Issue November 2007 - Hot Rod (2024)

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Start running with HOT ROD - the biggest, baddest, car-guy magazine in the business! We bring you the broadest performance car coverage you'll find anywhere. From one end of the smoking¹ rubber road to the other. Barn finds, hot rods, rat rods, race cars, home-built super cars, land speed racers, the latest Detroit iron, and classic muscle - if it¹s hitting the streets, you¹ll read about it here first!

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DEPARTMENTSSTARTING LINET’d OFFMuch of my life has been controlled by T-shirts. From the day in about 1974 when I first envied my brother’s nearly destroyed, jade-green, psychedelic-look Kawasaki shirt to the moment when it later became my most valued hand-me-down, I was ingrained with the notion that the shirt on your back means who you are. The battery-acid holes dotting that faded Kawi T established me as the real thing, though it was in fact my bro who’d earned the stripes.In my preteens, I always craved the latest issue of CARtoons mag with its free T-shirt iron-ons, even if I never actually ironed them onto anything. The transfers didn’t work that well, and even in the ’70s you were junior-high gauche if you had iron-ons rather than the store-bought real thing.…4 min

DEPARTMENTSHOLESHOTGOODBYE OLD FRIENDA few months ago the demolition of the historic Ambassador hotel made me vent in this column about how Los Angeles has no sense of its past, valuing real estate more than historical significance. Last weekend it happened again, only this time it wasn’t a building that went away. It was a stretch of pavement roughly ¾ of a mile long, with an old Chrondek Christmas Tree at one end and an uphill shutdown area at the other. Los Angeles County Raceway is no more.Living in Denver as a teenager, Bandimere was my home track, the first dragstrip I ever made a pass down. But reading all the West Coast-based car magazines familiarized me with LACR since that’s where the magazines tested everything, and it was a big…3 min

DEPARTMENTSLETTER OF THE MONTHTHEY’RE THIRSTY IN ALBERTAIt was Saturday, May 17, 1980, in Spokane, Washington. Why do I remember the date? That was the day before Mt. St. Helens erupted. A buddy and I had just picked up 30 dozen of Adolph Coors’ finest at a Safeway store in Spokane. Not that we were influenced by Smokey and the Bandit, as referenced in your article in the Aug. ’07 issue of HOT ROD! We had initially loaded the Coors in the back seat of my ’67 Acadian Canso (try it sometime, five cases per row, three rows high), and had just transferred the beer to the trunk to be less obvious, when I snapped the photo. I don’t remember why, but we decided to start the drive home that evening. We camped at…1 min

DEPARTMENTSBENCH RACINGJust when you begin to think that the days of paper letters and envelopes are nearly gone, we get inundated with snail mail. As go to press, we’re right on top of the deadline for submissions to our grandiose Homebuilt Heros™ program, and the volume of mail is so huge that the Primedia mailroom folks are sending us death threats. Poor Campbell is buried (literally) under all the mail. Which leads one to wonder why the vast majority of Bench Racing letters come via email, not the U.S. Post Office. I propose that the act of sitting down with a pen and paper and composing thoughts, maybe adding a photo or two, is a far more thought-provoking way of communicating. So let’s see more regular mail from you folks. The…5 min

DEPARTMENTSREAL STOCK CARSWe may have created a monster. In my column in the August issue, I lamented about how NASCAR’s Nextel Cup cars have no connection to production cars and how, for me anyway, that takes a lot of the excitement out of it. The readers agreed en masse, and it has us thinking some dirty thoughts. Like Hmmm, maybe we could promote an actual Stock Car race based around brand-new production cars. Not like we need more magazine-sponsored events, but this idea has some teeth to it, don’t you think? Stay tuned. —ROB KINNANLAUGHABLENASCAR is so far removed from “stock” that to call it Stock Car racing is laughable. HOT ROD sponsors Power Tour® and drag racing events, so how about a Stock Car race? Safety equipment and driver training would…3 min

DEPARTMENTSREADER’S RIDESPURPLE HEART NOVA’72 Chevy Rally Nova • Sgt. Damon Coates West Linn, ORA domestic disturbance call on January 9, 2003, changed Clackamas County Police Sgt. Coates’ life when he was shot in the face by a mentally ill teen with a .45 pistol. The trauma from the wound led to a stroke and paralysis of Coates’ left side, leaving him wheelchair-bound. Though he received a Purple Heart for his injuries, the completion of his ’72 Nova project by concerned fellow officers and citizens of West Linn especially touched him. The Purple Heart Nova, as it’s known, has a copy of Sgt. Coates’ badge and commendation airbrushed on the front fenders. The license plate reads “KODE 4,” which is the police radio code an officer sends to let others know he’s…2 min

Issue November 2007 - Hot Rod (2024)

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