Hot Rod's Top10 Cars of 2007

[Ed Blown Vert]

Hot Rod's Top10 Cars of 2007
Here's how the HOT ROD Top 10 works: Each staff member flips through every page of every issue in 2007, from January through December, and makes a list of their favorite vehicles found in those issues. It can be any type of vehicle whatsoever, and there are no criteria on choosing a car for the Top 10 other than that it floats that staffer's boat. Race car, street car, concept car, truck, bike, van, SUV . . . whatever. If they think it's cool, it goes on their list. Then we put all the lists together and see which vehicles got the most votes. The more votes a car gets, the higher on the list it goes. Inevitably the list ends up having 20 or 30 cars on it, so we all have to gather together and fight it out to pare the number down to 10. That's when it gets fun.
So here they are: Hot Rod's Top 10 for 2007. Some readers will no doubt holler and scream that we left their favorite vehicle off the list, and that's fine-let us hear it. If you can keep the profanities to a minimum, we might even publish your letter.
Jon Huber
'79 Ford Mustang
January Issue
In this era of wicked-fast street 5.0L Mustangs, we're still shocked that very few of them enter our Drag Week(tm) playground. When we saw Jon Huber's '79 Fox pull into Cordova Dragway for the start of the '06 HOT ROD Drag Week(tm), we muttered among ourselves, "Finally, a Mustang." Then Jon started it, and the jig was up. There was no 5.0L under the hood. Instead, it had a seriously pissed-off 2.8L four-cylinder with an ARCA circle track head, a turbo, and prodigious tuning on the computer. This little thing carried the wheels perfectly straight for 100 feet on every pass, made the drive mostly without issue, and damn near won the Power Adder Small-Block class over cars with way bigger motors. It was the little engine that could, and it made believers out of a lot of folks during that week. It also stirred the souls of the HOT ROD editors who got to watch it scream. -Rob Kinnan
George Lange
'67 Ford Mustang
June Issue
What happens when one of America's top street rod builders gets hold of some late-model sheetmetal . . . say, a '67 Mustang? Some serious genre bending, that's what. Bobby Alloway's rods have won the Ridler Award, the AMBR, and Street Rod of the Year. The Mustang he built for George Lange wears a '60s ponycar skin, but its flavor is high-dollar luxury street rod. The interior is voluptuous in blue and white leather, while the exterior has been carefully smoothed, contoured, and accentuated. An Art Morrison Max-G chassis replaces the original unit floorpan, while the powerplant is a 4.6 topped with Ford GT heads, twin turbos, intercoolers, and throttle bodies, all polished to a fare-thee-well. And there's custom billet all over the place, including the subtly restyled lamp bezels and fuel filler. So what does it all mean? Who can say, but we know we can expect more musclecar-era cars done to the hilt in maximum street rod style, further blurring the traditional boundaries between "street rod" and "street machine." And what does it matter? Those are just labels anyway. Either way it's a hot rod, and this one was one of the Top 10 for 2007. -Bill McGuire
Year One
'77 Pontiac
Trans Am
August Issue
MTV viewers named the '77 Trans Am from the original Smokey and the Bandit as the most awesome car ever, which is no surprise. The second-gen TAs with their garish screaming-chicken hood stickers have morphed from '70s gold-chain kitsch to completely bitchin', and the price tags have risen along with that transformation. As a company founded on the creation of restoration parts for Trans Ams (albeit the '69 model), Year One knew it had to get in on the frenzy, so it created a brand-new '77 Trans Am that you can buy. Burt Reynolds even approves. The company kept the quintessential TA look, but upped the ante on everything inside, outside, and underneath to bring it to modern, high-tech standards. And if you want one all it takes is a big check and the ability to decide between one of three build levels. Get yours today. -Rob Kinnan
Jeff Mann
'57 Chevy
April Issue
We never tire of tales of resolute persistence in the face of adversity and continual destruction in finishing a car in the manner that it was originally envisioned. Jeff Mann's '57 certainly earned its feature title, "Dare to be Difficult," as it's taken him down a twisted and expensive path for the last 22 years, uncovering every single issue that could arise from asking a blown 392 Hemi to make 800-plus horsepower reliably. Expensive? You bet. Jeff tells us, "I could have had five 572ci big-block crate motors for what it cost me to put the Hemi in this car, but that's money well spent." In this case, we agree. -Christopher Campbell
Robert Wood
'35 Chevy Modified
March Issue
It's an old race car body slapped on a dirt Modified chassis, the engine is a me-too small-block Chevy that doesn't make a ton of power, and there are some things about the car that don't thrill us that much, but that's not what Robert's Dare to Be Different ride is about. This car is 100 percent "kiss my you-know-what" attitude and miles of rubber, and it looks like nothing else on the street. It was one of eight vehicles included in the March issue's big "Dare to Be Different" section, and it got more reader response than any car HOT ROD featured for the year. The kicker, and one of the reasons it held firm in our Top Ten voting (and nearly became HOT ROD of the Year), is that none of those responses were negative. People just flat dig this car. We hope it inspires a trend. Not necessarily the huge-tire deal, but the mindset of building a street car using a circle track parts catalog. Look into it; you'll be surprised what's out there for the roundy-round crowd. -Rob Kinnan
Darren Tedder
'71 Plymouth 'Cuda
August Issue
Darren's awesome '71 'Cuda is not only a 1,000hp street-driven car capable of 8-second quarter-miles, but it's also antiseptically clean. The three-pronged combination of show-car shine, street-driving capability, and dragstrip nastiness is an exceedingly rare one, but Darren's Plymouth hits it, hard, on all three points. Darren brought the car out to play at the '06 Pump Gas Drags(tm) and posted consistent 8.90s with a best of 8.914 at 153.77. He nearly won. Word is he's building an E85-powered Hemi for the '07 HOT ROD Drag Week(tm). If that's true, this monster will also prove its mettle over 1,000-plus miles of public road. And that, folks, is one fantastic hot rod. -Christopher Campbell
Rob Freyvogel
'63 Pontiac Tempest
November Issue
Sometimes it's easy to get caught up in all the CAD-inspired, CNC-machined wonderment of contemporary automotive technology and lose track of what hot rodding is really about: having fun with cars, exercising your own skills and creativity, and leaving long black marks all over everything. Cars like Rob Freyvogel's '63 Tempest bring it back home for us again. Using parts he scrounged from eBay and swap meets, Rob made huge power from a big-block Chevy running E98 ethanol fuel. The key pieces are a pair of remote-mounted turbos borrowed from a Cummins diesel application and a trunk-mounted charge cooler. But while the approach is low-buck, it is by no means low-tech-Rob also cooked up a home-brewed EFI system. The best result at the track so far is 9.86 at 149 mph. Just to have a little fun, Rob cloaked all this homebuilt tricknology in an oxidized red paint job and a set of ashtray hubcaps-and to complete the scam, the engine is painted Pontiac blue and wears a 326 air cleaner. So as far as you know, this is just another derelict '63 Tempest shambling down the street . . . that is, until Rob stands on the throttle and lays down some big, black stripes.-Bill McGuire
Dale Earnhardt, Jr.
'70 Chevy Camaro
December Issue
Dale Earnhardt, Jr., needs no introduction, and neither does Detroit Speed & Engineering. Put the two together and you know the result is going to be top-notch. But man, we didn't know the Camaro they conspired to build would be this nice. It would be easy to slap a Pro Touring label on this car, and there certainly is no shortage of Pro Touring Camaros built to an extreme level, but Dale's car is more our personal speed. Though the accouterments blur the line a little, the inspiration was more vintage Trans-Am than current Pro Touring, and instead of going straight for four-digit horsepower numbers and over-the-top induction plumbing like most people do, this car has a simple, 450-ish- horsepower GM crate motor with a carburetor. That's because Dale plans on driving the car hard. And unlike with so many "finished" cars that the owner is scared to get dirty, Detroit Speed handed the keys over to Dale before we shot the car, and he is driving the wheels off it right now. -Rob Kinnan
Ross and Beth Myers
'36 Ford
July Issue
When Troy Trepanier of Rad Rides by Troy went after this year's Ridler Award at the Detroit Autorama, he didn't just turn the conventional thinking about show cars upside down. He also turned it inside out. The car he designed and built for Ross and Beth Myers was a '36 Ford three-window coupe on the outside and a free-form expressionist sculpture on the inside. Troy carefully redesigned every bit of the undercarriage, from the Ford FE engine's oil pan to the stylized differential housing and control arms. So what Troy built was essentially a car within a car. Now it was as though the competition faced not one but two originally designed, exquisitely constructed Troy cars occupying the same physical space on the show floor. Beating one Troy car is difficult enough; how in the world can you ever beat two? But then that is what the Ridler Award is about: not just raising the bar, but periodically redrawing the boundaries. "There is no point going to this level of effort just to build a car like some other car," Troy says of his first Ridler winner. "You have to give people something new." -Bill McGuire
'69 Plymouth Barracuda
February Issue
It's called Blowfish and it is the second Rad Rides car on this year's Top 10 list. That one shop could build two Top 10 cars is quite remarkable, but when you consider that those two cars could not be further apart in concept, and that the builder is not known for specializing in either genre, you get a whole new appreciation for the Rad Rides crew and especially their leader, Troy Trepanier. Troy has long been known for building high-end street machines and Dare to Be Different kinds of cars, and a street rod has slipped out of Rad Rides' doors every now and then, but nothing even remotely approaching the level of a Ridler Award winner. That changed this year. Likewise, nobody has asked Troy to build a legit race car from scratch, but when frequent customer George Poteet wanted to run 300 mph on the Salt, he called on Troy and his boys.
The result was a combination of many different styles of car building that all work seamlessly together. The body style and evil 1,200hp, turbocharged four-cylinder engine made it a Dare to Be Different car; the attention to detail was as good or better than nearly anything you'll find at an indoor car show; the level of fabrication rivals a modern Formula 1 car; and, oh yeah, it ran 255.412 mph at Bonneville on a partial pass, setting the record in F/Blown Fuel Competition Coupe in 2006. All that adds up to the most incredible hot rod of the year. -Rob Kinnan

Photo Gallery: The Top10 Cars of 2007 and Hot Rod of the Year - Hot Rod Magazine



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