Sommaire pour Fall 2016 de Roadkill

10 PRE-ROADKILL #BECAUSEROADKILLs DAVID FREIBURGER Iwas Roadkilling before there was ROADKILL. The video series and mag is a reflection of life rather than a produced version of “reality” that isn’t. You can tell by the way I was doing this stuff before the cameras were ever pointed my direction. Here are my nine most inane moments never caught on video, which is really for the best. THAT POOR HONDA: When I was a teen, some friends and I got an old Honda Civic, probably about a ’75. We cut the top off, chocked the rear wheels, and poured ATF on the front tires. I got the front tires spinning, wedged a tool box on the pedal, and got out as we watched rubber smoke until the engine seized. We hosed…

IN THE BEGINNING This pic is from 1957, but if you squint away the ’50s cars and trucks in the background, it could be from the ’40s. And that’s why we’re starting here. This is a scene from El Mirage Dry Lake in SoCal, where hot rods have been racing for top speed since the ’30s. Imagine the outlaw scene: Guys were knocking the fenders off their cars to save weight then hopping up engines with homegrown tactics and getting thrown in jail for street racing in Los Angeles. It sounds like last week’s headlines, but they were the first to do it. Then, to avoid Johnny Law, they drove backroads for three-plus hours to remote desert dry lakes where they’d bivvy for three days and run side…

The joke’s on you if you think this is all for show. Yeah, that’s an airplane radial engine shoved back against the firewall of a ’39 Plymouth truck and rising from a pockmarked, raw-steel body dotted with rivets. When Gary Corns starts it up, there’s a wheeze and then a rat-a-tat-tat in the bare-metal engine bay. Smoke billows around the Plymouth and it disappears before you can comprehend what you’re looking at. “One day my dad said we needed another project,” Gary’s son Adam says. “He went over to an airplane wrecking yard, and the next thing you know this 1950s seaplane shows up on a trailer, and he says we’re gonna use the 300-hp Jacobs radial engine for the truck.” The truck is a vintage Plymouth that Gary picked…

The roads around Le Mans, France, are narrow and prone to sudden changes in direction. Climbing roses trail along brightly painted shutters, and black-hearted, red-faced poppies bop around in fields along the lanes. It’s not the place you’d expect to see a big American car, but we weren’t there five minutes before we spotted a flash of Poppy Red that was attached not to a stem but to a Ford V-8. It’s one of the best-kept secrets of France; there are cool cars there! France’s most famous car race, the 24 Hours of Le Mans, brings incredible machinery to the racetrack, and the fans come in their chrome and carbon-fiber best. Cruise through town, and you’ll see a new Porsche parked outside a boulangerie—we don’t know what that means, but…

A four-wheel-drive Ferrari station wagon? It almost sounds like a ROADKILL project car. But it’s probably just something the product-planning boys in Maranello dreamed up during an epic Chianti-fueled lunch at the Ristorante Montana, the storied eatery just down the road from the Ferrari factory’s main gate. Weird as it sounds, though, the four-wheel-drive wagon-ish Ferrari GTC4Lusso is actually a spectacularly good supercar The naturally aspirated, 6.3-liter V-12 under the hood delivers 680 hp at 8,000 rpm, and the front wheels are driven via a crankshaft-driven power takeoff unit bolted to the front of the engine block. While up to 20 percent of the engine’s 514 lb-ft can be sent to the front axle, up to 90 percent of that can then be directed by the PTU to a single…

HOT HORSE They say only Mustangs will survive the nuclear apocalypse. Nah, they don’t say that. Do they? Anyway, in 2013 driver Vaughn Gittin Jr. took his 2014 Ford Mustang RTR drift car through a wall of flames at Willow Springs Raceway in Rosamond, California. Gittin was risking his eyebrows for a video shoot. Photographer Larry Chen was risking his for the chance to get this shot. “We only had enough pyro stuff for one take,” Chen told us. Nailed it. You can see the final video by searching “Fire Drift.”…

dive Checklist Snorkel on Jeep • Snorkel on Fred • Four-wheel drive • Fingers crossed • Let out the clutch • Here goes nothin’ • WITH 12 FEET OF WATER AND 16 FEET OF SNORKELS, A FLAG SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA. I was wearing a special scuba mask that allowed me to talk to and hear other people underwater as I let out the clutch and rolled into the pond. The tires stayed planted, and I plowed ahead as my vision went black. It wasn’t actually black. It was more like a tan, the color of coffee with a half-dozen creamers dumped in. The Cummins was still running, and that was a good sign. Then the dust started to clear, and I thought I was starting to climb the…

Every summer, the San Louis Valley in Monte Vista, Colorado, is scored, tilled, and graded until the Rocky Mountain flatlands become a smooth dirt straightaway. Contestants come from all over the country, from the urban lowlands of New Jersey to the mountain coastlines of California. Guys and gals with their hop-ups and hot rods make the pilgrimage to do their best on the dirty eighth-mile drag strip. This, the Hot Rod Dirt Drags, is just one of several brilliant events put on by Mike “Nick” Nicholas, the man behind Colorado’s Hot Rod Hill Climb (HotRodHillClimb.com). Nick got the idea from old-school drag racing that was all the rage when the triumphant servicemen came home from World War II. The thrill-seeking racers would find unused airstrips and empty stretches of flat…

THE 10 MOST EXTREME STEPS JON KAASE USED TO MAKE 585HORSEPOWER FROM A ’50S FORD SCHOOL BUS ENGINE This is real hot rodding: taking an obsolete turd of an engine and doing whatever it takes to make power. Ingenuity over bolt-ons. But why would champion race engine builder Jon Kaase bother with a Y-block Ford? Because he can. He can also get the thing to deliver 585 horsepower without a turbo, blower, or nitrous oxide. All this from an engine that made 200 horsepower stock. His prod was the 2015 Hot Rod magazine Engine Masters Challenge, an engine-builder competition of horsepower and torque on the engine dynamometer. In 2015, the shootout introduced a class for vintage engines, and Kaase intended to win. His weapon was the Ford Y-block, the…

NEW CARS WE LIKEFast, cool, loud, interesting ... It was when we hit 175 mph in a 5,919-pound sedan on a German autobahn that spending $17,335 on carbon-ceramic brakes suddenly seemed a good idea. Yeah, yeah, you can get a whole new car—a whole fleet of Roadkill cars—for $17,335, but if your are pockets deep enough to afford the $335,600 you need to buy a 2017 Bentley Mulsanne Speed, adding another 5 percent to the invoice for the optional stoppers is no big deal. Nearly 6,000 pounds traveling at 175 mph equals enough kinetic energy to melt steel brakes. If we had the money, the Mulsanne Speed is our kind of ultra-luxury car. OK, it’s not much smaller than a Suburban, and yes, it weighs three tons. But it…

Here’s all you need to know about the new Jaguar F-Pace: Before anyone outside the company had even driven one, it had become the fastestselling Jaguar in the company’s history. The secret sauce? Putting a sports car badge on an SUV. Hey, it worked for Porsche, whose Cayenne and Macan SUVs are the cows that now provide the cash to build 911s. And it’s going to work for Jaguar, which is already putting the finishing touches on a baby brother to the F-Pace called the E-Pace, based on the same hardware as the Range Rover Evoque. The F-Type is available in the U.S. with three powertrains and in five trim levels. Top of the range is the F-Pace S, powered by the 380-hp version of the 3.0-liter, supercharged V-6 used…

Viewers of the Roadkill Garage show have probably noticed our fondness for the oxy-acetylene torch. We consider it a problem solver, always ready with the quick solution for all kinds of potentially time-consuming mechanical quagmires. The torch can cut, weld, heat, melt, and loosen— all handy actions when working on derelict cars. Whether burning something off or burning something on, the steel-melting, 6,300-degree heat of the oxy-acetylene flame is our friend. The torch mechanism includes a tank full of oxygen, another loaded with acetone, pressure regulators, and hoses leading to a handheld torch that has one regulating knob for the fuel (acetylene) and another for the oxygen. Like all good things, the arrangement has the potential for a garage-leveling explosion when mishandled, which is why you need to buy…

Here’s an intro to the old school for the young generation of Roadkillers. This is how guys built the cars known as street machines in the ’80s—this one with a dip of street race and with some modern parts for extra spunk. It’s also the story of the resurrection of an old car that spent years wallowing in farm soil laden with sundry vegetal and animal residue. The car is the Crop Duster, a big-blockengine-swapped 1970 Plymouth Duster built for what today would be considered cheap for a vintage muscle car that runs in the 11s, naturally aspirated. “You’re still going to have 20 grand duplicating that car,” David Freiburger says in his trademark deadpan. “That’s the problem. That’s expensive.” But insofar that cubic dollars can be replaced by fanatic…

NO BRAKES? NO PROBLEM. IT'S SPEEDWAY, NOT STOPWAY. It’s not a race around the track so much as a slow-motion crash that lasts for four laps. The riders are contorted around the bikes, playing vibrato on the throttle, braving a mechanical bull ride inches from three other bulls. The race starts at the lift of a ribbon, which seems a delicate bit of wrapping on what turns out to be a brutal racing package. When the thin white barrier rises, the riders charge forward, 0-60 in less than three seconds, and in less than three seconds they are at the first turn, their bodies making diagonal slashes across the motorcycles, metalbooted left feet skimming across the dirt, redirecting the pack into the back straightaway. The rider with the best…

Freiburger’s a Jeep junkie. Show him a rusty old flattie moldering under a tree somewhere, and he’ll start drooling and mumbling as he reaches for his wallet and a wrench, in that order. Me? I’m a Land Rover guy. I learned to drive in an ex-Australian Army Series II that was built in 1960 and probably hadn’t done more than a million miles. So driving the 2016 Land Rover Defender 90 Heritage is a trip down memory lane. Yes, it has fancy heated bucket seats instead of foam slabs, the transmission has six speeds instead of four and synchromesh on first and second gears, there are coils instead of cart springs on the axles, and there’s even air-conditioning, power windows, power steering, carpet on the floor, and a CD player.…

Our social media followers continue to struggle with this concept: ROADKILL is still posted to YouTube every month, and Roadkill Garage is an all-new show that is shown exclusively on MotorTrendOnDemand.com. Is this a ploy to get you to subscribe to MTOD? Of course! That’s how you can help make sure ROADKILL survives well into the future. Roadkill Garage features David Freiburger and Steve Dulcich, who is also a co-host on Engine Masters. No, this doesn’t mean Finnegan is leaving ROADKILL. The photos and captions tell the story of the first nine episodes of the show, and at the rate folks are watching, it looks like there will be many more in the future. EPISODE 1: The Pilot The first episode of Roadkill Garage is the one that tested…