My first car was a Mini, a 1968 Australian-built Mini Deluxe. Its previous owner(s) had added chrome wide wheels, a rorty sports muffler, and a Saas wood-rimmed three-spoke steering wheel, all of which delivered plenty of street cred in the high school parking lot. But the 2021 DBA Mini Remastered Oselli Edition (phew!) is a Mini beyond anything 16-year-old me could have imagined. My Mini packed 38 hp and 52 lb-ft of torque, courtesy of the 998cc version of the BMC A-series four-banger under the hood. The DBA Oselli Edition punches out 125 hp at 6,200 rpm and 113 lb-ft of torque at 4,500 rpm f ..read more

Update 7/1/21: There is now a full product list of GR Heritage parts available for the Toyota 2000 GT, the A70 (MkIII) Supra, and the A80 (MkIV) Supra. The list for the two Supras is nowhere near as long and in depth as the one for the rare ’60s-ea 2000 GT, but more parts will likely be available in time. If you want to check out the parts lists, you can view them on Toyota’s Gazoo Racing site here. There’s also a form to fill out if you want to request a specific part as well as instructions on how to order them.  If you’ve ever owned a classic car that’s no longer in production, then yo ..read more

“The art of building a car knows no color,” said actor/comedian Kevin Hart in an exclusive interview with HOT ROD in anticipation of the new show Kevin Hart’s Muscle Car Crew. His words are true, and that’s a fact I’ve witnessed over my nearly two decades in the industry. Cars bring people of all walks of life together. The shared passion among enthusiasts breaks down perceived differences in age, demographics, and social status. No matter what you look like or where you came from, you can always recognize a cool car and share a conversation with a stranger over it. As a colleague and friend f ..read more

Believe it or not, the 2022 Tesla Model S Plaid’s new steering yoke isn’t the first time an automaker tried to reinvent the steering wheel. Back in the ’60s, Ford’s Mercury brand debuted what it called “wrist-twist steering,” which looked much like the Model S’ yoke and featured many of the same design goals—chiefly improved visibility both outward and of the instrument cluster. Here’s what we thought of Mercury’s Twist-Grip system after a 150-mile test drive back in 1965.—Christian Seabaugh We heard of Mercury working on a new wrist-twist steering idea and we’d gotten several press releases o ..read more

You can only ask this question in the context of a Fast and Furious film: How do you top a ’68 Dodge Charger with a jet engine in the trunk? Easy—a ’68 Charger with a Hellcat in the back seat. How does a Hellcat engine, even one tuned to Demon specification like this one, top a jet engine? Because it’s real. That’s right, kids, the jet engine sticking out the back of the “Ice Charger” in 2017’s Fate of the Furious was just a prop. The car was powered by a Chevy LS3 V-8 pushed back under the dashboard to make room for an all-wheel-drive system. Cool stuff, but the mid-engine Charger is the real ..read more

As the hand struck who-knows o’clock, the online car shopping vortex sucked me in once again. For months I’d been on the hunt, motivated by whimsy as much as need. Instinctually I punched in my search parameters. Image? Has. Color? Green. Transmission? Manual. Price? A Camaro’s convertible top costs more. By that point I was used to miscategorized ads, but this one said “five-speed manual” right up top. The photos confirmed it—a shifter wrapped in a rubber accordion boot stood proud on the floor. Calls were made, dollars were extracted, papers were signed. Next thing I knew, I was cruising hom ..read more

Food is magic. Wait, what? Wasn’t this article supposed to be about a Chevy C10? Bear with us. Food is magic because a skilled chef can take simple ingredients and—with the right application of heat and force—turn them into something entirely different, somehow greater than the basic sum of all those ingredients. Roadkill’s David Freiburger and Mike Finnegan are highly skilled automotive chefs and one of their greatest recipes—the original Muscle Truck, Freiburger’s 1974 Chevy C10—is pure magic. But this wouldn’t be Roadkill if the fleet were in pristine running condition all the time, and the ..read more

“Putting Porsche in the Pink.” That was the headline on a New York Times story published on January 20, 1996, detailing the German marque’s effort to turn around its finances and reinvent the way it had built cars for more than 40 years. As the newspaper pointed out, the company that produced must-have products for the upwardly mobile during the cartoonishly decadent ’80s—in 1986, North American sales exceeded 30,000 units—had reached its last gasp. Antiquated, inefficient manufacturing processes collided head-on with an economic recession and a misjudged, aging product range to result in just ..read more

It’s late 1970. Mazda has been at the rotary engine game for almost a decade, developing the problematic Felix Wankel/NSU design into a formidable, powerful, and futuristic little powerplant. It was the highlight of the forward-looking production 1967 Mazda Cosmo Sport 110S. While beautiful, and interesting, the Cosmo Sport merely (albeit expertly) epitomized the now. The RX500 Concept, which took the stage at the 17th Tokyo Motor Show, envisioned a rotary-powered future straight out of a Syd Mead sketchbook. The RX500’s aesthetic is pure ‘70s sci-fi, with a wrap-around windshield that makes i ..read more

Fifty years after Tom McCahill invented “zero to 60,” it remains the road-test’s benchmark number. Simple to understand, easy to compare, McCahill’s 0-to-60-mph yardstick captured the public’s imagination. Bolstered by frequent use in automotive advertising, nought-to-sixty took on a significance way beyond its true value. Nobody cared about other figures. Forget quarter-mile times, esoteric 45-to-65-mph passing numbers; only top speed gets close to resonating with enthusiasts in the same way. Thomas Jay McCahill’s first road test, on a 1946 Ford, appeared in the February 1946 issue of Mechani ..read more