Not content with launching just a publishing empire, Robert E. Petersen put on a series of car shows in the early ’50s that he called Motorama.
The next big fad is GMC superchargers,” wrote LeRoi “Tex” Smith in the June 1964 issue of Rod & Custom magazine.
The equipment may have changed, but many of the tips laid out in this October 1964 issue of Car Craft magazine are still worthwhile for anyone interested in taking better pictures of their cars.
Not to be confused with the billet grilles that took off in the ’80s, bullet grille treatments were a hot modification trend in the late ’50s.
The photo here was taken at the very first SEMA Show, which was known in 1967 as the High Performance & Custom Trade Show and was held in January of that year at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. The car in the booth is a Camaro, Chevrolet’s answer to Ford’s wildly popular Mustang.
It’s December 1967, and the men about to fire that Chevy small-block on the engine dyno are Jim Travers (right) 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.”
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.
Framed by those tall velocity stacks is Bruce Crower, photographed late in 1966 for a Car Craft magazine article about his then-new fuel-injection systems for big-block Chevy engines. The air/horsepower equation in our title was the story’s title as well, referring to Crower’s “deep breathing” injectors. Unlike other injection systems on the market at the time, Crower’s injection manifold featured gaping intake ports that were nearly 3 inches wide. Those injector stacks could be mammoth, too—as tall as 14 inches, depending on the application.
In January 1963, Tom McMullen posed in his flamed Deuce highboy for Hot Rod magazine’s Eric Rickman in front of Beckman Instruments, where McMullen worked as an electronics technician.