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Randy Clark of Hot Rods and Custom Stuff brought his 1966 Buick Riviera to Jay Leno’s Garage wearing a gold paint job that took his team fifteen hundred hours to complete — longer than most full restorations take start to finish. The Riviera’s clean, GT-inspired lines gave Clark’s crew the perfect canvas for that level of obsession. Even Leno, who has seen thousands of custom builds, wanted to know how anyone justifies that kind of time.
At the 2016 Goodguys Nashville Nationals, more than 2,500 hot rods, muscle cars, and customs filled the infield at Nashville Superspeedway for a weekend billed as “America’s Favorite Car Show.” The event doubles as a proving ground through the Tanks, Inc. Hot Rod of the Year competition, which includes a 100-mile reliability run on real roads. Closing time brings its own reward, when hundreds of engines fire up at once for the drive home.
Underneath the vintage 1970 Mustang bodywork on this SEMA 2016 showstopper, called ‘Vicious,’ sits a Nissan GT-R chassis and drivetrain — a body swap precise enough that even close-up video had commenters asking what they were actually looking at. It shared the spotlight with a wide-body Dodge Charger one viewer described as ‘a mile wide, two miles long, and six inches tall,’ plus a custom ‘Shomad’ Nomad wagon. See the build that fooled an entire comment section.
Mike Finnegan went from a Hot Rod Magazine staff editor to one of the most recognizable builders in automotive video, after a road-trip film shot with David Freiburger became Roadkill and spawned Hot Rod Garage, Faster with Finnegan, and Engine Masters. When MotorTrend Productions closed in November 2024, he moved everything to his own YouTube channel and kept going. Read on to find out how a builder who refuses to choose between hot rods and art cars stayed relevant for more than a decade.