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Three Swedish friends took a 1966 Chevrolet Bel Air to Budapest for a downtown burnout, then shipped it to the United States to attempt Drag Week, an event requiring five strip passes at five tracks with hundreds of highway miles driven in between. The Bel Air was Chevrolet’s mid-tier family car, built more than 236,000 times that year. Read on to find out why that made it the right choice.
Fifty years of muscle car culture have never agreed on what makes a car ‘hot’ – raw factory horsepower, a numbers-matching restoration, or a modern resto-mod build. This deep red machine parked outside a garage door raises that same debate all over again. Is it the stance, the sound, or the story behind it that decides the verdict? See where this one lands and decide for yourself.
Alan Robinson’s Chevrolet Impala wagon weighs 4,720 pounds with its 26-inch street wheels and four JL Audio subwoofers still bolted in, runs a stock-bottom-end 6.0-liter engine at just 10 psi of boost, and still posts mid-11-second quarter miles at Hot Rod’s Drag Week. Getting to the line means swapping two of those 98-pound wheels for drag radials first. It wasn’t even the car Robinson planned to bring. Watch a wagon nobody expected to be fast prove exactly the opposite.
This \,995 Model T bucket roadster traces its whole design language back to one car: a stripped-down T built by hot rodder Norm Grabowski in the 1950s that became famous nationwide after appearing on the TV show 77 Sunset Strip. Ford’s Model T was the perfect canvas for that idea, since millions were built between 1908 and 1927 and donor cars were cheap and everywhere. This particular build carries a modern 350 CID V8 and an automatic transmission, proof the T-bucket formula still works just fine with modern power under the hood.
Finished with only three days to spare before Cruisin the Coast, this 1967 Chevrolet Impala SS is a near-stock restoration that skips the flashy paint and stretched stance in favor of getting every factory detail right. Read on to find out why 1967 marked the Impala SS’s last real high point before the package faded away.
Not every SEMA show car is built to be photographed, this 2016 Camaro SS was built to be tested. ScottieDTV’s coverage reveals it served as the actual development mule for GM’s new LT1 engine before Lingenfelter Performance Engineering added a Magnuson supercharger and reshaped its output entirely. The wheels and exhaust came almost as an afterthought. What LPE actually did under the hood is the part worth understanding before you write this one off as just another show floor build.
V8Builds isn’t a park-and-wait car show — it’s built around an actual autocross course that turns spectators into participants. Its second installment at Auto Club Speedway pulled a bigger crowd and a deeper car count than ever before. Read on to find out what makes this format different from every other Saturday cruise-in.
A 1976 Ford F-100 that’s stayed in one family since it rolled off the lot is rarer than the truck itself. Grandpa bought it new; his son and grandson are still building it together. Here’s what makes the Dentside generation such a strong hot rod platform, why vintage Ford trucks are suddenly climbing in value, and why this build’s paper trail matters as much as its parts.
Jeff Lutz has a pattern: flat black paint, twin-turbo big-blocks, 1957 Chevrolets, and Drag Week wins to back it all up. His newest build, unveiled at the Tri-Five Nationals, keeps the 540-cubic-inch big-block he has used before but steps up from 88mm to 98mm turbos in pursuit of roughly 3,500 horsepower. Read on to see how the new car fits the formula that made his two Mad Max ’57s and his Drag Week-winning Camaro famous.
Doug Cook and the team at Motion Raceworks skipped the well-worn LS platform for something almost nobody had real data on: GM’s Gen V LT4. With virtually no seat time on the new combination, they walked straight into Hot Rod’s Drag Week 2017 chasing a record, and immediately ran into wiring harness gremlins that nearly derailed the entire attempt. See how a team with no playbook turned a fresh, largely undocumented engine build into record-setting territory.
Big Oak Garage’s 1957 Chevrolet 210 post sedan hides a modern LS engine and Wilwood brakes under 68-year-old original paint and a set of new wheels deliberately aged to look decades old. It is a restrained build in a genre that usually chases attention, until the comments reveal a setback during the process that longtime viewers still call heartbreaking. The car came back from it anyway. Watch to see how Will Posey and the crew pulled it off.
This 1951 Ford coupe hides a 368 cubic-inch Y-block V8 pulled from a mid-1950s Lincoln, an engine that had no factory business anywhere near a Shoebox. The car left the line with a 226 inline six or a 239 flathead V8, neither of which could keep up with the shape. Here is why builders have raided Lincoln’s parts bin for decades, what separates the Lincoln Y-block from the small Ford engine sharing its name, and which details are hardest to execute.
Mirage is the kind of name you only give a vehicle nobody can categorize. Is it a car, a pickup, a street rod, or a hot rod? The build shrugs at the question, because the answer is all of them stacked on a factory truck Ford sold before anyone had heard the name F-100. What started as a 1941 Ford pickup, a model truck history tends to skip entirely, is now a one-off hardtop convertible. Read on for what it takes to get there.
The 1968 and 1969 Pontiac GTO earned wildly different reviews — “best-balanced car Pontiac ever built” from one magazine, “too easy to spin the tires” from another. Between the redesigned Endura bumper, the Ram Air IV option, and a budget trim called The Judge that turned a Laugh-In catchphrase into a sales phenomenon, these two model years packed in more genuine engineering and marketing history than most GTOs get in a decade. Read on for the full breakdown.
Most show builds are engineered to turn heads for a season. This 1971 Dodge Challenger has been doing it for roughly two decades and still looks like it left the shop last week. Pro Street was a style born from NHRA Pro Stock cars of the early eighties, and getting it to age this well takes more restraint than shock value. Read on for what defines a tubbed car, and why 1971 Challengers made such good raw material.