Hot Rodding

Christmas has come and gone, and no Porsche 911 under the tree (mind you, I did accidentally leave out skim milk with the cookies), so I’m left trying to sew a sportscar out of a station wagon. Good news though: I can build it, someone else has the technology.

At least that’s what I keep telling myself as my Subaru WRX wagon hunkers down on Rocket Rally’s All Wheel Drive dyno and begins emitting a whooshing shriek like a banshee caught in a shop-vac. Oh well, warranties are for sissies anyways.

Buying your car “off the rack” never quite results in that perfect personalized fit. The front grille is too plastic, or the alloy wheels are too small and plain, or the suspension is too soft, or for some inexplicable reason you feel the need to festoon the dashboard with dozens of bobbleheads. Manufacturers aim their vehicles at a target market, but usually end up making compromises in order to appeal to the greatest amount of potential customers possible.

Customization is the answer, and tailoring your whip to fit can give great satisfaction in knowing that no-one else out there has exactly the same car as you. Then there’s that certain type of person who just can’t leave well enough alone, and can’t wait to start fiddling with their shiny new machinery and/or potentially breaking things. Who, me?

Think of the phrase “Hot Rod” and the image springs to mind of a chopped-n’-channeled, American-Graffiti-style “deuce coupe”, or a slammed ’57 Chev’ with its supercharger bursting through the hood.

I remember being trackside at Mission Raceway Park for their Friday Night Street Legal Drag Races while a classic Dodge Challenger pulled up to the line, its lumpy idle sounding like a bowling ball in an industrial dryer, and proceeded to light up its slick tires with an enormous burnout, producing a smoky pall that took several hours to fully disperse. Big, bearded dudes with suspenders and tattoos grinned their approval behind wrap-around shades.

Come to think of it, some of them looked a little like Santa in the off-season, although if Santa Claus looks like that in his civvies, next year I’m leaving out a fifth of bourbon and some pork rinds rather than milk and cookies...

Anyway, all that Detroit Iron (racing in what’s appropriately called the Outlaw class), though impressive to look at, was outnumbered by the legions of import and compact domestic cars in the paddocks. Many of the Beards scoffed at the buzzy little front-wheel-drivers as you would your kid brother and his tricycle when you’ve got a BMX, but some of these little pocket rockets are fast. What’s more, many of them are daily-drivers: reliable, fuel-efficient (up to a point) and not quite as prone to release billowing clouds of pollution as their forerunners.

And forerunners are what those big ol’ muscle cars are to the hopped-up Honda crowd. The Bearded Ones may not like to admit it, but the guys in baggy jeans and spiky hair are the spiritual successors of the original hot-rodders. Just because high-revving four-cylinders and ball-bearing turbochargers have replaced Whipple superchargers and four-barrel carburettors doesn’t mean anything’s really changed. Hot Rodding is still what it’s always been about: standing out from the pack by striving to be the fastest, the loudest, the baddest.

Best of all, this is the Golden Age of hot-rodding for both the muscle-car purists and the tech-savvy tuners. The number of specialist manufacturers for the high performance has swelled each year, and today’s tuner has an almost unlimited number of choices. It’s possible to get everything from bolt-on swaybars and a full turbocharger kit for the Honda Accord hand-me-down from Mom, or disc-brake and fuel-injection conversions for the classic Mustang that’s mouldering in the garage.

Luckily, if you’re rightly afraid of the cost incurred if you accidentally break something, there are lots of factory-tuned parts providing the custom tailoring along with that ironclad warranty. For those of us with deep pockets there have always been Mercedes’ AMG or BMW’s M-Division, but now you can get also buy Nismo parts for your Nissan, SPT parts for your Subaru and Mugen for your Honda. No points for guessing what Mazdaspeed parts are good for.

Back to the little Subaru wagon and the final dyno numbers are flickering up on the screen: peak horsepower is right around the level of the mighty Impreza STI, with a nice usable torque band. Not bad, but it’s the additional extra two or three MPG I’ll need to be emphasizing to my cycling-enthusiast wife when the Visa bill comes.