Hot Rod March 2022

@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 C10; and…

20 Years Ago March 2002, 116 pages, $3.99 Monster Torque certainly grabs your attention at the newsstand, and it’s the same force that shoves you back into the driver seat as you bury the accelerator, so yeah, that’s a good thing in both instances. How do you get monster torque out of a small-block Chevy? That’s easy, give it more displacement and more efficient airflow. David Freiburger laid out the formula “in 6 easy steps,” by starting with a HT383 crate engine from Chevrolet Performance, which was advertised as a truck engine that made 325 hp and 415 lb-ft of torque. With that as a modest baseline, DF experimented with headers, a better oil pan and windage tray, Edelbrock’s RPM Air Gap dual plane intake, 1.6:1 rocker arms, and finally Comp’s XE282HR…

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” Harrell.…

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 to 1,200 miles total—each…

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 track will have…

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 served that…