custom cars through history
The history of customizing cars has been a long evolution from 4 cylinder fords on the salt flats to 1000hp alcohol fueled racers speeding down straight tracks blowing thousands of dollars on a single day’s driving. Along the line of these cars evolution there was a split were some kept on chasing building cars with the most horsepower and others started building trailer queens that only drove to shows and occasional cruise. These cars are built to be speed demons yet barely reach their potential.
The first races at bonneville started officially in 1914 when Teddy Tetzlaff set the land speed record going 141.73 after this there wasn’t much activity until the 1930s which brought out drivers like sir malcolm campbell showed up with his unique style of racing and Ab Jenkins who raced a duesenberg named The Mormon Meteor. These early racers were primarily upper middle class men who built streamlined bodies around Duesenberg and Pierce Arrow powerplants. The body’s were done in two styles highboy lakestars that were modified to lose as much weight as possible and streamliners that are all about aerodynamics.
The introduction of the ford flathead v8 is what revolutionized hot rodding especially with the 32 ford roadster it was in. then came the overhead valve 303 cubic inch rocket 88 old. Which was soon surpassed by the small block chevys and mopars hemis. Most of these early hotrods still ran factory 3 speed transmissions. They also used a large amount of 9in ford rear ends due to the amount of abuse they could handle. The one thing that was not evolving at as fast of a pace was the suspension and steering in these cars there was small changes like ford going from one to two leaf springs or putting different types of coilover shocks to lower the stance or channeling the body.
A Lot of the hot rodding community started splitting around the 1950s due to the increase in people doing custom paint jobs and pinstriping putting all sorts of chrome on the engine and pulling off the trim and leading in the headlights and swapping out the grills. On the other hand you had people keeping true to the tradition and building up the hottest car they could although their attention had drifted from the salt flats to the street and worked on handling and not just their horse power they’re also was a rise in companies building factory cars that had the ability to compete head to head with these hot rods like gullwing mercedes and porsche 356. A Lot of the show side of these cars evolved into the lowriders and lead sleds you see today. The lowriders started in the mid 1960s with the increased availability of hydraulic brakes and the easy customization of x frame chevys. These lowriders had some of the most intricate paint jobs and elaborate use of chrome this style of car was primarily popular in inner cities and with minority communities. A Lot of these early lowriders tore themselves apart due to the frame not being able to handle that much frame flex and those chevys were harder to add supports to or box in the frames on. These lowriders also didn’t pay very much attention to the speed they were going and more on how they looked going there. They also started doing bombers which were 1940s sedans that were custom built in the style of lowriders this came around due to the increased price in other antique cars and the vast availability of these sedans.
There also have been a lot of facets of the culture that i missed due to the time i had to do this article. Some of these are top fuel dragsters, midget racers, mud trucks, formula one just to name a few. Also there is a bunch of novelty racing like barstool, lawn mower etc that most people go to for the laugh instead of being there for the actual competition.
This is a short history of racing and the culture that comes along with it. There is a lot of other aspects of this evolution that were not included in this article due to lack of information time deadlines or my staggering laziness about literature. So i’m going to wrap it up here.
