20 Years Ago
April 1999 (164 pages, $3.50): Tech Editor Steve Magnante popped out of a $500 Nova body sprayed “with $30 worth of spray bombs…and a case o’ suds.” True to company tradition for April Foolery were a full-page fake ad for the Talking Gray [Baskerville] Doll, a “Prop Rods” compilation of silly “Hollyweird” custom cars, and the two-page “Car Feature About Nothing,” picturing a Chevy-powered Nash whose owner reportedly failed to provide any specs (“Pistons: Eight”). No joke was Editor Ro McGonegal’s news that our company had been sold for the second time in three years, fetching $1.2 billion for 132 titles.
40 Years Ago
April 1979 (140 pages, $1.25): Editor Lee Kelley somehow secured L.A. street time for the one-off, “experimental” Z28 that dazzled writers at last summer’s Detroit new-car previews. Chevy engineers swapped its 175hp smog motor for an L82-based, all-aluminum 350 wearing a pair of Jim Hall’s old Chaparral heads. Externally, this ringer was virtually identical to a ’79 stocker, also black, that shared possibly the first dual-car HOT ROD Road Test. Zero-to-1,320 was no contest: 14.00s versus 16.12. Also this month, we documented Chrysler’s return to NHRA Pro Stock, after six years, and a dominating debut for Bob Glidden’s small-block Arrow (8.49/159.60).
60 Years Ago
April 1959 (108 pages, 35¢): After engine-builder Frank McGurk threw everything he had at Chevy’s 348 for 11 dyno comparisons, Don Francisco concluded that the repurposed GMC V8 “doesn’t look as though it will be too outstanding. On a horsepower per cubic inch basis, the maximum of .82 hp…doesn’t compare at all well with the 1.05 hp [McGurk] gets from gas-burning Chevy 283 engines [with] similar modifications.” HOT ROD Mart offered the wrecked Rod & Custom Dream Truck ($1,000), and we honored Hollywood’s Quarter Kings, “one of more than 800 car clubs in Los Angeles County.”
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