For a good half-century now, the hobby
of hot-rodding typically meant taking a cheap car, taking out any
body part that didn’t matter (i.e. roofs, hoods, bumpers, fenders,
seats, and other such nonsense), modifying the engine and/or dropping
in a bigger one for greater performance (often protruding upwards
from the hood), and fattening up the tires for extra traction.
The term is still as accurate as ever.
In fact, not even the cars in question have necessarily changed: one
very typical image of a Hot Rod is a Muscle Car straight from the
1960s (the so-called muscle car golden age), restored to all its
glory and then some. It’s not uncommon to take the great ancestors
of cars we know today (Mustang, GTO) or ones forgotten by all but a
few (Plymouth Barracuda), and send the output of its V8 soaring to
600 horsepower and above. Hot rods can be just as much about
customizing as weight-saving (think of flaming paintjobs), and price
isn’t necessarily an object: one notable Barracuda ("Hemi
Cuda" in hot rod speak) on the cover of a major-name Hot Rod
Magazine had every body panel and interior item customized to its
owner’s desire. For $340,000.
As for hot rods’ relation to American
culture, the link is quite strong. Nearly all hot rods are American
and almost always rear-wheel-drive. In our culture, quarter-mile
times make the man. Enthusiasts who spend as much time in the present
as the past also pay close attention to modern-day production cars
like the new Mustang, and the upcoming 2009 Chevy Camaro and Dodge
Challenger are currently headline news.
Of course, no rule ever said it had to
be a car, per se. Muscular + American seems to add up to enough;
Jeep’s Grand Cherokee SRT-8 seems to be a hot commodity, no doubt
due to the street cred of its 425-horsepower modern-day Hemi V8. Even
the new Chevy Tahoe gets attention.
But some define the genre on their own
terms, creating the occasional aberration. One individual dropped a
turbocharged-and-NOSed Buick V6 right under the hood of a Geo Metro,
for crying out loud. If you can burn through the quarter-mile in 9.3
seconds at 147 MPH, who cares how you get there?
If hot rods are to be defined as speed
on the cheap, count on it being a part of our culture as long as
Planet Earth has fuel.
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