SEMA Heritage

It’s December 1967, and the men about to fire that Chevy small-block on the engine dyno are Jim Travers and Frank Coon, founders of Traco Engineering. Commanding their attention is a Trans-Am race engine—possibly destined for one of Roger Penske’s Sunoco Z/28 Camaros—and Car Craft magazine’s Bob Swaim is chronicling “Traco’s magic touch” to see how the legendary engine builders squeeze more than 400 hp from “a basically stock 301ci engine with the Z/28 options.” Swaim’s story, “Chevy’s Little ‘301’ Giant,” appeared in the magazine’s March 1968 issue.Traco (a contraction of Travers’ and Coon’s last names) was founded in 1957 after the pair served as mechanics for Bill Vukovich during his Indy 500 wins in 1953 and 1954.

“If you haven’t already bolted a tape deck in that machine of yours, man, you’re either living outside of the ‘in’ group or have never heard an automotive stereo tape player in action,” he said in his opening paragraph. “Stereo might be great at home, but in a car—it’s something else. Just to drive along while listening to your favorite music coming at you from all directions is what most stereo owners refer to as the new surrounding sound.”

The pits at an NHRA drag race today are as much a part of the show as they are a place for work. They’re a maze of 18-wheelers, easy-ups and souvenir booths, where hawking T-shirts and collecting autographs go hand in hand with rebuilding engines in a tense but well-orchestrated effort to make the next round.

The third annual Hot Rod Magazine Championship Drags, held in June 1966, was a scorcher. On the track, that is. All the big names in drag racing came to Riverside loaded for bear: McEwen, Chrisman, Landy, Leal, Ongias, Swingle—and records tumbled.

It has been 60 years since the first Corvette rolled off its assembly line in Flint, Michigan. A month before that first Vette was built, a Belgian-born engineer named Zora Arkus-Duntov joined Chevrolet.

It’s 1968, and Car Craft magazine publisher Sal Fish shakes hands with actor James Garner. Garner, in the helmet and goggles, sits in a Bill Stroppe-prepped Ford Bronco, ready to race in the second National Off Road Racing Association (NORRA) Mexican 1000.

At the 1970 Bakersfield Fuel & Gas Championships, the Top Fuel final came down to a duel between two close friends: Tony Nancy and Harry Hibler. Nancy, known for his outstanding upholstery work and for building a number of immaculate hot rods (several of which were featured on the cover of Hot Rod magazine), had just entered the Top Fuel ranks that year. Hibler, who for years ran the San Fernando dragstrip, had started racing Top Fuelers a couple years before and was juggling his racing schedule around his day job, selling advertising at Petersen Publishing Company.

When we titled this piece “Going 90,” we weren’t talking miles per hour. Alex Xydias and his radically chopped SO-CAL Speed Shop Double Threat Coupe were good for far more than that: a class record of 172.749 mph at Bonneville in 1953; a little more than 170 mph (with an ailing engine) in 1954 when this photo was taken of Xydias in the coupe; and a record 132.79 mph at the Pomona drags later in 1954, when he had the engine sorted out and tipped the nitro can just a bit.

Given the explosion of sophisticated automatic transmissions in everything from Ferraris and Porsches to the new ZL1 Camaro, Roger Huntington, writing in the April 1967 issue of Car Craft magazine, could have been talking about today’s performance-car market: “Automatics are here to stay in high-performance American cars. And, in fact, the age-old manual four-speed might just be falling back a hair. A lot of hot dogs like the convenience of two-pedal driving, and it is pretty well established that an automatic is quicker away from the stoplight—other factors equal. This is becoming a very strong sales factor in today’s supercar market. More and more guys are going automatic on their hot street machines.”