Índex per Spring 2017 a Roadkill

Sometimes I feel like an old man bitching about “the good ol’ days” when it comes to technology. In general I think that tech has made my life better, but there are a few places where I find myself not quite as techsavvy as I like to think. I first logged onto Twitter a few years ago. Not sure why, but I did. I thought I understood the platform. I found out I didn’t understand it at all after engaging in a Twitter discussion with Motor Trend editor Jonny Lieberman over how “metal” a certain Volvo was or wasn’t. His argument for the Volvo was that Scott Ian of Anthrax drove one and thus the car had to be “metal.” I jokingly tweeted to Jonny that Ian hadn’t been “metal”…

“Holy moly, this is my third issue as editor of ROADKILL! People keep asking me how I like it. Well, let’s see. I’ve been daily driving a Dodge Viper for three months FOR LEGITIMATE WORK REASONS, and I got to eat Australian snack foods with Marty and Moog from Mighty Car Mods, and multitime Hot Rod Drag Week winner Tom Bailey came to my house and helped me pick out seat covers for my crappy Satellite wagon, and later we did some burnouts, so yeah, I like it. The other thing people keep asking me is if whatever they are doing is OK. I get emails like, “Hey Elana, is it OK if I bring a totally stock VW Bug to a ROADKILL event?” or “I can’t afford a car…

We got invited to head down to Ensenada, Mexico, for the week surrounding the Baja 1000 with a huge crew headed by motocross legend Gregg Godfrey. With trailers loaded up with Polaris RZRs, the plan was to prerun the race course and cause a bit of mischief along the way. The Baja 1000 is one of the most grueling off-road races in the world. It starts in Ensenada and runs about 1,000 miles through the desert of Baja California. Hot, dusty, and rough as all hell, it’s been sorting out the pros from the rookies for nearly 50 years. Gregg Godfrey is a pro. The rest of us? Definitely rookies. With a vague plan and limited experience, we rolled the dice and hoped that the sands of Mexico would be…

The B-29 bomber’s mirrored surface reflects more than just the blue sky above it and the runway beneath. Doc, as this particular plane is known, hadn’t flown in 60 years. Its polished skin reflects the surroundings, sure, but it also reflects a man’s dreams, a community’s effort, lives lost, and wars won. For it to fly again for the first time in six decades mere feet from where the B-29 was originally assembled is a great example of the persistence needed to restore anything. Rescued from the Mojave Desert, Doc flew again from Wichita’s McConnell Air Force Base because of the blood, sweat, tears, and sheer determination of a large group of enthusiasts inclined to preserve the greatest generation’s history. Boeing broke all the molds with the B-29 Superfortress, the…

TO HELP US BREAK DOWN A BUDGET FOR NEW PROJECT It’s done. You’ve pulled the trigger on that project car and dragged it home. Project cars come in all shapes and sizes, so let’s assume you’ve found yourself one that runs, but just barely. Only your true diehard hot-rod buddies get it. Everybody else thinks you’re crazy. You see what the nonbelievers can’t, not a rusty junkyard escapee but a soon-to-be cruiser that just needs a little tweaking to become a loyal daily driver. Building it is a moral imperative. There are a hundred things that it needs and a thousand cool parts you want, but you can’t afford them all—heck, you can’t afford any of ’em. You just laid down most of your cash for the right to put…

The salt can play tricks on you. Stare into the emptiness that surrounds Bonneville, Utah’s famed land speed record spot, and you run the risk of seeing things that might not be there—hints of a phantom city obscured in the distance, the sun glinting off the flats at just the right angle to suggest that the barren waste around you goes on forever, or pools of water that confuse you into thinking you have somehow been transported back in time to stand on the surface of the vast inland ocean that once occupied this very spot. If you’d popped the hood of a certain ’67 Chevrolet Nova wagon at last year’s Bonneville festivities, you would have sworn the salt was messing with your mind on a much … smaller scale.…

All-wheel drive. A twinturbo V-6 with 404 hp. A buttoned-down ride, sharp steering, and a tenacious grip on the tarmac. Nope, it’s not an Audi but a Caddy: the CT6 3.0TT sedan. Forget those plastic-fendered Fleetwood Broughams, the bobtail Sevilles, and all the other craptastic Caddys that in the ’70s and ’80s marked the brand’s downward spiral from the Standard of the World to the Walmart of luxury cars. The swaggeringly stylish Cadillac CT6 takes the fight to the German luxury car elite. Even though it swings and misses a couple of times. The 3.0TT is top dog in a three-car CT6 lineup that includes a midrange model powered by the 335-hp 3.6-liter naturally aspirated V-6 and a base model that has a 265-hp version of GM’s versatile 2.0-liter turbocharged…

WE GO INSIDE THE HISTORY OF THE BELLY TANK RACER Little lozenges with wheels and a view port zip along a dry lake bed. They show up in drawings and logos. They pop up at local car shows and land speed events. People call them belly tanks, tankers, or drop tanks, and they are associated with vintage dry lakes racing. But where did they come from, and why do they look the way they do? Belly tank racers are a mix of WWII aircraft leftovers and hot-rodding ingenuity. They’re part of the early days of hot-rodding but are still in use today. Let’s start with where they came from. Answer: the sky. The drop tank was designed to extend flying time by acting as a portable fuel cell that could…

Within the space of just a few weeks in 2016, we saw the debut of not one but two 16-cylinder, 1,000-cubic-inch Cadillac Eldorados. Our pal Fred Williams built an off-roading twin-engine Caddy for Dirt Every Day, and veteran LeMons racer Dave Morros and his crew turned up with their own thousand-inch Eldo for a race in the budget-racing 24 Hours of LeMons series. And they did it the “easy” way with simple addition: one-half Cadillac + onehalf Cadillac = two Cadillacs in one. A motivated builder can make a twin-engine car in many ways. Drag racers, land speed racers, road racers, and tractor pullers have built some astonishing creations. Some have linked the crankshafts of two engines arranged nose to tail. Some have run multiple engines and transmissions side by…

CAN THIS INFAMOUS SNAKE BE A TAME COMMUTER CAR? Iknew the day was coming. But when it arrived, I shriveled and hissed like Gollum in The Lord of the Rings. “We wants it. We needs it. The precious. We hates them. We hates them. They steals it.” No golden trinket caused this meltdown. Rather it was the request for the return of an Adrenaline Red 2015 Dodge Viper GT that our parent company TEN was forced to buy after someone unnamed ruined all its resale value by off-roading it on a Motocross course. (RK Episode 38). When I came on as editor, I claimed the keys as a birthright. I’d driven numerous Vipers before and always said that I’d happily daily drive one, but here was a chance to prove…

Roadkill spirit runs deep among Mercedes-Benz’s in-house hot-rodders, AMG. Based in a sleepy little village called Affalterbach, just outside Stuttgart, Germany, the fun-loving AMG crew routinely pulls stunts such as stuffing a 630-hp twinturbo V-12 into a Mercedes SUV or squeezing 375 hp out of a 2.0-liter fourcylinder engine and putting that into a little Mercedes hatchback. They’re now working on a road-legal 200-somethingmph hypercar powered by a Mercedes Formula 1 engine. Because they can. The shiny bums at Mercedes HQ let AMG run amok because ... all that craziness makes a ton of money. About half the AMG cars produced are sold in the U.S. The greater Los Angeles area alone is AMG’s eighth-largest market in the world. AMG is so successful those shiny bums now want more people…

The ROADKILL and Motor Trend family now includes muscle car guru Mike Musto and his killer new show, The House of Muscle. You might remember Mike from his YouTube show Big Muscle, his radio show RPM, his time on Bullrun, or … well, Mike has been around. Most recently, Musto road tripped his “Project Angrier” ’69 Dodge Daytona to this summer’s Roadkill Nights event, where he raced Freiburger in the Dirt-Track Challenger during Episode 56 of ROADKILL. We caught up with Mike to chat about The House of Muscle and how a kid from New York became the king of muscle car stories. Roadkill: Where were you born, Mike? Mike Musto: Manhattan! Grew up in Brooklyn and later Long Island. New York isn’t exactly known for car stuff these days. Maybe not Manhattan,…

I was a teen when I began working on cars, a natural progression from tearing down, fixing, and building bicycles. I had saved and bought my own collection of basic hand tools, and I was pretty handy at bolting things together. Once I graduated from pedal power to automotive projects, it didn’t take long to realize the importance of being able to join pieces of metal together. Back then, wire feed and TIG (heliarc) were exotic and expensive. The home welder had two choices: oxy-acetylene or electric arc (stick). Stick welding can be really good for strong structural welds on heavier material, but the oxy-acetylene rig was the right choice for automotive handiwork. I bought a brand-new Victor outfit, rented a pair of bottles, and prepared to take my automotive…

RK&MCM become BFFs You could say this story started when Freiburger bought a big, slow, mostly blue Chevy back in October 2016. DF had found a ’69 Impala Custom and felt that it was perfect for the upcoming ROADKILL episode with fellow YouTube stars Marty and Moog of Mighty Car Mods, and I jumped at the chance to help him go pick it up. Really, though, the story started way before that, when fans of both shows agreed that the two teams should join forces. Until the people of the internet spoke, we didn’t even know about each other! Marty and Moog are a pair of car geeks from Down Under. Moog is lanky and loud, all teeth and beard and dirty jokes. Marty is cheerfully sleepy, drawling, “Maaad” when…

Laura was depressed. “I write these press releases about cars, and I don’t know what the words I’m writing mean.” “Yeah, but you’re a PR person,” I answered. “Nobody really expects you to know how an engine works.” She glared at me. “I expect me to know.” “You just need to take something apart and put it back together,” Tom said. “I suggest a minibike.” The above is an exact recreation of a conversation I had with best friend, Laura Conrad, and my husband, Tom Yeager, last summer. Laura told me to make her seem taller in the retelling, and Tom wanted me to refer to him as “El Jefe,” but I refused. This is science. We are all about facts, and the facts are this: Tom’s suggestion to learn…

Twin-engine cars are nothing new in the 24 Hours of LeMons. At least four of them have raced in the series before. Dave Morrow and his team had once made plans, albeit just a basic outline, to power a six-wheeled General Motors’ “Dustbuster” minivan with three supercharged GM V-6s. Goaded by LeMons organizers, Morrow and his crew of Pittsburgh-based misfit racers undertook the twin-engine Cadillac build months before it raced at Gingerman Raceway on October 8 and 9. Morrow and his dedicated regulars are no strangers to weird builds. They built a twin-turbo, mid-engine GMC van back in 2010 and more recently assembled a hacked-together “Pontiac Banshee” using a BMW 3 Series, an Opel GT, and a Pontiac OHC-6 inline-six engine. However, the simple amount of effort expended to make…

ENDURO AND DERBY RACING: AFFORDABLE AND HILARIOUS The men and women who composed the field of junkyard race cars surrounding me were surprisingly diverse—some racers were barely old enough to have their driver’s licenses, and others were seasoned veterans who’ve been racing in different realms of motorsport for many years. Everyone had been friendly and welcoming to the newcomer, and I felt great as I sat there on the grid. The remains of a fifth-generation Honda Accord were whirring away beneath me—120 furious little horses ready to run the Night of Destruction at Irwindale Speedway in Irwindale, California. That’s when I realized my seat belt was inoperable. Was I going to end it here, thrown through the windshield of a barely running economy car in front of 6,000 race fans…

NEW CARS WE LIKE Porsche Turbo. Two words that in the 1970s could leave grown men curled up in a little ball in the corner of the room, whimpering for momma as the ice water thawed in their veins and their hands gradually stopped shaking. Driving the original turbocharged 911 on the limit was like wrestling a gorilla on a greasy pole over a pit full of alligators. One slip and you could be sure it wasn’t going to end well. The original 911 Turbo had just 260 hp, and in these days of 707-hp Dodge sedans, it’s hard to see what all the fuss was about. But those Porsche ponies all arrived between 2,700 and 3,500 rpm with the subtlety of a baseball bat to the back of your…

The guys at Aston Martin say they’re sorta over the whole James Bond thing. And when you first see the new DB11 in all its aluminum and carbon-fiber glory, you get it. This swoopy, extravagant, 12-cylinder gran turismo doesn’t need a double-0 number. Those gorgeous looks are killer enough. Like an impecunious English aristocrat’s crumbling stately home, Aston Martins have always looked classier than they were to live with. Faults were forgiven as eccentricities, passed off as part of the charm of owning a hand-built British sports car. New from the wheels up, the DB11 tips that olde worlde, shabby chic shtick into the dumpster. Case in point: This is the first Aston Martin with a modern infotainment system, courtesy of the electrical hardware supplied by Mercedes-Benz parent company Daimler,…

If someone offers you a free 1965 Ford F-350 tow truck, you should put it in your backyard, right? That’s why there’s currently a 352 FE-powered wrecker in Elana’s backyard. “My husband’s friend told us that if we moved it, it was ours,” she says. “Since that was both a challenge—can we move a truck that hasn’t moved in 30 years—and a gift, you can be sure we made it happen.” Plans for the truck include making the brakes work and fixing the weird short that causes the rotating boom light to go on every time it rains Old Friends Back in the ’90s, when Freiburger was on the off-road magazines team, he and fellow Jeep lunatic Rick Péwé would regularly limp rusty rescue cars across back-road America with questionable…