The 1967 NASCAR season was dominated by Richard Petty and his Hemi-powered Plymouth Satellite—a potent combination that won 27 races and notched 35 top-five finishes in 48 starts that year. NASCAR’s 1966 champion, David Pearson, found himself struggling in 1967. He ran just a partial season and left Cotton Owens’ Dodge team after 10 races to drive Fords for Holman Moody.
It’s August 1958, and Hot Rod Technical Editor Ray Brock (center) is being shown the finer points of supercharger design by Paxton Chief Engineer John Thompson (left) and Andy Granatelli. Brock’s visit and comprehensive research led to an in-depth story with the “…Can Be Practical” headline in the magazine’s October 1958 issue.
Given the lengthy schedule of events put on by the NHRA today, it’s hard to imagine a time when the drag-racing sanctioning body had just one national event on its calendar: The National Championships—or “The Big Go,” as Hot Rod magazine liked to call it. So when a second national meet was added in 1961, it was a very big deal.
In January 1965, Petersen Publishing photographer Pat Brollier set up his camera to get as much depth of field as possible to capture the goings-on at the Winternationals Custom Auto Fair in the cavernous Pan Pacific Auditorium in Los Angeles. That small aperture resulted in a long exposure, blurring many of the visitors as they passed by what had to be one of the most dramatic exhibits in the show.
Dot-O-Wols were considered “the latest in tire glamorizing” when Al Paloczy photographed them in the September 1959 issue of Car Craft magazine.
What a difference a year makes. While the first High Performance and Custom Trade Show drew about 100 exhibitors to the drafty halls of Dodger Stadium in 1967, the second edition a year later moved to the modern, well-lit Anaheim Convention Center, where 140 exhibitors used 201 10x10-ft. booths to display their products and make their 1968 sales pitches to 3,800 distributors and dealers from all over this country, Mexico and Canada.
There are names synonymous with automotive performance: Iskenderian, Edelbrock, Hilborn, Weiand. Those who know Louis Senter and understand his achievements in performance and the automotive aftermarket rank him right up there with those other pioneers. Yet his isn’t the same kind of household name in this industry. That’s because when Louis and his brother Sol took on Jack Andrews as a partner in their new Los Angeles speed shop in the mid ’40s, they named it Ansen Engineering, a combination of the principles’ last names.
Some 10 years after its founding, Hot Rod was branching out, looking for new trends to appeal to its speed-hungry readers. Late ’50s and early ’60s issues continued to cover the traditional hot-rodding venues—Bonneville, Indianapolis, Pikes Peak and NHRA-sanctioned dragstrips across the country—but other forms of motorsport were appearing regularly, too.
In the days of hot rodding’s infancy, there were a lot of ways—and places—to go fast if you lived in Southern California. Top-speed runs at the desert dry lakes had been going on since before World War II; drag racing was beginning to boom for those whose speed needs could be contained in a quarter-mile; and oval tracks flourished throughout the area, drawing everything from rough-and-tumble jalopies to nitro-fed midgets.
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 first one was held in 1950 at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, but later shows were staged at the art deco palace that was the Pan Pacific Auditorium. Hot rods, Bonneville race cars, drag racers and custom cars straight from the pages of Petersen’s magazines made up a big portion of these Motorama shows, but they also included new cars, antiques, motorcycles and classics from the ’30s and ’40s.