Hot Rod September 2022

“Can a Volvo be a hot rod?” That was the question posed to me at a press event I attended a couple days ago. The occasion was the North American debut of the Volvo P1800 Cyan, a heavily modified version of an early Volvo P1800. It was built by Cyan Cars, a division of Cyan Racing, a Swedish company affiliated with Volvo’s factory race team in the World Touring Car Cup race series, and they have a proven record in racing with several championships in that series. In conjunction with the race program, Cyan builds road-going performance versions of Volvo’s street cars, but this is their first foray into a modified version of an older model. Can a Volvo be a hot rod? Well sure, but before I could answer to…

20 Years Ago September 2002: 124 pages, $3.99 Here’s a cool piece of HOT ROD historical trivia: This issue was the first to feature a cover picture shot on a digital camera. Kids with their phones won’t appreciate the struggle photographers had in the early days of digital cameras to generate an image with enough resolution to use on the cover, or inside the magazine for that matter. Wes Allison was the shooter here, and he’s always been on top of photographic technology. (Incidentally, he shot this issue’s cover image on Canon’s new mirrorless DSLR, the impressive R3.) Fresh off the plane from Power Tour, editor David Freiburger compiled a six-page feature of readers’ cars from the trip. Marlan Davis returned to the pages of HOT ROD after a stint at Car…

By 1958, the National Roadster Show in Oakland, California, was nearly a decade old and enjoyed a reputation as one of the country’s premier hot rod and custom car events. But “proving that the West Coast boys have no monopoly on fine hot rods and customs,” HOT ROD paired coverage of the Oakland show with a report from the Hartford, Connecticut, Autorama, what Tex Smith called “the undisputed show center of the East.” The two stories, “Car Shows East…” and “…Car Shows West,” ran together in the May 1958 issue. It’s interesting that HOT ROD sent its A-Team to Connecticut—Smith, Photo Editor Eric Rickman, and even Editor Wally Parks made the trek—while it leaned on Car Craft’s Dick Day to provide Oakland coverage. Maybe, even in these early days, the magazine staffs…

There’s a rod shop about an hour west of Boston called East Coast Custom where David Simard and his team build hot rods for customers. The Leominster, Massachusetts, shop also features a spectacular barnful of David’s own iron, traditional prewar Fords mostly, collected over the past several years and in various stages of progress. We’ve talked about David Simard’s East Coast Custom before. On our website last year, we featured a 1933 Ford five-window coupe called The Devil’s Coupe, a surviving ’30s-era hot rod that had been out of commission for more than 50 years before being revived and put back on the street in perfect period unrestored condition. If The Devil’s Coupe had a brother, it’d be this channeled 1933 roadster—another perfectly preserved piece of hot rod history—with a pedigree just…

A 1957 Corvette custom show car named Bali Hai that disappeared in 1965, still wearing its original body modifications and custom Tommy “The Greek” pinstripes, has been found in California. What makes this find so special is that the car is a time capsule from the last Oakland Roadster Show, held in February 1960. It reappeared at the Grand National Roadster Show in Pomona, California, in 2022. The car was originally purchased used in 1957 by 20-year-old Oakland resident Bill Shelley. Using $3,000 earned from selling cows, Bill bought it in Polo White with a red cove, 283ci engine, and a three-speed transmission. The previous owner had added a low gearset in the rearend and set it up for drag racing. Bill raced the Corvette at Half Moon Bay and Vacaville before…

Why do people stuff cool cars away in dark garages and barns only to forget about them? According to Chad Ehrlich, owner of Nobody’s Auto in Great Bend, Kansas, it’s typically the same story. As he told us, “What I usually hear is, ‘I used to drive it all the time but got a new car, so I put this away to fix up someday.’” Sadly, that day never seems to show up. This is exactly the case with this garage find 1979 Camaro. Yes, the owner stuffed it in the garage to “fix up someday.” He ended up moving about 30 miles from where the car was stored, and it just wasn’t worth the back-and-forth drive to work on the car, so it sat. In the more than 15 years…