The year 2006 saw an abbreviated HOT ROD staff. Former Associate Editor Stephen Kim got sick of living in L.A. and left for Texas back in mid-'05, and Matt King left soon after, when Harley-Davidson came a-callin'. That left Freiburger, Kinnan, and Davis as the sole people responsible for creating America's largest performance magazine . But we got through it, and now we're back up to a nearly full staff with the recent hirings of Associate Editor Christopher Campbell and our brand-new Detroit Editor, Bill McGuire.
In the past, when it came time to select our favorite hot rods of the year, each staffer would make an individual Top 10 list, then we'd gather around the conference-room table, see what everybody picked, and start arguing our individual cases. This year, however, it was just Freiburger, Kinnan, and Campbell making the choices. We made the list before McGuire started, and Davis was out indefinitely, so the committee had three members. That means if your favorite car didn't make the list, you have only the three of us to yell at, which we're expecting.
The second-guessing is a given, since this Top 10 list is and always has been brutally subjective. We pick the vehicles that turn us on individually, purely as a matter of our tastes and nobody else's. It's the staff's list of favorites, which is bound to be different from the lists of many other people. The criterion for choosing the cars on the list was simple: they must have appeared in the pages of HOT ROD sometime between the Jan. '06 issue and this one. A car needn't have had a complete, six-page feature to be considered, either. We chose cars for the Top 10 that had had nothing more than a single photo in Roddin' at Random. If you saw it in HOT ROD, it was eligible for the list.
So, with the explanations and excuses out of the way, here, in no particular order, is HOT ROD's Top 10 for 2006.
Jay Brown * 1969 Ford Mustang Mach 1 * January issue
We felt obligated to pick a car from the landmark, first-ever Drag Week(TM) event, and while Carl Scott's winning Nova would be the obvious choice, we had to go more with the style of car that we yearn to own ourselves and the type we'd like to see exemplify the cars of Drag Week(TM). Of all the stellar entries, our pick went to Jay Brown's Mach with its combination of not-a-Chevy appeal and FE power. This thing looks like an everyday musclecar and runs reliable mid-10s on motor. It looks the part, and it acts the part. If we gave style points in drag racing, this car would have taken them all at Drag Week(TM). -David Freiburger
Kurt Urban/Wheel To Wheel * 1972 Chevrolet Nova * November issue
It's no secret I'm bent on beaters. The single fact that people will scream, "How does that junk make it in the Top 10?!" makes me want to put it there. And even though crusty street racers are nothing new, this competitor in HOT ROD's Pump Gas Drags(TM) and upcoming Drag Week(TM) events has plenty new: like a 402ci Gen III small-block stuffed with two new Rotrex superchargers for 1,160 hp that's all tucked under the hood. It's tucked everywhere else, too, with ingenious packaging of the intercoolers and dual fuel systems for total driveability and anytime power. It's just cool. The bosses at Wheel To Wheel want to paint it. We say no. -David Freiburger
Don Stellhorn * 1965 Pontiac GTO * December issue
How good was the first car you ever built? And when we say built, we mean fabricated nearly from scratch. After totaling his '64 GTO on a road course, Don decided that with nothing to lose, he might as well build his dream car--and eliminate compromises along the way. He literally built nearly the entire GTO from scratch, keeping only the roof and some repro quarter-panels and draping them on a full-tube chassis designed for road racing. Yes, it's a full-on race car with not even a hint of streetability, and the flares, wing, and some other parts of the car verge on being over the top, but the look says "Get out of my way," and the bite backs up the bark. This is, in our opinion, the baddest-looking GTO ever built, and we mean that in a good way. -Christopher Campbell
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