Because I’m a sucker for a cars and coffee event these days, I’ve been spending a few choice Sunday mornings gawking at other people’s toys. And, with the (slightly) improved weather here lately, a few of those shows have featured plenty of hot-rods. I wouldn’t call myself a total hot-rod guy, but when I see one I like, I really dig it.
The ones that appeal most to me are the fair dinkum, old-school rides with plenty of ingenuity on show. There’s an element of craftsmanship, too, in making a functioning vehicle out of whatever was lying around at the time. Let’s be honest here, anybody can go out and buy a crate engine, order up a set of remade rails, flash the plastic on a front and rear suspension set-up and then plonk a brand-new fibreglass body on top. Okay, maybe not just anybody, but you get my drift.
But I prefer the approach that says: Okay, we have a set of 32 Ford rails, we can recondition the suspension and add proper dampers on engineered mounts, and then we can take the original steel body, remove the rust and add a set of era-correct wheels. Bingo, it’s a hot-rod. It might not be perfect, but it’s for damn sure you won’t see another one exactly like it.
But this is also where we come to the subject of powering that hot-rod. To a bloke like me, the correct way to go is to use what ever is lying around, cluttering up the shed. And using the old brain muscle to come up with something nobody else has thought of yet. Obviously, a more modern, more powerful donk is acceptable, because that’s just following hot-rodding tradition to the letter. But why does it automatically have to be a V8?
Fact is, there’s a heap of reasons why a V8 may not be the best choice (depending on the rod in question, of course).
Those start with the sheer mass of a big lump of cast iron. Seriously, I reckon I saw a T-Bucket recently where the blown big-block trying to tear those old rails apart would have accounted for more than half of the car’s entire kerb weight.
Lord alone knows what an animal it must be to drive, and I actually wondered if the bloke or blokette had ever given it the full berries and, if so, what mayhem ensued. Okay, so the owner probably doesn’t drive it interstate or daily, but surely, having a vehicle that doesn’t turn itself inside-out when you gas it up isn’t too much to ask. Or shouldn’t be.
Second of all, I’m not seeing blown Hemi V8s falling out of trees lately. Which means they’re not actually what people have stacked three deep in their sheds these days. So, right away, we’ve moved away from the basic ethos (again, this is all according to me, so feel free to disagree).
What prompted this tangential line of thinking on my part, was recently seeing a couple of rods powered by four-cylinder engines. And at the risk of being forced to hand in my man-card, I really like that idea. And before you flip the page, whoa back up for a minute and hear me out.
A four-cylinder hot-rod is not as daft as some of the hard-heads out there would have you believe. Just for starters, I reckon about three sheds in ten across Australia have a four-banger of some sort lying under a tarp, in a pool of its own oil, just waiting for the right project to come along. So right off the bat, we’re being true to the original rodder’s mantra of using whatever had been discarded by the grown-ups.
Secondly, a four-potter is a much lighter proposition, so those ancient transverse leaf springs and spindly axles will be a much better chance to maintain contact with the planet without two thousand horsepower trying to turn them in to pretzels. And without all that mass and horsepower, you don’t need to fit huge (and heavy) brakes or huge (and even heavier) wheels and tyres. The whole thing could be pared back to exclude power steering, because you just wouldn’t need it (although I’d stay with boosted brakes). And if ever less was truly more, then the hot-rod is Exhibit A.
And, hey, think about this: The average tin-bodied, roofless rod is likely to weigh in at well under 1000kg, right. Now, if you’ve ever driven a VW Beetle or a rear-drive Ford Escort with even 150 horses to push, say, 800kg, you’ll know that these things absolutely fly. So why couldn’t it work in a hot-rod sense? Answer: It bloody well could. Oh, and you’d probably get 40 miles to the gallon out of it. Not to mention you could actually use most of the performance most of the time without automatically going to jail. Go and drive a Mazda MX-5 or Toyota 86 and tell me that buzzing a banzai little four-cylinder to 7000rpm and back again isn’t huge fun. It’d be just as much fun in a hot-rod, too …just way cooler.
But, I hear you saying, a hot-rod often has the engine hanging out in the breeze, on show. So how’s an itty bitty four-pot gonna pull that off? Well, there are plenty of four-cylinder engines that look great. The 18RG Toyota twin-cam is one, with its black crackle-finish rocker cover and side-drafts. Same goes for the Ford Pinto which looks especially tough when you remove the timing-belt cover to expose the cam sprocket. In fact, just about any crossflow donk with a pair of Webers hanging off the side of it is going to do the business as well as being able to be tuned to however crazy you want to go.
Want something a bit more serious grunt-wise? Then think a bit more modern. How about a turbocharged SR20 or a zappy Honda mill? The Nissan is even available in rear-drive form (find a wrecking-yard 200SX that’s gone in backwards) so there’s less messing around with bell-housings and adaptors.
Either way, the electronic injection would make daily life much easier and the nice people at the local rego branch are vastly more likely to take you seriously when it comes time to register the thing. Roll up to the motor registry in a blown, Keith Black-powered T-Bucket and they’re more apt to pull a gun on you, let alone hand over a set of number plates. Your chosen insurance provider is also a much better chance to return your calls with a four-banger nestled between those 32 Ford rails, too.
Thing is, I can’t really see a downside to this concept. The end result would go as hard as necessary, would be a lot cheaper to build, run, insure and maintain, and would arguably be loads more fun when you were actually out in it, as opposed to sitting around looking at it in the garage.
Come on, tell me what’s wrong with this argument. I’ll wait.
Another stupid idea
I get a bit annoyed when I watch the rest of the world get road safety stuff wrong. A succession of governments has turned the concept of road safety in to a way to make money, and that really trips my thermostat. But, you kind of expect that from government, mainly because it’s been such a dire cesspit of stooges and boofheads for generations.
But now private enterprise is getting in the business of perverting the course of road safety. Perhaps you’ve seen the TV advert where a young fella in his tricked-up Nissan pulls up at a red light beside an older driver. The older blokes leans through his window to pass judgment on the young bloke’s use of the brake pedal and sudden stop. And thus begins the stereotyping.
But the ad then goes on to explain that if you choose to participate in an organised process of having your every move on the road scrutinised, you can win prizes. We then move on to vision of a few weirdos telling a camera that they always wear their seat-belts tight and low, and always look both ways before doing something random. Or some-such. Motherhood statements, I believe they’re called.
The ad then ends with the original young fella, spotting the green light, selecting gear and then applying a tiny squidge of throttle and proceeding through the intersection at a speed a glaciologist would recognise. The punchline is that young ’un has learned his lesson, wants to be a safe driver and is therefore accelerating through an intersection at a wounded snail’s pace.
Okay, a few things to unpack here: First, driving through an intersection is best done at a normal rate of acceleration to avoid giving every single car behind you the shits and creating the perfect conditions for road-rage. Secondly, is the young bloke shown checking that the intersection is actually clear and not full of a tradie ute running a red light? Nope. So, regardless of speed, I wouldn’t have called that a safe move, then. Would you?
See, this is the problem. While ever we hyper-ventilate over speed, and ignore stuff like never assuming a green light means a clear road ahead, we’re not doing anything for actual road safety. Maybe there’s a percentage of the population who will watch that advert and agree with the message. But if that’s the case, that same percentage is wrong. Sadly, I also believe it would be quite a large percentage. And that’s purely because we’ve been spoon-fed this crap for decades now. We no longer know any better. Well, some of us, anyway.
But it gets worse. Because the advert also reveals that this bullshit is the work of an insurance company. Yep, a company that stands to gain financially if crashes are reduced. Not saying it doesn’t care about you or your loved ones being hurt in a shunt, but if part of the motivation of the campaign isn’t to reduce payouts after crunches, then I’ll stand rooted.
And here’s where it gets really Big Brother. In order to win the prizes, you need to download an app and have it running on your phone while the insurance company tracks your journey, logging speeds, how hard you brake and corner, where you’ve been and whether you’ve broken any road rules. Oh, and, of course, whether you’re being a good boy and accelerating like a three-toed sloth with a broken leg.
So what happens if you’re a bad boy and drive like a normal person? Don’t know. But wouldn’t it be possible for all the driver-behaviour data – good and bad – to be stored on a database somewhere and used to calculate your next premium? Think about it: One quick-ish trip to the local emergency department with your injured kid on board, could render you uninsurable. And it’s no good appealing to the courts, ’cos the legal system has no say in whether an insurance company decides to cover you or not.
I’m quite certain the insurer in this case would suggest that this misuse of data wasn’t going to happen, but what if the info was hacked and sold on the dark web to an insurance company that wasn’t so concerned with your privacy? Or maybe the same info falls into the government’s hands and you suddenly start getting retrospective speeding fines in the mail.
I reckon they’ll be selling leg-warmers in Hell before I willingly agree to be electronically tracked as I go about my own private business. And look, this is dangerous in other ways. Like the fact that agreeing to be tracked on the roads is just softening us up for the day when the government mandates to do exactly that. And knowing the law’s propensity to be all stick and no carrot, I don’t fancy that one bit.
Over to you.