Should have a billet aluminum cover

I recently picked up a copy of this magazine out of curiosity about street rods. I'm familiar with muscle cars, and to a lesser extent, imports, but I decided to take a look at this magazine to see what's going on in the world of street rods, and learn some more details of how the typical street rod is built.

The biggest thing that struck me about the magazine was that it seems to cover a lot of show and not much go. They had a lot of details on the featured cars' looks, but they did not mention any horsepower numbers except for one dyno article. Likewise, there was no mention of drag racing except for one article covering an event for dragsters campaigned in the '60s, like the legendary Winged Express. I don't think any of the cars in the feature articles had ever staged on a drag strip or been on a dyno pull. Different strokes for different folks, but this really doesn't seem to be much of a performance oriented magazine.

Now, for some coverage of the individual features. It starts with an editor's column, which in this case was about... chocolate. What does this have to do with cars? I don't really know, and while it was apparently meant to be funny, I didn't find it all that entertaining. They had a column after that dedicated to various news snippets, and then it's the letters to the editor. Nothing remarkable there, although I didn't notice them printing too many of the "Your magazine sucks!" letters that I've seen turn up in other car magazines. Whether they omit them or have a more mature audience, I don't know. They did write detailed replies to many of the letters.

This brings us to the articles themselves - all 20 of them. It's a big magazine, all right. They have articles on six feature cars, one a rod built in the '60s and the others contemporary efforts. Except for the '60s rod, which was powered by an aluminum Chrysler six, they all featured Chevy V8 power, which seemed to be a bit less variety than most non-marque muscle car magazines have for their feature cars. They did show some pictures of non-feature cars with other powertrains, including an Ardun Hemi, so they seem to have some room for other powertrains. The cars were all finished to very high standards; I can appreciate the craftsmanship that went into them even if I think the powertrains were often cliched. They also featured several articles on events, and a handful of tech articles - one covered Flathead Ford ignitions, one was about do it yourself fiberglass, and the other two were on suspension.

Then there's the remaining columns. These include cars that don't get full on articles, two readers' question and answer columns (one on mechanicals, one on metalwork and bodywork), and an events calendar.

This magazine might be interesting to its own audience, but I don't think I'm quite the reader they had in mind.