Expensive Vehicles

Oh how the times have changed. You can waltz into a Chevrolet or Ford dealer these days, buy yourself a four banger equipped Camaro or Mustang and give the 1995 Kenny Brown 320x all it would handle in basically any setting. The Brown 320X is going to sound better, get more attention, and garner more smiles than a stock four banger modern pony car, but we’re not sure it would perform better. 1995 was the era when 320hp was “enough” for a lot of people, in 2021 mini-vans have that almost by accident. This was as normal a tuner car as one could have ever expected to buy in 1995. Suspension tweaked. New and larger wheels/tires/brakes, engine has GT40 heads, intake, revised camshaft, etc. No blower, no craziness, just pretty straight forward stuff that most guys did on their own after any number of years. You simply got to skip father time and pay up front for the additional horsepower. The OZ wheels have not aged all that gracefully but other than that this is a car we’d love to drive, ri

On this episode of the NHRA Insider podcast, Brian Lohnes is joined by Rob Flynn and Erica Enders to talk about the incredible seasons both of them are having. For Rob Flynn, tuning the dragster of Mike Salinas has been an experience in measured aggression. The Scrappers team has four wins already this year and there’s no sign that they’ll be slowing down to let someone take them off the perch they are on now, leading the top fuel points. Flynn talks about the team, the approach, another successful weekend in Norwalk, and what the upcoming Western Swing means for him and all of his guys. Erica Enders has five wins in eight races and is on pace to smash her personal best record for a season which was 9 wins in 2015. Erica talks candidly about a number of subjects from attitude to staging, to the sometimes prickly nature of head-to-head competition. Lots of insight into the cars, the career-building moments, and the state of the class in 2022. The Insider will be on a one-week hiatus

We tend to stick onto the Redline Rebuild series videos like glue around here. But this time? To be totally honest, we weren’t really THAT into the 2-bbl 283 rebuild in-depth but we sure wanted to see the end product, which we have for you below. No, we have nothing against small block Chevy engines, that’s for sure, but it doesn’t strike us as compelling (on a granular basis) as the straight eights, Mini engines, and other weirdo stuff they have done in the past. In some sense, if you have seen one SBC you have seen them all, right? This said, the payoff video for the 283 is brilliant and like all of these, a feat of really interesting film making. It has to be pure tedium to create these films bolt by bolt and nut by nut. As the engine “takes itself apart” in a seemingly uninterrupted and smooth fashion that’s got to represent hours and hours of work. Perhaps there is an element of cool in the sense that this engine got a small roller camshaft and that’s about it. Factory intake, e

(By Tom Lohnes) –  A few days ago, Chevrolet released teaser photos of their newest generation of their midsize Colorado pickup truck and its newest iteration of the ZR2 off-road version, which is meant to be much more serious than the current truck. Cool! Starting with basics, the current-gen Colorado has been around since 2015 and has remained pretty much at the top of it’s class as far as midsize trucks go. Powered by a naturally aspirated 4-cylinder, a naturally-aspirated V6, or a 4-cylinder turbodiesel, the Colorado is a very capable and rugged little truck in Z71 and ZR2 forms. But, it is definitely time for a new one, because the trucks’ very period-correct looks and plastic fantastic interior really do not cut it in the 2022 market. So, there’s a new one on the way. This new one is expected to be heavily inspired by the newest generation of Ford Ranger, with the same independent front suspension and solid rear excel setup. Under the hood of all of them should be a 2.7-liter

(By Tom Lohnes) –  About 10 years ago, BMW teased us with what looked like the return of the legendary 3.0 CSL, but it never came to be. The modern concept car carried all of the beautiful looks from the classic, but packed more modern features and luxuries into the chassis of the then-current M4. Since then, there have been countless rumors and false hopes, but a few days ago some spy shots of a mysteriously camo-ed 2-door BMW surfaced. Well, it appears that the return is legit this time. BMW confirmed that at least three new M cars would debut in 2022. So far, the M3 Touring has debuted, and the new M2 is confirmed for a debut in a month or so. Well, BMW M also confirmed that their third new product would be something special, so it all starts to add up. Based on the current G82 BMW M4, the 3.0 CSL will use the mighty S58 twin-turbo inline-6 that is in the competition model, and it should have a tune that cranks horsepower up to about 600 and torque should rise to about 550. Power i

If you love old equipment you will really love this film called “This Town Sure Has Changed” and it features Allis Chalmers equipment doing everything from building roads to harvesting wheat and even running as alternative fuel vehicles. Seriously, the very first fuel cell powered vehicle in the world was an Allis Chalmers tractor and you can see it plodding along here. Equipment, much like many things on Earth has changed over the decades, specifically how people buy it. Unlike the wide open decades of the 1950s and 1960s, there has been scads of consolidation out there which means that there has been a lot of brands which were once proud and are now nothing. Many brands are owned by the same few companies that sell them as different versions of the same thing. One of my fascinations with old equipment is the competitive nature of the companies making the stuff. They were constantly battling for business and their devotees were as into brand loyalty as anyone. Now? It’s largely a sti

(Photos by Victoria Greene) Limpy’s Park After Dark 4 was as epic as everyone expected, with Big Tire, Small Tire, Street, and Daily Driver all competing for big money at Wichita Raceway Park. This No Prep race has some pretty specific rules, and that means real cars tearing up the track with Limpy on the flashlight. Thanks to Victoria Greene, from Auto Focus DFW, we’ve got all kinds of great photos from the race. Check out our second gallery below, and check-in as we’ll have more to post this week as well. CLICK HERE IF YOU MISSED OUR PREVIOUS PHOTOS The rules and info are below the gallery of photos. The post Park After Dark 4 Photos: More Big Tire, Small Tire, Street, And Daily Driver No Prep Drag Racing appeared first on BangShift.com . https://ift.tt/v0d4asZ from BangShift.com https://ift.tt/8ypAQt1

Here’s our final gallery of photos from the NHRA Lucas Oil Drag Racing Series at Maple Grove. Nothing but Stock and Super Stock NHRA cars on and off the track! If you missed our previous galleries, use the link below to see them all. (Words and Photos by Joe Grippo) Well, if you are checking out BangShift.com we can only assume you are a fan of Muscle Cars and surely have heard of or even attended shows like MCACN, MusclePalooza and Muscle Cars at the Strip. But have you ever been to an NHRA Lucas Oil Drag Racing Series event? These regional sportsman only races are chockfull of killer muscle from all decades from the 1950’s right up to the latest factory offerings of the Big Three. The classes showcasing the most Muscle are Stock and Super Stock Eliminator, it’s a literal rolling car show. Here you will find screaming, high-revving small blocks, big block grunt, clutches and high-tech automatics working in concert delivering massive wheel stands and single digit quarter mile et’s in

There are few things with more insane duality than a clutch explosion. Firstly there is the horrifying destruction and potential for people to be cut to ribbons from the shrapnel of flying clutch parts. Secondly there’s the wanton mechanical wreckage from this happening. Whether the floor being cut up, windshields and dashes being blown out, or driveline parts being fragged, is your main concern, it is all bad. The other side of a clutch explosion is the cartoony sounds that it makes with metal clanking and banging and then the weird silence that always follows it. Typically shattering glass does not sound like it does in the cartoons. Typically stuff blowing up does not sound like it does in the cartoons. Well, a clutch explosion sounds like it does in the cartoons and this video is more proof of that. This Volvo may be kind of ratty looking but you can clearly see and hear that the car has been hot rodded. There’s an exhaust stack through the hood, clearly more turbo than stock, an

Red Adair is one of our heroes. He was a fireplug of a man who gained world-wide fame by battling and defeating the world’s worst oil well fires with the company that bore his own name. Before Red came along, the methods used to fight well fires and blow outs were old, deadly, and marginally effective. Adair developed the techniques and equipment to do the job. For decades there was simply no competition. He was a bad ass, even in his upper years. When Saddam Hussein decided to wreck every well and petroleum facility upon his retreat from Kuwait in the early 1990s, experts said that it would be years to have all of the mess capped and the damage stopped. Adair was tasked with coordinating the massive effort to stop the oil disaster as quickly as possible. Those predicted years turned into six months. Done. A John Wayne movie called, “Hellfighters” was made about him. He was fabulously wealthy and was into hot rods and drag boats. They simply don’t build these models anymore. Adair

Every once in a while we run into a video that we start watching and kind go cannot stop. That’s this case with this gem which basically profiles machining in slow motion. It opens with a drill bit doing its work and then you will see all different kinds of machining operations being performed at a literal snails pace. To watch multi-axis machining stations doing their work with multiple tools and all of the features they have, we all revel at the speed in which they work but when you actually take it down to a minute level and see what is happening turn by turn, movement by movement, it actually gets more amazing. For all the dumb junk and stupidity that human beings get themselves wrapped up in, we’re also capable of designing and creating the machines you will see working in the video. That same sentiment can be shared about the cameras used to film this stuff. The humongous numbers of frames per second, the clarity, and the compact size to do the job, and in some ways even more in

I have long loved all the tool restoration videos on YouTube and it seems many of you dig them as well. It is fun seeing something kind of beat up and forlorn get brought back to life, cleaned up, and made to work as designed originally. The more interesting and unique the tools the better, at least for my taste. From old chainsaws to equipment designed to care for a home owner’s property, there’s no end to the stuff people have saved from extinction and then saved from the ravages of time. In this case we are talking about an awesome pneumatic drill made by the Thor company sometime in the 1930s. When you see the thing you’ll know exactly why it was called a “gun drill” and when you see it come apart and go back together you’ll appreciate how robustly things were made over 80 years ago. We wonder where this thing would have been used at that time. Pneumatic tools, we’re guessing were (as they still are) likely used in a factory environment rather than a normal jobsite, right? Would

There have been few larger tragedies in the world of racing than the untimely loss of rally great Colin McRae in 2007. He died in a helicopter crash and it was a crushing blow to his fans and lovers of amazing driving the world over. This man had the gift and in the video below he will demonstrate it heartily for what looks to be news reporter. You will hear McRae explain what he is about to do in the car and than explain what he is doing, while he is doing it! The ease and calm that guys who compete at this level possess are amazing. The transmission in this car is a clutchless sequential and you will both see and hear the trans working as he is constantly working the throttle and the shifter handle. Speaking of that shifter handle, who else when he hits that thing imagines McRae opening up a door for school kids to head off to class? Obviously the team accommodated his wishes for the layout of the cockpit and that’s the way he liked it. Being that he has 10x the ability and smarts t

Thank God for people who just do stuff to entertain themselves or at least do stuff to prove to themselves that they are capable of actually doing it. In this case we’re talking about someone who decided to build what amounts to a 7-cylinder Briggs and Stratton engine by linking all of the engines together and running them off of a common ignition source. Why? Who the heck knows. How much power does it make? 35? 45? 50? Does it matter? We’ve never heard an inline seven flathead run before but that is what this mill actually is at base. Why are three red and three silver? Who the hell knows. There are several vides of this engine running but we think it sounds the best with this common manifold instead of the individual mufflers it can be seen with in other videos. You’ll notice that the flywheel comes loose on the front of the engine by the time it quits running but it does not seem to do damage. Not much more to say about this one other than, awesome! Press play below to see this 7

The remnants of the long closed Las Vegas Speedrome can still be found on the property of the sprawling motorsports complex known as Las Vegas Motor Speedway and its associated tracks. The place was the last major strip in the Vegas area before the opening of the super complex that hosts NASCAR, NHRA, World Of Outlaws, and on and on and on. While it may have been short on super track cush, it was long on fun and as you can see, people showed up to have a good time. In this video we are at the track with a stick shifted, blown, Corvette competing in the Pro Gas category that would spawn the Super Gas division of NHRA drag racing as it got really, really popular around the country. The cool thing about this deal is that there are not throttle stops and there are cars like this Corvette competing which we kind of fell in love with. The crowd can be seen in multiple shots (beers in hand) cheering on their favorite car as they streak down the track. Theses awesome stuff and while Super Gas

Somehow we have long missed the fact that there’s a guy named Dennis Franz on YouTube who builds amazingly cool and highly BangShift approved stuff. Seriously, this guy cranks out scratch built engines and all kinds of awesome junk and we never knew he existed. That’s why we’re a couple years late on this particular video that shows a 392cc V8 engine that Franz built for a motorcycle project firing up for the first time. He made the whole thing, soup to nuts and from our estimation it looks and sounds freaking awesome. We’ll show you videos of the finished bike tomorrow but there are some things that we do know about the engine you see here. The camshaft was modeled after a Briggs and Stratton flathead cam. He made that from scratch. We assume he made the crank from scratch, and he used Honda 50cc pistons with apparently one cc of stroke less per hole than they would have had in that factory engine. The intake manifold is a beautiful thing to check out and honestly every inch of what

Springfield, Illinois is home to the “Springfield Mile”, a virtual paradise for anyone who like dirt track racing. Why? They advertise this place as the fastest dirt mile in the world and since there really aren’t all that many left, who are we to argue? The greatness of the place becomes immediately apparent when you start watching in-car videos of drivers attacking it. Whether we’re talking late model stock car stuff, or open wheeler action, the near endless slides around the corners are fantastic and the long straights provide more running room than anywhere else we have ever seen. In this video we’re riding with Shane Cockrum in his USAC Silver Crown 360ci Sprint car during a practice session at the track. The video is a couple minutes long and we were entertained for every second. Being that it is practice you’ll see Cockrum try multiple different lines through the corners and experiment with entry speeds and stuff like that. We still cannot get over how long the thing stays side

(Photos by Victoria Greene) Limpy’s Park After Dark 4 was as epic as everyone expected, with Big Tire, Small Tire, Street, and Daily Driver all competing for big money at Wichita Raceway Park. This No Prep race has some pretty specific rules, and that means real cars tearing up the track with Limpy on the flashlight. Thanks to Victoria Greene, from Auto Focus DFW, we’ve got all kinds of great photos from the race. Check out our first gallery below, and check-in as we’ll have more to post this week as well. Here are the rules and info. The post Park After Dark 4 Photos: Big Tire, Small Tire, Street, And Daily Driver No Prep Drag Racing appeared first on BangShift.com . https://ift.tt/gfFcKMo from BangShift.com https://ift.tt/bTXpmQc

Here’s our seventh gallery of photos from the NHRA Lucas Oil Drag Racing Series at Maple Grove. Nothing but Stock and Super Stock NHRA cars on and off the track! If you missed our previous galleries, use the link below to see them all. (Words and Photos by Joe Grippo) Well, if you are checking out BangShift.com we can only assume you are a fan of Muscle Cars and surely have heard of or even attended shows like MCACN, MusclePalooza and Muscle Cars at the Strip. But have you ever been to an NHRA Lucas Oil Drag Racing Series event? These regional sportsman only races are chockfull of killer muscle from all decades from the 1950’s right up to the latest factory offerings of the Big Three. The classes showcasing the most Muscle are Stock and Super Stock Eliminator, it’s a literal rolling car show. Here you will find screaming, high-revving small blocks, big block grunt, clutches and high-tech automatics working in concert delivering massive wheel stands and single digit quarter mile et’s i

More than 20 minutes of video from 1971 profiling the epic and incredibly profitable rivalry between Don “The Snake” Prudhomme and Tom “The Mongoose” McEwen, as bankrolled by Hot Wheels. The pair famously traversed the country, racing multiple times per week in match race action. They also hit the major NHRA and AHRA events of the day, but their bread was buttered on the match race circuit. At one point in the video, Prudhomme claims to be making more than $100,000 a year…in 1971. That was stratospheric money for the time. The footage is bad ass, the story is all-time, and the two men that the film centers around come off as genuine and real as possible. This was long before the days of trumped up reality TV, the story is honest and unflinching. Prudhomme is his always honest self, especially when describing the differences between himself and McEwen. The scoffs at the idea of fancy shoes, girls, and parties, instead telling the camera that his money goes toward new blowers, better en

(By Greg Rourke) –  So the other day I was drilling a broken bolt to extract it. I didn’t center punch it correctly, so when I drilled it I drilled partially into the part I was trying to save. I then had to weld up the hole, grind it smooth and then correctly drill and tap a new hole. Meh, I get paid by the hour. Here’s the story of a hole that was misdrilled and caused a bit more of a situation. It seems a drilling contractor was drilling for oil on behalf of Texaco. Their rig was on the water on Lake Peigneur in Louisiana, a short distance from New Iberia where the best hot sauce comes from. Lake Peigneur was a 1300 acre fresh water lake, which had an average depth of about 11 feet. 1000 feet below the water was a salt mine, which had been functioning without incident for 80 years. The drilling crew knew the salt mine was there, and located their rig on what they thought were the proper coordinates. They were wrong. The trouble started when the bit got stuck about 1200 feet down.

The X-series of rocket planes were some of the most important research craft ever built for scientific and military testing. As mentioned, there were several of them with the mightiest and most accomplished being the X-15. This plane flew 199 successful missions and it would have been 200 if the weather had cooperated with the last one. Eight men flew the plane and Albert Scott Crossfield was one of them. He was also one of the primary designers of the machine as well. The video you are going to see below was taking in 1960 during a ground test of the rocket plane. The craft was attached to a fixture in the ground with Crossfield in the cockpit wearing a t-shirt and dress pants. The idea was to start and restart the rocket engine a couple of times but it turned into a whole lot more than that. Due to the failure of a pressure value, a tank full of ammonia exploded in the rear of the plane and that explosion, in-turn, caused the failure of a hydrogen peroxide tank. After that literal h

Just when you thought it was safe to go outside….BAM….cement mixer with the wheels up, hooked to the pulling sled. Who hasn’t thought about the grunt force trauma a rig like this could apply to the ground? While it sucks to get caught behind one of these lumbering giants in traffic because they are slightly slower than a steamroller, they aren’t built for speed. They are built to haul around a big load of concrete and keep that slurry mixed up and happy on the way to a job site. I am reasonably sure that this is an Oshkosh truck. A Detroit Diesel could be powering the thing and the trans is likely an Allison automatic. Blind speculation though.  Obviously there is a big diesel engine in the back making the power and there are some axles that are virtually bomb-proof under it, but after that we’re counting on you to fill us in and we know there’s someone out there in readerville who has driven, wrenched on, or pulled one of these trucks apart. We once talked to a monster truck guy who

It has been intermittent these days on the BangShift Daily Tune-Up front, let’s fix that. I’m commandeering the musical end of the ship today and we’re going right back to my favorite era of car songs, the early 1960s. We’ve featured several songs by the Gary Usher formed surf group The Super Stocks before and they’ve all been pretty great. This one is no exception. It is a quick ditty that features a kid singing about himself. He’s not much good in school or with the ladies, but put him behind the wheel and he’s ready to take on all comers. We knew some guys like that…hell, we may have been guys like that. The history is all a little fuzzy. PRESS PLAY BELOW TO HEAR THE SUPER STOCKS PERFORM THEIR 1963 TUNE “WHEEL MAN” –   The post BangShift Daily Tune Up: Wheel Man – The Super Stocks (1963) appeared first on BangShift.com . https://ift.tt/DyewM8n from BangShift.com https://ift.tt/HEgWNZI

In the realm of cool dyno videos, this one hits on the top end of the “good stuff” meter. We’re not sure that we have ever run a Corvair engine dyno video before but if we have, this one would trump it. The engine you are going to see is a full race unit designed to be run in an NHRA comp eliminator dragster. If we were guessing we’d say like an E-Econo Dragster or somewhere in that range. That class would make the car weight in at about 1100lbs or so as this motor measures out to 190ci. Like all econo-dragster entries this engine would be backed by an automatic transmission. The class limits carbs to a single 4bbl but we’re guessing in this case the pair of two bbls meet that requirement due to the layout of the engine. So this little beast makes 380hp and 250 lb/ft at 9,100 RPM and it sounds like all of that on the video you’ll watch below. The motor has a 14.2:1 compression ratio, runs a roller cam of unlisted size, has highly modified cylinder heads and intake manifold setup by Ra

While we’ve been live streaming each and every race day here at Rocky Mountain Race Week, our friends at 1320Video have been putting in hours and hours to bring you all the cool video interviews, action, excitement, and more! That means you have cool videos that are going to be coming to you daily over the next week. Here are the Day 2 adventures of Rocky Mountain Race Week 2022! Video Description: It’s Day 2 of Rocky Mountain RaceWeek 2022 (1.0) and as usual, we’ve got racers already running into problems on the road. From burnt up transmissions to literal car wrecks.. we’re getting a little taste of everything. Today we found ourselves at Kearney Raceway Park, where 25mph winds blasted us all day, putting racers through yet another hurdle they may not have foreseen. The post 1320 Video Daily Rocky Mountain Race Week Video Recaps: Day 2 Is Here! appeared first on BangShift.com . https://ift.tt/9Ayl7pC from BangShift.com https://ift.tt/1sA3SPi

It is steep, it is narrow, it is very fast, and it is the oldest continuously running motorsports event (aside from war pause) contested on the same course in the world. The first running of the Shelsley Walsh hill climb took place in 1905 on what was essentially a dirt path up a hill. The event was more of a test of what cars were capable of climbing the near 11% grade that defines the course. Over the years the speeds increased, asphalt was added, and from an opening quick time of 70-seconds there are now cars running it quicker than 25 seconds! This video is from the 1990 event and we chose it to feature the race because it has all of the right elements. A great explanation of the course, V8 cars screaming up the hill, wreckage, open wheel mayhem, and more. It is fun to think about the legacy of events like this one. It is rare to be able to claim that an event actually began at what was really the dawn of the automobile and continues today and it is still run at the same place. Th

The Lenco Transmission has been a staple in the brutal world of motorsports since the 1970s. The design has been refined some over the years but the basic mechanical principle remains the same. A series of stacked planetary gear sets get engaged by levers or air as the car accelerates. Contrary to popular belief, these transmissions can be driven on the street. They were hugely popular in the world of pro stock for a couple of decades and they continue to be ever popular in classes like Pro Modified. Racers love them for many reasons but the fact that they are easily rebuilt, very strong, and can be altered in terms of gear ratio easily make ’em perfect for the brutality of the drag strip. In this video we see a Lenco get rebuilt after spending time in a heavy, 2,500hp car. Parts are time lapse, parts have music, but we think this is a cool look into the transmission and into how one gets serviced when it is time for a full freshen up job. Check out the video and let us know what you

Here is the third and final gallery of photos from David Whealon’s recent visit to GALOT for the Lucas Oil Pro Pulling League. Check them out below, along with event results. If you missed our first two galleries then use the link below to check them out too! (Words and photos by David Whealon) The Lucas Oil Pro Pulling League opened their 2022 pulling season with a trip to Benson, NC to the spectacular Galot Motorsports Park pulling track for the annual “Mule City 300” typically on the first weekend in June. The combined classes from the PPL Champions Tour and Silver Series brought nearly 100 All-Stars to compete on our Tarheel topsoil in six awesome classes of pullers from across the nation. On tap were the blown classes of the multi-engine Big River Steel Super Modified Tractors along with the mighty Summit Racing Mini Rod Tractors. A great showing of the mountain motor Pro Modified Four Wheel Drive Trucks was on hand as well to round out the field of ground-pounding muscle. The mo

Video Description: Follow Doug as he gets the trailer back in fighting shape. Ya know, sorta. Spark plugs are changed, oil and tranny fluid, and we test out the bump to make sure we’re ready. Video Description: Come ride with us. El Toro the Mustang, Doug and Red make some passes and really take their time to talk you through what they’re doing to the car and why. Part of our passion here at Motion, beyond the racing itself, is helping people understand racing and the behind the scenes elements that really matter. Doug and his co-pilot Red are in the Rowdy Radial class this year. That means they’re running wide open in an 1/8th mile. After the first night, they’re sitting in 3rd going into day 2 in Nebraska. Rockys Mountain Race Week is a special event. The post The Motion Raceworks Crew Prepares “El Toro” For Competition At Rocky Mountain Race Week appeared first on BangShift.com . https://ift.tt/d7n3LeA from BangShift.com https://ift.tt/tR8uvMg

While we’ve been live streaming each and every race day here at Rocky Mountain Race Week, our friends at 1320Video have been putting in hours and hours to bring you all the cool video interviews, action, excitement, and more! That means you have cool videos that are going to be coming to you daily over the next week. Here are the Day 1 adventures of Rocky Mountain Race Week 2022! Video Description: After an entire year, we are back on Rocky Mountain RaceWeek along with approximately 300 racers and dozens of RoadWeekers. Over the next 6 days, we’ll be driving over a 1,000 miles in 95+ degree weather – documenting these brave racers put their cars and themselves through the ultimate street car test. Subscribe so you don’t miss a single thing along the way! The post 1320 Video Daily Rocky Mountain Race Week Video Recaps: Day 1 Is Here! appeared first on BangShift.com . https://ift.tt/d7n3LeA from BangShift.com https://ift.tt/8WD79Yt

Well this was a bad day at the pulling office! Check out what happens to this Oliver Tractor when the driver hooks to the sled and bounces his way down the course. The thing literally breaks in half. What guys who don’t know lots about tractors tend to forget is the fact that a machine like this does not have a frame per se. Instead it has what’s known as a “component chassis” in the fact that the engine, transmission, and rear axle ARE the frame for the machine. This is the reason that we have seen these videos in the past when a clutch explodes or something, it’ll bust the sucker in two. Here, it seems like the violence of the bouncing action is what causes the thing to fail and disassemble itself. A perfect pull looks almost like a boat planing along the water. You’ll see a tractor build boost, come off the line, and gracefully hover the front end just off the ground. This gives 100% weight transfer to the rear tires that are driving the machine and if the nose is nice and level th

There are certain things that transcend geography and culture and apparently one of those things is watching two huge trucks rip a car in half. Long a staple of monster truck exhibitions and other mud slinging fun-fests, we thought the whole deal was limited to us ugly Americans who revel in such carnage. As the video below proves, there’s gazillions of us across the globe that love this type of deal, even in Ireland. The trucks in question are a pair of Macks. The one closest to the camera is a classic Superliner and it is a pretty neat looking rig. The drivers of these things take some time to get their rhythm down to get maximum pullage destruction going so we’re going to fast forward to the part where things start to get good, or things start to get really bad if you are the Peugeot that is getting pulled limb from limb. It does not appear that the car has been modified or altered for this exhibition of brutal pulling power because the thing pulls apart in a very jagged and aweso

If you like your dyno video action filled with high RPM wailing fury, than this video could be the best thing you have ever seen. The footage shows a 410ci sprint car engine being run on a dyno up to 8,500 RPM over and over again, most likely in simulation of the engine being run at a race. Our recent experiences on a chassis dyno at RPM levels not even close to what you’ll see happening here had us spellbound by the action in this video. When it is your mill sitting there spinning to a lazy five grand it makes you wince a little. We can’t imagine what it would be like to sit on the other side of the glass to see this going on. Despite the fact that the engine will be treated worse when it is actually powering the car, there’s something inherently more nerve wracking to see it working away in that little room. We’re going to try like hell to get to a sprint car race next season. It has been too long since we were last swishing dirt out of our teeth with cheap draft beers at a dirt tra

What you are going to watch is a few clipped together pieces of footage from the early 1960s movie “The War Lover”. Steve McQueen was in it along with several other big names of the day and it was a WWII flick that happened to be filmed in England. In this scene we see people on a viewing stand and a B-17 coming by multiple times at different heights and attack angles but the one thing every angle has in common is the fact that the airplane is so low to the ground you could jump up and touch it…or duck and touch it. This is not a camera trick, this is not some computer rendered thing, this is 100% ace flying skill by the guy on the controls. Making this an even better story is the fact that there were three B-17s used in the making of the movie. All three of them were bought out of an airplane junkyard in Arizona, fixed up, and the flown to England for the making of the movie. Can you imagine the balls it takes to hop into a big old plane like this that has been revived and fly it acr

You have likely seen still photos of a massive wreck at a vintage road racing event and marveled at the destruction and sheer volume of the thing. Well, now you get to see video and not only video but an opening shot from the stands and then footage from everyone racing who had an in-car camera on for the event. This is a true disaster and it is pretty amazing that no one was killed. The initial pileup is one thing but the cars that drive into the pile at full speed are genuinely disturbing. Add into the fact that the stuff on the track ranged from real Shelby Cobras on down and you have a genuine reason to get weepy. The race was the Brian Redman International Challenge and we’re not sure that we have seen another episode in the vintage racing realm that was worse than this one. Sure, calling it the worst wreck in vintage racing history sounds dramatic, but beat it and we’ll change our tune! The worst injury incurred during this series of crashes was a broken arm. That is kind of a m

When we look at the funny cars of today versus the funny cars of twenty years ago, the first thing that people notice is the shape. It isn’t like the cars of the 1990s were showroom stock bodied replicas of their street going namesakes but they certainly have an outwardly different look then today’s cars. The major differences come under the body and they range from the huge horsepower that the engines make now to the various safety systems designed to protect drivers during accidents. The insane Norm Wilding funny car crash from the 1995 NHRA Gatornationals is a perfect example of how things used to be. Wilding was the 1990 FIA champion and through the bulk of the 1990s the British native would run a number of NHRA races a year as well as match racing to support his cause. On this run from the Gators in 1995 things go horribly wrong, Wilding gets knocked unconscious early in the run and he is completely out, flopping around inside the cage as the car careens off the walls. There is

We’ve shared their adventures in getting the Bronco ready for Hot Rod Power Tour, but if you missed them you can use the link below. If you have seen them all, then check out the first two days of their actual Power Tour adventure below. The first day on the road was all about just getting to Memphis and then the second day was the incredibly hot first day of Hot Rod Power Tour 2022. With temps in the 100 range, and humidity through the roof, there were a lot of folks feeling the effects of the heat and a lot of muscle cars and hot rods that were having issues going down the road too. In fact, we know of several folks who had to swap out Plan A for Plan B and even some that had to ultimately resort to Plan C. CLICK HERE IF YOU MISSED ANY OF THEIR POWER TOUR PREP VIDEOS Video Description: Our first official day on the tour was kinda hard! MASSIVE THANKS to the Tubbs Automotive family for taking us in! The post Flying Sparks Garage Power Tour Adventures Continue! appeared first o

This is a really interesting video and educational as well. Why? Well, so many cars these days are all wheel drive, but what does that really mean? How AWD is your modern all wheel drive car? Jason Cammisa is going to tell you about the different systems, their effect on handling, and why what you think you are getting, you might not actually be getting. For instance, the idea of being able to send “all the power to one wheel” is a real misnomer in about every modern system out there, no matter what the salesman at the dealer tells you. There are three major styles of AWD systems on the market today and all of them act differently and cause the vehicles they are in to act differently as well. That’s whether you are stuck in the mud or trying to haul ass around corners. The technology here and physics are cool. This is a plainly spoken video that we think you will dig. Not rocket science but also not really well known stuff to most new car buyers. If you are going shopping for a car a

The Ford flathead V8 is iconic for so many reasons. It was the first V8 that was mass produced for the common man and at the time it was created the engine was amazingly innovative. Why? Someone who was not rich could walk into a Ford dealer and leave with 100hp under their foot. That was something the world hadn’t seen, ever. The engine helped to launch the high performance aftermarket, rocket auto-racing into something that normal people could do, and forced all the other car companies to step up their game as well. In this video we learn about the flathead V8 history and all that history is used as context for a great build that engine master Keith Dorton is creating for a customer. The fun part here is that the engine is going into an old truck and the owner both wanted more power and the stock look for an old Ford truck. You are going to see the engine built, the engine tested, and the end result of what one of the country’s great engine builders was able to do. This is also a p

There are few dead drag strips with more mythology surrounding them than Detroit Dragway. Unlike places on the west coast that got famous for match racing and all that other stuff, Detroit Dragway was on the bleeding edge of the factory horsepower and drag racing wars of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The track operated until the later part of the 1990s but by then the magic was largely gone. We’d venture to say that no other track in drag racing history saw more clandestine factory action than Detroit Dragway did over the years. From factory cars dressed as normal runners but actually powered with worked up engines to the very stockers. super stockers, and FX cars that would come to define their brands to a generation of drag racers, Detroit Dragway was the place that they were tested, sorted, and scienced out the most. While this video does not feature any of that stuff, we do get a look at the cars that were racing in the greater Detroit area during the end of the 1980s. Of course,