Project Cars Garage

One of the most iconic names in automotive history, Shelby became an international star in the 1950s as a race car driver, earning Sports Illustrated’s “Sports Car Driver of the Year” honors in 1956 and 1957, then winning the 1959 24 Hours of LeMans in an Aston Martin with co-driver Roy Salvadori. A hereditary heart condition put an end to Shelby’s driving career in 1960, but the lessons learned while driving world-renowned sports cars gave him the idea to build his own car using an AC Ace body and a small-block Ford V-8 engine. The result was the Cobra, a name that Shelby said came to him in a dream, and a company called Shelby American.

Photo Gallery: Carroll Shelby: 1923-2012 – Mustang Monthly Magazine

Doane Spencer, Joe Nitti, Neal East, Bob McGee—names forever synonymous with the hot rods they built or bought in the ’40s and ’50s. Their projects have become icons of the genre, and while you might name another couple hundred hero cars that have been storied ad nauseam, the workaday rods by Joe Average radically outnumber those exalted examples. This story is here to honor the anonymous.

Photo Gallery: Real Hot Rods of the 1950s – The Genuine Article – Hot Rod Magazine

In last month’s Get The Picture? column, we shared a number of ideas for retro-style, sign-painted lettering. This month, same deal, only with numbers. You know why it’s cool to have a number on your door? Because it means you have a race car—or at least that you want your rod to look like one. Here we present a variety of Bonneville, Midget, circle-track, and hot rod styles from now and then. —

Photo Gallery: Get the Picture – We’ve Got Your Number – Hot Rod Magazine

You know Ed Roth, the ’60s freakjob beatnik hot rodder who clearly sniffed too much resin while creating fiberglass show cars like The Outlaw, Mysterion, Road Agent, Surfite, and such. He’s seen here, scrawling the wall at a party in the early ’60s. You also know him as the father of Rat Fink and other weirdo monsters that were airbrushed and later silkscreened onto the must-have T-shirts for every teen gearhead of the time.

Photo Gallery: Kustom Kulture Archival Photos – Roth Weirdos – Hot Rod Magazine

Photo Gallery: Kustom Kulture Archival Photos – Roth Weirdos – Hot Rod Magazine

It was decades ago, but HOT ROD used to cover NASCAR. You graybeard readers will remember it well: There were annual race features on the Daytona 500 and Riverside, tech articles on the latest trickery from Junior Johnson and Smokey Yunick, and monthly roundy-round columns by Steve Kelley and Joe Whitlock. It was great racing with awesome cars, and HOT ROD was all over it. So what happened? Why doesn’t HOT ROD do NASCAR anymore?

Photo Gallery: When Nascar Mattered – Hot Rod Magazine

Photo Gallery: When Nascar Mattered – Hot Rod Magazine

RADICAL.George Barris and me. Sounds like a ’60s flick starring Peter Sellers with cameos by Sonny and Cher, but what I mean is that Barris and I might be the only two people who liked the “Chrisman Coupe” after George finished its 1959 pearl-white and tangerine makeover. This little kid loved the wire front wheels, those crazy spats, and the goofy, half-gullwing doors that showed up in a 1960 episode of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis and on the Aug. ’61 cover of Car Craft.

Photo Gallery: The Chrisman-Barris-Dobie Gillis Coupe – Hot Rod Deluxe Magazine

Photo Gallery: The Chrisman-Barris-Dobie Gillis Coupe – Hot Rod Deluxe Magazine

STYLE. Countless hot rods have been built in chicken coops over the years. However, few are as sleek or as beautifully constructed as the ’50s dreamboat you see here. Clearly, this was no ordinary chicken coop, and Arthur Bentas is no ordinary farmer. A genuine Yankee craftsman, he fabricated the Raven over a nine-year stretch, largely from scratch. The Chelmsford, Massachusetts, chicken coop was the same, special place wherein Arthur and his brother operated the Bentas Bros. Co., makers of the Kavalla Kart, a well-known machine in New England and elsewhere during the huge karting fad of the late ’50s and early ’60s.

Photo Gallery: 1950s Kustom Roadster- The Raven Returns – Hot Rod Deluxe Magazine

For the past 10 years, street rodding has gone through a number of styles-high tech, dare to be different, phantoms, retro, and now… rats. Rat rods are patterned after hot rods pieced together by owners/builders prior to or just after World War II. These home brews were crude, dangerous, and less than welcome on SoCal’s wide, straight streets. But they were fun, fast (for the time), and very frugal.

Photo Gallery: Don “Rockerhead” Montgomery – Hot Rod Magazine

Photo Gallery: Don “Rockerhead” Montgomery – Hot Rod Magazine

Snatch that jaw back off the floor. Youbetcha—in 1967, Tasca Ford had ragged GT350 and GT500 Mustangs stacked up like they’d been pitchforked into the back lot. The sign at the upper left of the lot says,“Bargain Basement.” Just freaking wow.

Photo Gallery: Shelby Mustang Stash – Hot Rod Magazine

My mom knows who Linda Vaughn is. It’s a pretty safe bet that yours does, too. The iconic Miss Hurst Golden Shifter has been a part of the racing and automotive scene since the early ’60s; she knows everyone we regard as heroes (and many more we don’t), and she never disappoints with her insanely accurate memory. Meet her once, even for just a moment, and there’s a good chance she’ll remember your name and what you talked about a decade later. She has probably the most recognized face (and let’s be honest, the most recognized breasts, too!) in the world of motorsports, having represented Hurst and several other companies for five decades now, after George Hurst stole her from her Miss Firebird responsibilities and made her the second Miss Hurst Golden Shifter, initially to promote the company, but eventually to promote everything about motorsports, hot rodding, and our way of life.

Photo Gallery: Linda Vaughn – Miss Hurst Golden Shifter in Her Own Words – Hot Rod Magazine

Photo Gallery: Linda Vaughn – Miss Hurst Golden Shifter in Her Own Words – Hot Rod Magazine

You already know we gearheads are an opinionated bunch, forming strong beliefs about and prejudices against certain vehicle styles. Currently, it’s the so-called rat rodders in the hot seat, just as lowriders were scorned before them. Dragster racers hated and ridiculed the first Funny Cars. Bar fights broke out over flatheads versus overheads. Coupes and sedans were excluded from dry-lakes racing by the roadster snobs who started the Southern California Timing Association. Some things never change.

Photo Gallery: Custom Vans – The ’70s Van Customization Craze Makes a Comeback – Hot Rod Magazine

Photo Gallery: Custom Vans – The ’70s Van Customization Craze Makes a Comeback – Hot Rod Magazine

On the sweeter side of the fence sits a brick-and-glass showroom, looking shaggy with vegetation hanging off its roof like a mop-top. It’s a relic, a place that slipped into the cracks between past and present, where the familiar red, white, and blue AMC signs forgot to come crashing down along with American Motors 25 years ago. Pikeville, North Carolina–a town of 700 people–has rolled off the tongues and keyboards of AMC junkies for years, with this seemingly abandoned dealership attaining near-mythical status as a slightly more flammable Shangri-La for gearheads. Ten years of blog posts, newsletters, and gossip say the place is like 1987 frozen in time, and where untitled cars still wrapped in plastic and bearing window stickers relax as fresh and gleaming as the day they sat on this lot and watched AMC slip from existence. Evidence is scarce enough to encourage rumors, appetizers to whet the hunger for proof.

Photo Gallery: Collier AMC Dealership – The Living Dead – Hot Rod Magazine

Photo Gallery: Collier AMC Dealership – The Living Dead – Hot Rod Magazine

Nobody likes a good story better than Carroll Shelby, so let’s start this story with a story. In 1915, years after the racing exploits that launched both of their careers, Henry Ford and Barney Oldfield happened to meet again. As they shook hands, Ford, by then among the world’s richest men, gave his former driver a wink and generously remarked that he reckoned the two of them had made each other. Oldfield winked right back and said, “I guess I did the better job of it.”

Photo Gallery: 50th Anniversary – Carroll Shelby, Hot Rodder – Hot Rod Magazine

Photo Gallery: 50th Anniversary – Carroll Shelby, Hot Rodder – Hot Rod Magazine

We have often discussed Rick Dobbertin’s game-changing, Pro Street Pontiac J2000 that was HOT ROD of the Year in 1986 (and named by us as one of the Top 100 Most Significant Hot Rods of All Time in Jan. ’08), so to rehash the car here is unnecessary. But when thinking about this month’s Where It All Began, in an issue devoted to outrageous engines, one image from the past stood out: the Chevy in Dobbertin’s Pontiac. In a car that took every one of his resources and nearly three years of his life to build, Dobbertin went with by far the wildest engine anyone had ever seen up to that time. In the context of history, we’ll argue it’s still the wildest. An all-aluminum, 350ci small-block was certainly not commonplace in 1986, and neither were the 1,500 man-hours of polishing on the car. But what made it even crazier was a single 1,050-cfm Holley Dominator feeding a pair of Roto-Master turbochargers, which fed twin MagnaCharger Roots blowers, all helped out with a one-off, 20-port NOS nitrous system and a water/alcohol injection system. And the whole thing was covered in more chrome and polished stainless steel than you’ll see in 99.9 percent of show cars today, 35 years later. And it ran. In the Oct. ’86 feature, Gray Baskerville wrote, “the jay-too-grand started and ran like a stocker, the water temp gauge rarely reached the 190-degree mark.” It’s still amazing.

Photo Gallery: Twin-Charged Chevy 350 Engine – Rick Dobbertin’s Outrageous Pro Street Powerplant – Hot Rod Magazine

Just as this issue goes on sale, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway celebrates the 100th birthday of the Indy 500, and HOT ROD sends its congratulations. Longtime readers will recall that the Brickyard and HOT ROD are old friends. From the magazine’s start until the mid-’70s, when we more or less outgrew each other, HOT ROD provided in-depth coverage of the annual May classic. In those years, Indy was the absolute pinnacle of American motorsports, yet still relevant to hot rodders as an attainable goal. Many Indy racers, from Dan Gurney to Andy Granatelli, Mickey Thompson, and Barney Navarro, had their roots in hot rodding, and we trumpeted their exploits in these pages.

Photo Gallery: Where It All Began – Smokey Yunick’s “Capsule Car” Sidecar Indy 500 Racer – Hot Rod Magazine