Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2020 i Hemmings Muscle Machines

IN THE EARLY DAYS of the Pure Stock Drags, brand loyalty set the camps and the internet chatter revolved around defending your chosen manufacturer. Soon the magazines noticed, and we were treated to big-block and small-block shootouts, further stoking the brand wars. And it wasn’t just the usual suspects; the Studebaker fan club became known as the most vocal cheerleaders for its members’ favorite vehicles. Looking back on that now, it is amazing how much friendlier the competition has become. But don’t get the wrong idea: The racers are still going all-out and looking for another kill story to tell, even if it comes at the expense of a friend. For 2019, 116 cars came from 18 states and enjoyed cool fall Michigan weather on September 13-14. Many new cars…

PERCEPTION AND REALITY rarely align, and for the past 50 years, that has been the case with the street-production version of the Ford Boss 429 engine. Like Chrysler’s 426 Street Hemi, the Boss 429 was a civilian version of an engine intended for NASCAR and the sustained, high-rpm performance required for stock car racing — and it even offered hemispherical (or very nearly hemispherical) cylinder heads. But the competition version of Ford’s V-8 was much farther removed from the street version than Chrysler’s Hemi. Nevertheless, it was easy and logical to assume that, with those mile-wide valve covers and football field-sized intake manifold, one of the era’s wildest production engines delivered thrust just slightly below a Saturn V rocket. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. Although development had churned for several…

I WAS NOT NEW TO SHELBY Mustangs back in 1982. By then, I had been a machinist for 17 years in my home state of Maryland, and I owned a 1966 G.T. 350 (SFM6S2335). I’d been saving to fund another 1966 Shelby Mustang. The search began and a coworker, Steve Cox, showed me an advertisement for a ’66 Shelby in The Baltimore Sun newspaper. I made the phone call and got the original owner’s wife. She said she had 50 calls on the car, and that she thought it was sold. I asked if a guy from Pennsylvania by the name of Wayne Conover bought the Shelby. She said she thought so. I knew Wayne and was waiting at his house when he got home with the Shelby. He said…

WHEN YOUR FIRST CAR IS A RED-ON-RED 1968 Firebird convertible that you still own today, it can be a challenge to top it with your next Pontiac project, but that didn’t deter Robert Thomas, a civil engineer from Centennial, Colorado. He purchased this 1969 Firebird in June 2007 from a local listing and recalls, “It ran, but wasn’t 100 percent. The Pontiac had already been modified in the Pro-Touring vein with a Doug Nash five-speed and Wilwood disc brakes, but most of the work was completed in the 1980s. Several small items, like interior bits and some brackets, were missing.” Originally Windward Blue with blue interior, the Firebird “had been repainted red, the interior had been redone with black cloth door panels, and the front seats had been swapped,” Rob…

1971 BUICK GSX AUTO WORLD • 888-910-2889 WWW.AUTOWORLDSTORE.COM • $94.99 Everyone’s favorite muscle car in a business suit, the Buick GSX, has been rendered as a 1:18-scale diecast (item AMM1138) to celebrate the annual Muscle Car and Corvette Nationals event, held in Illinois. This model, bearing MCACN license plates, is officially licensed by GM. It’s a limited-edition piece by the experts at Auto World, who are making just 1,002 examples. Our sample, number 0277, was carefully painted in bright Platinum Mist Metallic silver with trademark crisp red-trimmed black stripes. It had a detailed engine bay with a realistic 455 V-8 engine, doors that opened to reveal Body by Fisher-crested chrome sill plates, flock carpeting and legible instrumentation, and a true-to-life undercarriage. The winged trunklid didn’t raise, but the front…

The Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino hosted Barrett-Jackson’s annual trek to Sin City, and after three days of gavel-pounding action, the final result was $34.8 million in sales (including $560,000 for charity). Included in the overall number was a triple-black ’73 Buick Riviera selling for $30,250, a ’62 Corvette fuelie for $110,000, a ’70 Dodge Dart Swinger (340/ four-speed) for $26,400, a ’68 Plymouth GTX convertible for $39,600, a ’69 Olds 4-4-2 coupe for $108,900, a ’71 Pontiac Trans Am 455 HO/four-speed for $55,000, and a genuine ’70 Boss 302 Mustang for $101,200. Top-selling vehicle at the event was a Heritage Edition ’17 Ford GT for $1.54 million, with 10 out of 12 of the top sales reserved for sports cars. Worldwide Auctioneers’ visit to the Corpus Christi Old Car…

ROGER PENSKE BUYS IMS, INDYCAR SERIES With 18 wins in the Indianapolis 500 since 1972, some would say that Roger Penske and Penske Racing already own the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. On November 4, the sport’s best-kept secret became official: Penske Entertainment Corp., a subsidiary of Penske Corporation, would be purchasing Hulman & Company, and with it, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the NTT IndyCar Series, and IMS Productions. Details of the transaction, between two private companies, remain confidential, but it’s safe to say the purchase price was considerably more than the $750,000 paid by Anton “Tony” Hulman Jr., for the then-tattered track in 1945. Since then, the facility has remained within the Hulman and George families, and Penske becomes the track’s fourth owner since its construction in 1909. No immediate changes…

“I am a die-hard Mopar guy but enjoy all the old muscle cars. That is why I like reading your magazine and your articles — reading about some of the options on the other makes and what makes them unusual, also the owner’s comments. I just finished, or 95-percent finished (they are never done), my 1966 Plymouth Satellite. I tore it down completely; anything that could be taken off, was. While I was working on it, I wondered what the worst job on the assembly line could be when these things were built. I have to say I would never want to be the person who puts the tracks and the glass in the doors  and quarter windows. I find that to be a pain. To get them to fit…

PRICE Base price......................................................................................................................$3,412 Options on car profiled.............440 Six Barrel engine ($253.20); 727 TorqueFlite transmission ($229.35); A33 Track Pak ($137.80); power steering ($97); Rallye gauges ($76.75); leather seats ($62.55); Rallye wheels ($54.25); console ($53.05); power conv. top ($48.70); power brakes ($41.55); elastomeric front bumper ($40.70); tinted glass ($36.85); light group ($35.75); deck luggage rack ($31.30); racing mirrors, left remote ($25.75); front disc brakes ($23); road lights ($21.05); High Impact Paint ($13.85) ENGINE Type............................ Chrysler RB-series OHV V-8; cast-iron block and cylinder heads Displacement.........................................................................................................440-cu.in. Bore x Stroke.....................................................................................................4.32 x 3.75 in Compression ratio..........................................................................................................10.3:1 Horsepower @ rpm............................................................................................385 @ 4,700 Torque @ rpm...........................................................................................490-lb.ft. @ 3,200 Valvetrain...................................................................................Hydraulic lifter, flat-tappet Main bearings...................................................................................................................Five Fuel system ........... Cast-iron Six Barrel manifold; three Holley two-barrel carburetors; mechanical pump Lubrication system.....................................................................Pressure; gear-type pump Electrical system..............................................................................................................12-V Exhaust system.................................................................................................Dual exhaust TRANSMISSION Type..................................................Heavy-duty 727…

A HOOK, OF SORTS, WAS SET FOR MIKE Pudsey in 1977, when he was just 13 years old. It was the age that Mike recalls really starting to be interested in cars, and he assigns a certain Pontiac as contributing greatly to that awareness. A friend’s mother owned a ’73 Le Mans Sport Coupe, and Mike recalls thinking the styling was really great, what with the louvered rear quarter windows, Rally II wheels, bucket seats, console, etc. You can see where this one is going, can’t you? Fast-forward eight years to 1985, and Mike is now a 21-year-old, on a drive near his hometown of Surrey, British Columbia, Canada. A car in someone’s front yard had a “For Sale” sign in it, and Mike was immediately interested. It appeared much…

SUCK, SQUEEZE, BANG, BLOW. THE principles behind a four-stroke internal combustion engine are simple enough to understand, but haphazardly swapping components to produce more power can be both counterproductive and expensive. Worse, perhaps, is that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and in some cases, gains at low end are offset by losses at top end, or a decline in component or engine longevity. Getting more power from any engine, then, starts with a few relatively simple questions. What kind of output gains are you seeking? Do you want more off-the-line grunt? More midrange? More top end? A reasonable balance between all three? What compromises are you willing to accept to make more power? For years, the secret to making additional output was simply flowing more fuel and…

BUICK HAD A VERY GOOD YEAR IN 1968. The storied division regained a competitive foothold across multiple markets with fresh styling, improved safety features, new engine packages, and a revised model lineup. These hardly qualified as groundbreaking industry developments, but it was enough to help Buick set a new Flint assembly line production record of 350,826 units (breaking a record of 309,946 from 1950). Combined with Buick’s other plants across the nation, the automaker built 673,655 car s— second best in division history (add Canadian production and output climbed to 698,454). Among that run were the GS performance models. The nameplate welcomed an expansion, now comprised of the California GS (still little-known today, it was technically part of the Special Deluxe subseries), the GS 350 — renamed from GS 340…

SO, YOU’RE FINALLY BUILDING THE CAR of your dreams. And if you’re reading this issue of HMM, we’ll go ahead and assume you’ve got a vintage muscle car of some stripe that you’re ready to drop some serious coin on. First of all, congratulations: We want to see pics when it’s done. But, as much as you know exactly what you want under the hood and over the fresh bodywork, the interior is a little bit of a blind spot. Of course, you want something cool — the interior is where you’ll be spending most of your time (hopefully) and it’s the one part of the car you literally surround yourself with. Make sure it’s a well-thought out process. Just like the car, there are two ways to approach the…

2020 CHALLENGER DRAG PAK Chrysler launched its fourth-generation Challenger Drag Pak quarter-mile conqueror at SEMA this past November. The Drag Pak is not a street-legal car — it’s built to run in certain NHRA and NMCA sportsman drag racing classes. The 2020 Challenger Drag Pak starts as a “body-in-white,” has an SFI-spec rollcage welded in, and is given a specific engine crossmember to lower the car’s center of gravity. Like previous Drag Paks, the 2020 model will be powered by the supercharged 354-cubic-inch HEMI that’s backed up by a T400 three-speed transmission with a Kwik-Shift manual shifter, lightweight driveshaft, front and rear racing brakes, Racetech seats, and a Racepak Smartwire fully programmable power distribution center. New equipment added to the package this year includes a Strange rear axle assembly with…

THE SECOND WAVE OF PONY CARS quite literally grew up in 1970-’71, becoming more Clydesdale than Calabrese. Mustang shed its Falcon underpinnings, instead employing beefy mid-sized Torino bits; GM’s F-bodies had precious little Nova left beneath them; and Mother Mopar sectioned a few inches out of the B-body’s wheelbase and called it E-body. And so, a generation of light, nimble machines went ahead and carbo-loaded themselves into becoming bigger sizes altogether. On the one hand, it meant that these quarter-mile combatants wouldn’t need to be sent to specialty builders (ie, Kar Kraft, Hurst) to wedge the biggest, nastiest engines under the hood anymore. On the other, you needed bigger engines to haul around all that extra bulk. It also meant that the plumped-up ponies had evolved into another category altogether:…

I T’S BEAT, IT’S MOSTLY GREEN, and it’s likely the most famous Ford Mustang on the planet. Want proof? Ford sent off both its fourth and fifth generations of Mustang with film-tribute cars, series-built to honor the screen star, long lost to the public view. Then, when Ford came out with its sixth-gen iteration of the Bullitt Mustang, the Dearborn automaker unveiled the original Mustang from the 1968 film Bullitt. The return of the actual Bullitt Mustang virtually overshadowed the newest generation of tribute car. This Highland Green fastback was one of two that played the transportation of San Francisco Police Lieutenant Frank Bullitt (a character played by that icon of cool, Steve McQueen). This one is special, though, since it’s the “hero car” actually used by McQueen in interior…

This car has been a dream for me, not only turning out just as I’d hoped, but being something my whole family appreciates. In my mind, it just doesn’t get any better than that! It’s generally driven every week, mostly for local Friday night cruises and weekend family drives to the local burger joint. On average, we’ve rolled about 500 miles onto the odometer each year since the restoration, and it continues to do well at the occasional show I attend. A first-place award for ’68-’74 hardtops at the 37th Annual GTOAA Nationals may be the proudest moment. In the end, I just want to thank everyone involved in making it happen — you know who you are and I’m deeply appreciative. To Keith Kavelman in particular, I owe this…

IN ASSEMBLING OUR ENGINE Power Special Section this month, it seemed appropriate to take a look at dynamometer testing — the process of measuring how much power an engine produces. For automotive use, dynamometers — or “dynos” as they’re more commonly known — typically come in two forms: the engine dyno and the chassis dyno. The engine dyno mounts just the engine itself and takes its reading at the crankshaft output, typically referred to as “flywheel horsepower”; the chassis dyno mounts the entire vehicle to a platform and measures output at the drive wheels, resulting in the term “wheel horsepower.” A general rule regarding the difference in measured output between the two is that there is roughly a 20-percent loss from the flywheel to the drive wheels. Note that there…

PRODUCT TEST: MEGUIAR’S HYBRID CERAMIC WAX MEGUIAR’S • 800-347-5700 • WWW.MEGUIARS.COM • $14.99 (26 OUNCES) If you pay any attention to car care trends, you’ve likely heard about ceramic coating technology for vehicle paint finishes.These coatings seemed to hit the market as a service offered by pro detailers (usually for a significant fee), and then began trickling to the DIY market. In general, the reviews of these products have been very positive, but they still require proper application, which can take some time and care. The Meguiar’s Hybrid Ceramic Wax product is intended as a simpler, more affordable alternative to provide added protection to painted surfaces. Although the product comes in a spray bottle, it is not a simple spray on/wipe off solution. Instead, it is intended to be…

FOR THE BENEFIT of those new to Monterey Car Week — the days leading into the world-renowned Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance — the calendar is brimming with vintage vehicle events. Static car shows, test drives, tours, enough seafood to last a year, and, of course, auctions. Half a dozen of them, in fact, spread throughout the peninsula. Our coverage from this sales smorgasbord continues this month with highlights from Russo and Steele, a Scottsdale, Arizona, based company that’s been a Gold Coast staple for 19 straight years. Located in the vast parking facility adjacent to the famed Fisherman’s Warf, Russo and Steele opened its gates for early preview on Wednesday, August 14, having assembled a catalog of 146 lots. This is a calculated reduction from years past, as the company…

FEBRUARY 7-8 MOULTRIE SWAP MEET Moultrie, Georgia 229-896-2150 7-9 GPK AUCTIONS Atlantic City, New Jersey 856-573-6969 7-9 SUMTER SWAP MEETS WINTER EXTRAVAGANZA Bushnell, Florida 727-848-7171 13-16 ZEPHYRHILLS AUTO FESTIVAL Zephyrhills, Florida 813-312-4009 14-16 DAVE RUPP COLLECTOR CAR AUCTION Miami, Florida 561-779-0302 14-16 SACRAMENTO AUTORAMA Sacramento, California 877-763-7469 16 BUICK-OLDS-PONTIACCADILLAC SWAP MEET St. Charles, Illinois 630-865-4349 16 DAYTONA 500 Daytona Beach, Florida 800-748-7467 21-23 CARLISLE EVENTS WINTER AUTOFEST Lakeland, Florida 717-243-7855 21-23 McCORMICK AUCTION Palm Springs, California 760-320-3290 22 WINTER CLASSIC MOTORSPORTS EXPO Columbus, Ohio 614-268-1181 22-23 MONTICELLO ROD & CUSTOM CAR SHOW Monticello, Iowa 319-465-5119 27-29 AACA WINTER MEET Miami, Florida 717-534-1910…