splattered off the tires like guts from a shotgunned gopher. With the TKO five-speed in Second and the 454 at 5,000, the Mickey Thompsons were making the ultimate sacrifice. This was the moment we'd been waiting for but one we didn't really deserve.

Some projects come together over the course of a year or more, and some happen almost overnight. The Suburban seen here is an example of the latter. As the '11 HOT ROD Power Tour was looming, GM Performance Division kicked it into high gear on its new project vehicle for a Power Tour debut.

There’s an unfortunate irony in the fact that the cover car for our “Built, Not Bought” issue was, um, bought. However, current owner Dennis Strayer in Michigan picked it up from Bob “Bleed” Merkt—then in Wisconsin, now in Austin, Texas—who did pound together this rod from scratch. There’s really no other way to build a retro ride and have it stand proud, because even with today’s nostalgia craze, there are no out-of-the-box frames with the perfect pinch, kick, and Z—there are no chopped bodies in original steel or suicide front suspensions with ’40 Ford juice brakes. Even when a rod like this carries the de rigueur three-pot small-block Chevy, the grimy old intake says, “Hi, I scrounged the swap meets.” And while you can buy plenty of vintage-hot-roddy geegaws and gimcracks these days, a deft assembly of them can still say, “Yo, this ain’t no glorified kit car.”

Among gearheads, Pratt & Miller requires no introduction, so we'll settle for a recap. One of the leading race shops and R&D facilities in the USA, Pratt & Miller is home to the factory Corvette Racing team. This outfit has collected eight consecutive ALMS titles, five LeMans class wins, and 72 race victories, so it's the best of the best. But like many enthusiasts who work in the upper-est echelons of the motorsports world, the guys at P&M have never lost track of their hot rod and muscle car roots. One wing of the New Hudson, Michigan, facility, known as Pratt & Miller Collector Car Restorations, is devoted to customer rod builds--including the '62 Plymouth Valiant featured here.

Randy Nelson just scratched one more item from his bucket list: He finished the entire HOT ROD Power Tour® in his ’23 Ford roadster. The tour ended in Michigan, but he kept on truckin,’ heading to the East Coast to finish off one helluva vacation with his family. Power Tour® was its usual, casually brutal self, challenging hot rodders with long miles between stops and oppressive heat and humidity mixed in with a few downpours here and there to keep things spicy. The retired firefighter from Umatilla, Florida, motored through it all with a smile on his face. The smile might have come from all the attention the No. 6 car received.

We’ve spent more time with Raybestos Brakes’ Josh Russell at a race track than away from one—both competing and watching—so it came as no shock when he told us the new sweepstakes car he was putting together for the company was going to be a race car. Yes, it’ll be street-legal but more at home tearing up road courses and dragstrips. As with the Hollywood Hot Rods–built ’32 roadster pickup (Feb. ’11 issue), which was presented to the 2010 sweepstakes winner at this year’s Indy 500, he skimped neither on parts nor talent, this time enlisting Kevin Tully and Chad Hill at Hot Rod Chassis & Cycle (HRCC) in Addison, Illinois, for the latest project—a bad-to-the-bone ’64 GTO.

Fact: copper is hard to weld, and some people are allergic to copper dust. This means handforming the body of a car from sheets of copper is not only cost prohibitive, it's also grueling on fabricators. Fact number two: Aluminum gets hot when you machine it, which ruins tools if you're not careful, so building an entire chassis from billet aluminum can be unbelievably expensive, never mind that it takes forever. So why would anyone go to all the trouble and expense of building one car with the sheen of a new penny and another from big chunks of billet aluminum? Fame and fortune, of course.

Earning a paycheck to live the hot rod lifestyle is a great gig, but we aren’t the only ones who feel like we’re getting away with something when we show up for work each day. Bob Ashton of Utica, Michigan, is equally enamored with his job, which requires attending car shows to promote his own event, the popular Muscle Cars and Corvette Nationals. MCACN caters exclusively to numbers-matching, cubic-dollar cars that people love to drool over while debating their history. The scene is intense and as serious as a heart attack. The judging sheet for each car has a 1,000-point scale. You don’t show up with a first-gen Camaro unless you’re invited, and that coveted invitation doesn’t come unless your car has a COPO code or a name like Baldwin or Yenko attached to it. You’d think anyone running a show like that must know cars inside and out and that their personal ride would reflect the quality of MCACN.

Friday August 26th was the third Hot Rod’s Cruise Night at the Automobile Driving Museum. With cruises scheduled for the last Friday of every month, the next cruise will be 5-8pm on September 30th. For up-to-date cruise information check out Hotrod.com and be sure to follow us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/hotrodmag.

You know the 24 Hours of LeMons race series, right? It's endurance racing for cars that theoretically cost no more than $500, not counting wheels, tires, brakes, and safety equipment. HOT ROD has participated in a few events, and we've witnessed firsthand some truly ingenious and hilarious contraptions (as well as outright cheaters) that compete, but most of the cars are small Japanese or European sedans that we'd never care about if they didn't offer such comedy. Steve and Dave Schaible's racer, though, is a hot rod through and through, and in the spirit of Ak Miller's El Caballo de Hierro (The Iron Horse) from the '50s, it punishes the imports on the racetrack.