Hot rod

Hot rods are cars which have been customized for performance, and/or appearance. The fact is, nobody knows for sure the origin of the term "hot rod". The best explanation is that the term is a contraction of "hot roadster", meaning a roadster that was modified to go fast. Open roadsters were the cars of choice to modify because they were light. "A "Hot Rod" also refers to the cam inside the engine or other engine modifications. It was adopted as the name of a car that had been "hopped up" by modifying the cam to achieve higher performance. The term seems first to have appeared in the late 1930s, when kids from southern California would race their modified cars on the vast, empty dry lake beds northeast of Los Angeles. The term became popular during and after World War II, particularly in California, originally meaning an old car (most often a Ford, typically a Model T, Model A, or a 1932 to 1934 Ford Model B or Ford V-8) which had been modified by reducing weight (sometimes modifying the body by removing roof, hood, bumpers, windshield and/or fenders), lowering it, modifying, tuning, or replacing the engine to give more power, and changing the wheels and tires to improve traction and handling. Such modifications were considered to improve the appearance as well; often the car was also given a distinctive paint job.Hot Rod was sometimes a term used in the 1950s and 1960s as a derogatory term for any car that did not fit into the mainstream. As hot rodding became more popular in the 1950s, magazines and associations catering to "street rodders" were started. Hot rodders including Wally Parks created the National Hot Rod Association NHRA to bring racing off the streets and onto the tracks. The annual California Hot Rod Reunion and National Hot Rod Reunion are held to honor pioneers in the sport. The Wally Parks NHRA Motorsports Museum houses the roots of hot rodding. Nowadays people who own hot rods keep them clean and try to make them noticeable. Those who work according to the original idea of cheap, fast and no frills are often called rat rods. There are many magazines that feature real hot rods, including The Rodders Journal. Commercial magazines include Hot Rod Magazine, Street Rodder, and Popular Hot Rodding. There are also television shows such as My Classic Car, and Horsepower TV. Hot rods are part of American culture, although there is growing controversy within the automotive hobby over an increasing trend towards the acquisition and irreversible modification of surviving historic - some even very rare - vehicles rather than the traditional hot rodding concept of the salvage and remanufacture of reusable junked parts.

Author Tom Wolfe was one of the first to recognise the importance of hot rodding in popular culture and brought it to mainstream attention in his book The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.