hot auto review

NHRA has formed the NHRA Hot Rod Heritage Racing Series that will crown year-end points champions in 14 categories.

Courtesy NHRA - To help preserve NHRA's rich history and tradition while capitalizing on the success of nostalgia drag racing competition, NHRA has formed the NHRA Hot Rod Heritage Racing Series that will crown year-end points champions in 14 categories.

"This new series is an exciting step that will appeal to drag racing fans young and old," said Peter Clifford, NHRA executive vice president and general manager. "It's a great way to introduce the younger generation to the history of our sport and give fans young and old a glimpse of racing the way it used to be."

The NHRA Hot Rod Heritage Racing Series will kick off with the famed March Meet in Bakersfield, Calif., March 7-9 and conclude Oct. 10-12 at the California Hot Rod Reunion presented by Automobile Club of Southern California back at Bakersfield's Auto Club Famoso Raceway.

Among the highlighted stops in between are Firebird Raceway in Boise, Idaho, for the 36th annual Pepsi NightFire Nationals and Auto Club Dragway in Fontana, Calif., and The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

In all, there will be seven independently produced events with each class of competition competing at and earning points toward series championships at five of those seven events. The four groups comprising the 14 categories are Nostalgia Top Fuel Dragster; Nostalgia Funny Car; Group 1, consisting of A/Fuel, Junior Fuel A, Junior Fuel B, and AA/Gas Supercharged; and Group 2, containing the following eight categories: Nostalgia Eliminator 1, Nostalgia Eliminator 2, and Nostalgia Eliminator 3; A Gas, B Gas, C Gas, and D Gas; and Hot Rod.

Each of the seven events will feature at least two of the four groups, and only the first two events, the March 7-9 March Meet and the April 18-20 So Cal Shootout in Fontana, will feature all four.

"This series will benefit everyone, from the racers to The Wally Parks NHRA Motorsports Museum," said Steve Gibbs, director of The Wally Parks NHRA Motorsports Museum. "It provides a great opportunity to preserve NHRA's rich heritage through nostalgia drag racing competition."

Hundreds of "race-ready" drivers are anxious to compete in competition that will be conducted under existing, well-established NHRA nostalgia rules. The year-end champions in each of the 14 categories will earn the most coveted trophy in all of drag racing, the NHRA Wally.

NHRA Hot Rod Heritage Racing Series Schedule*
Date/Event/Location/Groups
March 7-9/March Meet/Bakersfield, CA/TF, FC & Groups 1 & 2
April 18-20/So Cal Shootout/Fontana, CA/TF, FC & Groups 1 & 2
May 2-4/FC Feature/Las Vegas/FC & Group 2
May 30-June 1/TF Feature/Bakersfield, CA/TF & Groups 1 & 2
Aug. 8-9/NightFire Nationals/Boise, ID/TF & FC only
Sept. 13-14/Sports Special/Fontana, CA/Groups 1 & 2 only
Oct. 10-12/California/Hot Rod Reunion/Bakersfield, CA/TF, FC, and Group 1

* Schedule and categories subject to change

When your name is Earnhardt and, more importantly, your first name is Dale, people take notice. Kyle and Stacy Tucker, proprietors of Detroit Speed & Engineering (DSE) in Mooresville, North Carolina, certainly paid attention when Dale Earnhardt, Jr., walked through their door asking about Stacy's blue '69 Camaro. Dale's JR Motorsports NASCAR Busch Series race shop is a mile or so down the road from Detroit Speed's facility, and Dale had driven by their place and noticed Stacy's Camaro and all the other cool DSE project cars parked out front. He was interested in the Camaro, but Stacy wasn't about to sell her car, so they talked about building one specially for Little E.

They quickly decided on a second-gen Camaro with a vintage Trans-Am feel. As Dale puts it, "I always liked the early Trans-Am series race cars. I always thought the way they sat down over the wheels and the rake in them was killer. They're just badass, and every time I saw one, I thought that it would make a nasty-looking street car."

The timing was right, as DSE had just released its new front subframe kit for the second-generation F-bodies. After some conversation and a few sketched-out ideas, the plan was on to build Dale a turnkey hot rod. His initial requests were limited to four: He wanted it finished in a hurry, like in 18 weeks, since previous projects from other shops took way too long for his liking; he wanted to be able to play his iPod through a killer stereo; instead of a rear seat, he wanted an upholstered shelf so his dog Killer could ride along; and finally, it had to be orange, as bright as possible. There was also the understanding that the finished machine could be driven like a rental car with full-coverage insurance. The end result met all of those goals and then some.

Obviously, DSE's client is a big-time celebrity, so this car will serve as a bit of a calling card for the company. But to build a car of this caliber under this much pressure and in less than five months meant that all of DSE's manpower would be needed. Kyle called his customers who had cars under construction and explained the situation to them, and also talked to his employees about the sacrifices that would have to be made to get it done. The customers allowed DSE to slow down the progress on their cars, and every person in the shop jumped right on board. Kyle tells us, "Lives were put on hold, not just by the guys in the shop, but by the understanding wives and families at home who rarely got to see them during the process."

Everyone worked a normal schedule during the day, from 7:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m. But then after a short catered dinner, work began on Dale's Camaro until at least midnight, sometimes much later. That included Saturdays and Sundays. Each guy in the shop got one night off per week and went home at 5:00 p.m. Kyle says, "The interesting thing was that these guys were committed and proud enough of the project that every one of them voluntarily stuck it out the entire build."

Dale had some input into the project beyond his initial four requests and would often stop by the shop to see the car's progress and bench-race ideas. To keep a low profile, DSE waited to talk about the car or post anything on its Web site until it was almost finished. Kyle says, "We couldn't afford to slow down the progress, and we were pretty sure that Dale Jr. already had enough obligations without creating more. Run lean, run fast! We were trying to keep the whole thing under wraps until the end."

As you would expect, the suspension is straight out of DSE's wishbook, from the complete, hydroformed front subframe and suspension assembly to the Quadra-Link in back, tied together with DSE's subframe connectors. It all works like a modern Trans-Am car should, in that it rides and drives like a new Corvette but with the classic body shell of a musclecar. But the Camaro is about way more than just the parts bolted to it. The detail in this thing approaches Ridler-level anal-retentiveness. Every visible bolt is custom-made by DSE in polished stainless steel with an integral washer. The rollcage has NASCAR cues, like the stitch plates tying the A-pillars to the forward downbars, yet it's high and tight, completely street-friendly, and nearly invisible from outside the car. The interior likewise has a race car theme with matching stitch plates under the dash and on the doors and a Racepak data-logging dash display, but the stereo, leather seats, and creature comforts make it Cadillac-comfy and blur the line between Trans-Am hard-core and Pro Touring overload.

Because this thing's meant to be driven, the engine is not a complicated and temperamental 1,000hp nightmare. It's a simple GM Performance Parts LS crate engine topped with a 750 Holley, and it makes 440 hp at six grand. A T56 six-speed and 3.89-geared 9-inch make it quick and reasonably highway-frugal. The combination of durable engine and bridge girder-strong suspension should be able to take anything Dale's right foot can dish out. And hey, if something breaks, parts are available to fix it.

Which brings us to the subject of parts development and how much of it was done on this car. Kyle tells us, "Things kind of accidentally develop into products. During the build some small one-off detail might be incorporated into the project with no intention of producing it. But after the car comes out and detail pictures are posted on the Web site, we start to get requests for specific parts, and if there is enough interest we begin to produce them. Several items include the stainless hood striker pin, the custom bolts, and the fabricated diagonal struts, just to name a few. Some we are now producing and some are in the works. During the heat of the build is when a lot of really good ideas for a product come out."

Is Junior happy with the Camaro? Uh, yeah. The car was in his possession when we shot the photos for this story, which was immediately following the Goodguys Columbus show where it was in the final five running for Street Machine of the Year. Steve Crisp, JR Motorsports' director of motorsports and Dale's righthand man, says that after they picked up the car, Junior drove it around for the day. Steve ran some errands and showed up at Junior's house later, and he tells us, "When I pulled into the driveway, Junior was sitting in a lawn chair with a sponsor's beverage in his hand and was just looking at the car with a smile on his face."

We'd say mission accomplished.

Here's how the HOT ROD Top 10 works: Each staff member flips through every page of every issue in 2007, from January through December, and makes a list of their favorite vehicles found in those issues. It can be any type of vehicle whatsoever, and there are no criteria on choosing a car for the Top 10 other than that it floats that staffer's boat. Race car, street car, concept car, truck, bike, van, SUV . . . whatever. If they think it's cool, it goes on their list. Then we put all the lists together and see which vehicles got the most votes. The more votes a car gets, the higher on the list it goes. Inevitably the list ends up having 20 or 30 cars on it, so we all have to gather together and fight it out to pare the number down to 10. That's when it gets fun.

So here they are: Hot Rod's Top 10 for 2007. Some readers will no doubt holler and scream that we left their favorite vehicle off the list, and that's fine-let us hear it. If you can keep the profanities to a minimum, we might even publish your letter.

Jon Huber
'79 Ford Mustang
January Issue

In this era of wicked-fast street 5.0L Mustangs, we're still shocked that very few of them enter our Drag Week(tm) playground. When we saw Jon Huber's '79 Fox pull into Cordova Dragway for the start of the '06 HOT ROD Drag Week(tm), we muttered among ourselves, "Finally, a Mustang." Then Jon started it, and the jig was up. There was no 5.0L under the hood. Instead, it had a seriously pissed-off 2.8L four-cylinder with an ARCA circle track head, a turbo, and prodigious tuning on the computer. This little thing carried the wheels perfectly straight for 100 feet on every pass, made the drive mostly without issue, and damn near won the Power Adder Small-Block class over cars with way bigger motors. It was the little engine that could, and it made believers out of a lot of folks during that week. It also stirred the souls of the HOT ROD editors who got to watch it scream. -Rob Kinnan

George Lange
'67 Ford Mustang
June Issue

What happens when one of America's top street rod builders gets hold of some late-model sheetmetal . . . say, a '67 Mustang? Some serious genre bending, that's what. Bobby Alloway's rods have won the Ridler Award, the AMBR, and Street Rod of the Year. The Mustang he built for George Lange wears a '60s ponycar skin, but its flavor is high-dollar luxury street rod. The interior is voluptuous in blue and white leather, while the exterior has been carefully smoothed, contoured, and accentuated. An Art Morrison Max-G chassis replaces the original unit floorpan, while the powerplant is a 4.6 topped with Ford GT heads, twin turbos, intercoolers, and throttle bodies, all polished to a fare-thee-well. And there's custom billet all over the place, including the subtly restyled lamp bezels and fuel filler. So what does it all mean? Who can say, but we know we can expect more musclecar-era cars done to the hilt in maximum street rod style, further blurring the traditional boundaries between "street rod" and "street machine." And what does it matter? Those are just labels anyway. Either way it's a hot rod, and this one was one of the Top 10 for 2007. -Bill McGuire

Year One
'77 Pontiac
Trans Am
August Issue

MTV viewers named the '77 Trans Am from the original Smokey and the Bandit as the most awesome car ever, which is no surprise. The second-gen TAs with their garish screaming-chicken hood stickers have morphed from '70s gold-chain kitsch to completely bitchin', and the price tags have risen along with that transformation. As a company founded on the creation of restoration parts for Trans Ams (albeit the '69 model), Year One knew it had to get in on the frenzy, so it created a brand-new '77 Trans Am that you can buy. Burt Reynolds even approves. The company kept the quintessential TA look, but upped the ante on everything inside, outside, and underneath to bring it to modern, high-tech standards. And if you want one all it takes is a big check and the ability to decide between one of three build levels. Get yours today. -Rob Kinnan

Jeff Mann
'57 Chevy
April Issue

We never tire of tales of resolute persistence in the face of adversity and continual destruction in finishing a car in the manner that it was originally envisioned. Jeff Mann's '57 certainly earned its feature title, "Dare to be Difficult," as it's taken him down a twisted and expensive path for the last 22 years, uncovering every single issue that could arise from asking a blown 392 Hemi to make 800-plus horsepower reliably. Expensive? You bet. Jeff tells us, "I could have had five 572ci big-block crate motors for what it cost me to put the Hemi in this car, but that's money well spent." In this case, we agree. -Christopher Campbell

Robert Wood
'35 Chevy Modified
March Issue

It's an old race car body slapped on a dirt Modified chassis, the engine is a me-too small-block Chevy that doesn't make a ton of power, and there are some things about the car that don't thrill us that much, but that's not what Robert's Dare to Be Different ride is about. This car is 100 percent "kiss my you-know-what" attitude and miles of rubber, and it looks like nothing else on the street. It was one of eight vehicles included in the March issue's big "Dare to Be Different" section, and it got more reader response than any car HOT ROD featured for the year. The kicker, and one of the reasons it held firm in our Top Ten voting (and nearly became HOT ROD of the Year), is that none of those responses were negative. People just flat dig this car. We hope it inspires a trend. Not necessarily the huge-tire deal, but the mindset of building a street car using a circle track parts catalog. Look into it; you'll be surprised what's out there for the roundy-round crowd. -Rob Kinnan

Darren Tedder
'71 Plymouth 'Cuda
August Issue

Darren's awesome '71 'Cuda is not only a 1,000hp street-driven car capable of 8-second quarter-miles, but it's also antiseptically clean. The three-pronged combination of show-car shine, street-driving capability, and dragstrip nastiness is an exceedingly rare one, but Darren's Plymouth hits it, hard, on all three points. Darren brought the car out to play at the '06 Pump Gas Drags(tm) and posted consistent 8.90s with a best of 8.914 at 153.77. He nearly won. Word is he's building an E85-powered Hemi for the '07 HOT ROD Drag Week(tm). If that's true, this monster will also prove its mettle over 1,000-plus miles of public road. And that, folks, is one fantastic hot rod. -Christopher Campbell

Rob Freyvogel
'63 Pontiac Tempest
November Issue

Sometimes it's easy to get caught up in all the CAD-inspired, CNC-machined wonderment of contemporary automotive technology and lose track of what hot rodding is really about: having fun with cars, exercising your own skills and creativity, and leaving long black marks all over everything. Cars like Rob Freyvogel's '63 Tempest bring it back home for us again. Using parts he scrounged from eBay and swap meets, Rob made huge power from a big-block Chevy running E98 ethanol fuel. The key pieces are a pair of remote-mounted turbos borrowed from a Cummins diesel application and a trunk-mounted charge cooler. But while the approach is low-buck, it is by no means low-tech-Rob also cooked up a home-brewed EFI system. The best result at the track so far is 9.86 at 149 mph. Just to have a little fun, Rob cloaked all this homebuilt tricknology in an oxidized red paint job and a set of ashtray hubcaps-and to complete the scam, the engine is painted Pontiac blue and wears a 326 air cleaner. So as far as you know, this is just another derelict '63 Tempest shambling down the street . . . that is, until Rob stands on the throttle and lays down some big, black stripes.-Bill McGuire

Dale Earnhardt, Jr.
'70 Chevy Camaro
December Issue

Dale Earnhardt, Jr., needs no introduction, and neither does Detroit Speed & Engineering. Put the two together and you know the result is going to be top-notch. But man, we didn't know the Camaro they conspired to build would be this nice. It would be easy to slap a Pro Touring label on this car, and there certainly is no shortage of Pro Touring Camaros built to an extreme level, but Dale's car is more our personal speed. Though the accouterments blur the line a little, the inspiration was more vintage Trans-Am than current Pro Touring, and instead of going straight for four-digit horsepower numbers and over-the-top induction plumbing like most people do, this car has a simple, 450-ish- horsepower GM crate motor with a carburetor. That's because Dale plans on driving the car hard. And unlike with so many "finished" cars that the owner is scared to get dirty, Detroit Speed handed the keys over to Dale before we shot the car, and he is driving the wheels off it right now. -Rob Kinnan

Ross and Beth Myers
'36 Ford
July Issue

When Troy Trepanier of Rad Rides by Troy went after this year's Ridler Award at the Detroit Autorama, he didn't just turn the conventional thinking about show cars upside down. He also turned it inside out. The car he designed and built for Ross and Beth Myers was a '36 Ford three-window coupe on the outside and a free-form expressionist sculpture on the inside. Troy carefully redesigned every bit of the undercarriage, from the Ford FE engine's oil pan to the stylized differential housing and control arms. So what Troy built was essentially a car within a car. Now it was as though the competition faced not one but two originally designed, exquisitely constructed Troy cars occupying the same physical space on the show floor. Beating one Troy car is difficult enough; how in the world can you ever beat two? But then that is what the Ridler Award is about: not just raising the bar, but periodically redrawing the boundaries. "There is no point going to this level of effort just to build a car like some other car," Troy says of his first Ridler winner. "You have to give people something new." -Bill McGuire

'69 Plymouth Barracuda
February Issue

It's called Blowfish and it is the second Rad Rides car on this year's Top 10 list. That one shop could build two Top 10 cars is quite remarkable, but when you consider that those two cars could not be further apart in concept, and that the builder is not known for specializing in either genre, you get a whole new appreciation for the Rad Rides crew and especially their leader, Troy Trepanier. Troy has long been known for building high-end street machines and Dare to Be Different kinds of cars, and a street rod has slipped out of Rad Rides' doors every now and then, but nothing even remotely approaching the level of a Ridler Award winner. That changed this year. Likewise, nobody has asked Troy to build a legit race car from scratch, but when frequent customer George Poteet wanted to run 300 mph on the Salt, he called on Troy and his boys.

The result was a combination of many different styles of car building that all work seamlessly together. The body style and evil 1,200hp, turbocharged four-cylinder engine made it a Dare to Be Different car; the attention to detail was as good or better than nearly anything you'll find at an indoor car show; the level of fabrication rivals a modern Formula 1 car; and, oh yeah, it ran 255.412 mph at Bonneville on a partial pass, setting the record in F/Blown Fuel Competition Coupe in 2006. All that adds up to the most incredible hot rod of the year. -Rob Kinnan