Table of contents for Winter 2016-2017 in Roadkill

Being Roadkill is liberating. Both Elana and I come from Hot Rod magazine, where I always used to say, “The great thing about Hot Rod is that we can cover everything; there are no boundaries.” It wasn’t true. Although Hot Rod has vast freedom compared with the constraints of, say, a Chevy-only magazine, it was in fact shackled by its legacy of content based on V-8-powered American cars and by the expectation that it would only feature the best of the best. The cars in Hot Rod often had to be vetted for compliance with vague but critical stylistic rules established over six decades of the hobby. I pushed outside the rules as often as possible, but it’s only now that I’m seeing and enjoying a new world of cars…

That’s on my bucket list.” <Wince> I hate the term “bucket list.” I know it’s supposed to be a nice thing, like, “Oh I will have ever so many lovely experiences before I die,” but to me it’s just an excuse drawer, a mental laundry pile never to be folded. When people say “on my bucket list,” what I hear is, “I don’t want that enough to actually do it.” For example, the Bonneville Salt Flats. “Speed Week, totally on the bucket list.” Well, go then. It’s just a hotel room, or if you’re broke, free camping near the truck stop. Do you think it’s going to be there forever? The salt is thinning, it was rained out two years in a row, government agencies are getting less and less…

If Cool Classic Cars Are Too Pricey, Redefine Cool Are you willing to think outside the 1969 Camaroshaped box when it comes to a project car? We won’t deny that the days of picking up a firstgen Z/28 or a 1971 ’Cuda for the cost of hauling it away are over, but that does not mean you can’t afford a classic project car. If your dreams are big but your bank balance is little, here are a few suggestions for your Craigslist searches. We’ve aimed for somewhere between $2,000 and $4,000 based on classified ads for non-basket-case vehicles with a few warts that otherwise (allegedly) run and drive, but feel free to write us to let us know what we’ve missed. WANT A SHOEBOX CHEVY? BUY A 1955-1957 PONTIAC…

FROGGY That’s probably the kindest description of Scott Wright’s 1962 Plymouth Savoy. It’s green and bulging and sort of drippy. You get the feeling that if you picked it up, it would pee in your hand and hop away. The four-door Savoy is hardly one of the iconic shapes of the 1960s, and yet there was something about it that stopped us in our tracks when we first saw it parked on Woodward Avenue in Detroit. Maybe it was the racing belts slung over the bench seat or the fat rear wheels shod in Mickey T rubber—much of which was stuck to the rear quarter-panel—but the Plymouth seemed to have just a few too many go-fast goodies to be just an old sedan. There’s a full-body thrill you get when…

Clutch in. Shifter from two to three. (Or is that five? No. I got it right this time.) Back on the gas. Clutch. Three to four. And then I got in trouble. Apparently the old man in the pickup thought I was going too fast. (I was.) This wasn’t the first time I’d been scolded, of course. Years earlier, an angry cop’s flashlight blinding my 17-yearold eyes, I had to answer for why I was driving my old Bimmer like a bat outta hell. Um, there’s a girl in my passenger seat, officer, and I want her to think I’m cool. I didn’t actually say that, but a similar answer could’ve applied today. Elana was trying to teach me to drive a stick. So of course I had to break…

There’s nothing subtle about the Dodge Viper. It’s big. It’s loud. It’s uncomfortable. It’s your crazy uncle in a ROADKILL T-shirt. Then there’s the Dodge Viper ACR. It uses the same basic hardware as the regular Viper, including the same 645-hp 8.4-liter V-10 and six-speed stick shift, but adds super-sticky Kumho tires, adjustable coil-over Bilstein shocks all round, indestructible carbon-ceramic brakes, and a massive rear wing that looks like it was stolen from a Cessna. The Viper ACR holds the outright production-car record at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca, lapping the iconic 2.2-mile track in 1 minute, 28.65 seconds with Motor Trend’s in-house hot shoe, Randy Pobst, at the wheel. That time is 1.24 second quicker than the best lap set by Randy in Porsche’s $850,000 918 Spyder, an 887-hp science-project…

The Race of Gentlemen (TROG) is an oceanside drag race designed to recapture the early days of hot-rodding, complete with flag starts, military surplus overalls, and belly tankers—those sleek, spacey streamliners made from the disposable fuel tanks of World War II aircraft. At the Pismo Beach, California, running of TROG 2016, Mike Barillaro of Barillaro Speed Emporium entered a flathead-powered tanker. As he launched for a run, Mel Stultz, the man who dreamed up TROG, grabbed onto the tail as it left the line. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing, definitely not planned. It must have been a shock to Mike when the car stopped and he saw Mel hanging on the back end. Photo: Marc Gewertz…

A man stands alone on an alien surface. Nothing grows there, although a few flying insects brave the empty airspace above the salt floor. A spaceship of sorts sits behind him, glowing deep blue beneath a speckled, briny crust. They are not separate man and machine. It is a joining, a summation of many lives and minds and dreams. They have been on a quest, and now it is ended. The man slumps forward. His suit hangs loosely at his waist. The setting sun paints his bare torso shades of red and gold. He is a fit man, but not young. He’s spent 67 years on this planet. Even in the flattering light, you can see that this has been a long journey, and he is tired. Finally, his father…

Not content to just soil assorted racetracks with crapped-out “race cars,” our beloved garbagefire racing series, 24 Hours of LeMons, expanded its offerings to public roads with the first LeMons Rally during the 2016 Monterey Car Week. Bring the worst cars in America to America’s fanciest car show? Totally appropriate. In the middle of August, four dozen terrible street cars participated in the rally with varying degrees of failure. The basic idea: bring some kind of hooptie street car and drive it 1,500 miles over five days. There was no prescribed route aside from mandatory checkpoints, such as the Bad Water Basin in Death Valley National Park, and additional optional checkpoints along the way. To score points for each checkpoint, the team would have to take a picture of their…

Herb Adams worked for Pontiac, and when Pontiac pulled out of Trans Am racing in 1970, Adams and a group of friends decided to keep racing on their own. Their car was a 1964 Pontiac Tempest, practically an antique by 1970s racing standards. Compared to the sleek, short-tailed ponycars, it was a brickshaped, ancient, rusty grocery-getter. There were so many reasons it shouldn’t have worked. The team members were all young Pontiac engineers working at night in Adams’ garage. They didn’t have anywhere near the money of the OEM factory teams. It should have been an embarrassment. But instead the “Gray Ghost” Pontiac became a legend. Pontiac’s last factory-backed racing was just as SCCA’s Trans Am racing series was reaching the height of its popularity in 1970. A fatal crash…

How the American ponycar has evolved: The 2016 Ford Mustang Shelby GT350R is powered by a quadcam, flat-plane-crank, 5.2-liter V-8 that develops 526 hp and revs to a screaming 8,250 rpm. It has independent rear suspension and carbon-fiber wheels, and it will lap Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca faster than a Ferrari. Think about that for a moment. A Ford that Carroll Shelby once sneered, back in the ’60s, was “a nice little secretary’s car,” is faster on a racetrack than an expensive Italian exotic. Mind you, the GT350R ain’t cheap—for a Mustang—with a base MSRP of about $64,000, and greedy dealers reportedly demanding—and getting—25 grand over sticker. But, hey, that’s the free market at work. Part of the reason for the price gouging is that GT350Rs are rare and will…

winner (losers) The 1970 Dirt Track Challenger has now starred in two ROADKILL episodes: No. 54 and 56. Both times it gave the guys fits with rear-gear disasters and general poor drivability. That didn’t stop them from throwing a tunnel ram on top of the 318 small-block and running it down track at Roadkill Nights on Woodward Avenue. You might think from this photo that they won. They did not. As Freiburger says, “If you’re going to lose, lose in front of a lot of people.”…

Irv Alexander was a substitute teacher in my high school. He was a Marine—a barrelchested, white-crew-cut, take-no-BS Marine substitute teacher. As a substitute he was pretty easy-going, but he wasn’t the sub that you took advantage of, if you know what I mean. That barrel chest was from years in the weight room, which earned him the title of national bench press champ for the over-50 age group. All this stuff was cool, but what really impressed me as a pimple-nosed teenager were his two Willys Jeeps that he drove to the school when he was subbin’. One was a wagon, the other a bright-yellow CJ2A with a hard top. These were not hardcore wheeling rigs but clean retro Jeeps. I knew he was a kindred spirit when he confiscated…

Words: Benjamin Hunting Photography: Jessica Walker Evolutionary leftover? A horrific hybrid? No, not Sasquatch, but a truck he might drive. We captured Keith Northrup’s 1937 International Pre-Runner, the elusive Trophy Rat. IF you’d been standing on the shore of Seattle’s Lake Washington in August 1955, you might have seen Boeing test pilot Alvin “Tex” Johnston waving out from the cockpit of a prototype 707 airliner— that was upside-down. Seems Tex was tasked with a demo flight to show off the new passenger plane to Boeing executives, and he felt the best way to do that was with a mid-air roll. His boss asked him later what the hell he was doing, and he answered, “Selling airplanes.” The folks near Seattle in Washington state tend to have an independent streak. It…

OH, MAN This could be the coolest thing we’ve ever done. It all started at M1 Concourse in Pontiac, Michigan, on August 19, 2016, where for the second annual Roadkill Nights Powered by Dodge, we drag raced on the street. Right on Woodward Avenue! The police were there. They said it was all good. Freiburger and Fin made it in to Pontiac late the night before the event, and of course they immediately tore the Dirt Track Challenger apart in the parking lot. “Why doesn’t this car have a nickname?” we asked Fin as Freiburger measured U-joints with a calibrated eye. “I wanted to call it the ‘Dirt-E-Body,” Fin says, “but it hasn’t caught on yet.” ROADKILL NIGHTS IN PONTIAC, MICHIGAN, MIGHT HAVE BEEN OUR BEST BAD IDEA THUS FAR…

To new people starting car stuff I would offer this advice: Get four of your best mates, buy a beater, buy beer, and get ready for the greatest week of your life.” If you ever get frustrated with all of the little setbacks and complications of a project car, you can at least console yourself with the fact that your engine and your chassis are located on the same continent. That’s not something Harry Haig and his crew of horsepower junkies could claim when they bought a junkyard ’69 Chevelle and stuffed a twin-turbo big-block under—or should we say through—the hood. Let’s back up a bit. Everyone knows Australians love cars. Harry and his mates all build and race in Australia, and after conquering their home streets, strips, and everything…

WHEN THE TIME COMES, rubber-shod wheels will be replaced by one-piece aluminum discs, a specially forged high-strength alloy called 7037. Rubber would build too much friction on the sand in Hakskeen Pan, South Africa, where the record attempts will occur. The wheel shape was modeled so that it will spin but not sink in the desert surface. They’ll turn at 10,200 rpm. Andy Green drives an AWD Jaguar F-Type to work. It makes sense for the only man who has driven faster than the speed of sound to have a powerful machine as a daily driver. It’s a beautiful car, sleek, looks fast standing still. You know the sort. Its 5.0-liter V-8 makes 550 hp. That would barely power the fuel pump on Andy’s real car, a carbon-fiber rocket-powered needle…

The little red coupe leaps forward as I nail the gas, and a throbbing, guttural boom fills the cabin. Instantly, I’m transported back more than 30 years, to a forest in far-off New Zealand, watching lights flickering through the trees as the same sound echoes through the still night, growing louder by the second. Suddenly, a car appears, traveling impossibly fast, sideways through the corner. A glimpse of yellow and white paint and the front brakes glowing orange in the gloom. A pop-bang-flash from the exhaust, a shrapnel burst of flying gravel, and it’s gone, that unique sonic signature reverberating in the darkness. Watching World Rally Champion Hannu Mikkola drive the iconic factory Audi Quattro in the 1984 Rally of New Zealand was one of those car-guy bucket-list moments. And…

Since Freiburger and Fin invited me aboard this ship and Dulcich scooted over to make room for me on the bench, we’ve all been going nonstop building cars and making sparks. Some of you out there seem enraged by this, but most of you have been enthusiastic about getting more crazy car content both on Motor Trend OnDemand and all the free channels— those would be Roadkill.com, YouTube, and Roadkillshow on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Allow me to catch you up on some of the cars you’ve seen or will be seeing, plus the ways you can see even more. Roadkill Extra Free on YouTube) In episode 54, Freiburger and Fin bought a retired dirt-tracking Challenger and hooned it up in a field. The Challenger returns in episode 56 for…