Randy Johnson's been around the block more than once. He's been modifying cars for the last 21 years and building them seriously since the mid- '90s. Both his decidedly different Camaros wound up on the pages of Car Craft. Lucky lad, he is. But luck had nothing to do with the prescience and the forethought that brought those cars to the strict attention of the savvy, experienced eye.

Arguably, 1969 was the pinnacle year of Detroit's craziest car notions. It spawned all manner of what-ifs right there in iron, steel, and bits of aluminum. It was small bodies (small was good, small was light, small was fast) with big, hot motors thumping away under some hopelessly gaudy hood. The 440 Barracuda of that year comes sharply into focus. It was the stuff of endless daydreams, no matter where your support lay. It was your last thought before you let the car mag you shouldn't have been reading slide to the floor right before you put your head to pillow and winked out the light.

"You know you have something special when a Ferrari F430 pulls into the gas station and people pass it by to check out your car," owner and builder Ben Grasso tells us through a huge grin. This is something Ben would have to get used to. In 2007, this car was unveiled at SEMA, and drew a crowd every time the key went to the run position. "It's just something about the X-pipe Boom Tube exhaust and the individual throttle bodies that give it a wild sound," Ben says.

Street SweeperAt $4.27 per gallon for 91 octane premium unleaded, the price to fill up the 20-gallon tank in our '68 Chevelle just climbed well over $80. Yikes! On top of that, the actual distance yielded by that gas with our 496-inch big-block and Turbo 400 trans was only about 150 miles. We'll do the math for you: That's about 7.5 miles per gallon. Something had to give, so we contacted the overdrive specialists at Gear Vendors.

Many of us get into our cars after work and try to wipe our minds clear of the business day. It forms a division between your work and home life, usually a necessity for maintaining sanity. This wasn't the case for Adrienne Janic (or A.J. for short), former co-host of the popular TLC program Overhaulin'. A.J. spent countless hours overseeing the modification and restoration process performed on the show, and realized she had to have a hot rod of her own.

In an ocean of Camaros, Novas, Mustangs, 'Cudas, and all the other common players in the musclecar segment of our hobby, it's easy to get the "been there, seen that" attitude. If something a bit different is a breath of fresh air, then Dan Graham's '71 Pantera is a freaking hurricane. First off, you just don't see many Panteras in the musclecar world. From a U.S. standpoint, they were only offered from '71 to '74 (when Ford dissolved its business relationship with DeTomaso). But it was fun while it lasted. In a strange way, we need to thank Ferrari for the few Panteras we have here in the States. Back in the late 1960s, Ford needed a high-performance GT car to battle Corvette and Ferrari. Ford was already supplying engines to DeTomaso Automobile, and after Ford's failed attempt at buying Ferrari, decided to partner up with DeTomaso to build a new mid-engine GT. The new GT would be based around Ford's "new" 351 Cleveland engine. It was Euro styling stuffed with American muscle.

"Welcome to 1985, buddy," isn't the most tactful line to use when breaking bread with new acquaintances. Nevertheless, the stimulus prompting this sort of gut reaction makes it awfully tough to be diplomatic. Standing before us on the fairgrounds is what looks the part of a quintessential Pro Street poseur. Blower sticking through the hood? Check. Ludicrous tubs? Affirmative. Flamboyantly plumbed nitrous unit? Present and accounted for. The only things missing are a pink paint job and the geezer old enough to pimp a Tri-Five Chevy. Fortunately, as it turns out, our hasty predispositions are totally bunk.

The dirty little secret in the musclecar hobby is that the key to our automotive happiness (to a large extent) resides in the hands of a few elite. After all, they are the ones who set the prices on our favorite cars, right? Go to any major car show or big-time auction, and you'll discover that a regular Joe can no more afford a Hemi Challenger than he can get a date with Scarlett Johansson. So you skulk back to your two-car garage, and your four-door Slant Six, hoping that some day you'll win the lottery or find Aladdin's lamp somewhere.

Street SweeperTo a lot of hot rodders, ourselves included, a performance torque converter is just another check mark to tick on the to-do list of building a fast street car. You bolt it on, and promptly forget about it. There it spins quietly out of sight under your car, while the other high-profile parts like the engine, wheels, and paint get all the attention. If you've done your homework, and had all the right discussions with your engine builder and your torque converter manufacturer, you should be good to go for 90 percent of the street applications.

You don't do a killer car cheap. You can build it yourself, have someone do it for you, or buy something that's already rolling. Regardless of origin, the thing's naturally gonna be expensive. Did we mention turbochargers? Though not necessarily the most expensive power adder in the universe, its plumbing complexity, high-quality materials, and powerful adaptable electronics are mandates. To complete the package, the engine and drivetrain (the management of all that torque) must be able to respond accordingly. If you're stabbing an overkill engine, the rest of the car's systems have to withstand hellish abuse, even for a few seconds of bloodletting. Doing it all in an obscure but memorable suit makes it that much more deadly.

Sometimes you just have a bad year. Just ask Britney Spears or the 2004 New York Yankees. Such misfortune is no stranger to the Big Three either, and in the world of musclecars, every year after 1972 was a bad one. While it's understandable why the OEs had no further need for hot rodders inside their engine shops, it seems like every stylist who knew anything about styling was mysteriously replaced by a new crop of Art Center flunkies. Perhaps they went on to make better use of their talents by pursuing careers in women's handbag design. Who knows what really happened, but some models survived this deplorable era with their dignity intact. With its groovy post-'72 body style, far-out white vinyl top, and righteously smog-compliant (pre-mod) 360 small-block, Randy Gunter's '74 Dart Sport has three irrefutable strikes against it. Nevertheless, these idiosyncrasies make for a surprisingly competent 11-second street machine that's so unorthodox, it's cool.

It was like we had landed on another planet. Mid-December, and the sun-scorched earth was only broken by long stretches of flawless blacktop. A perfect blue background without a cloud in the sky framed everything that we looked at. We had been invited to GM's Desert Proving Grounds (DPG) located in Mesa, Arizona, to test the latest version of Project X. The DPG is the same place that GM's engineers evaluate and develop every GM vehicle before it goes public. Had we found automotive heaven?

Sure, outsourcing sucks for consumers, but it's not like the poor tech support reps in Calcutta actually enjoy talking to disgruntled Windows Vista users. When it comes to communication barriers, it seems like everyone ends up a loser, but that's only true if you've never met Jerry Balko. As the tale goes, the former owner of his '68 Camaro wanted to paint the car in Porsche Red. Unfortunately, his painter didn't speak much English, and the parts guy at the Porsche dealership didn't speak much Spanish. Not knowing that Porsche offered several different shades of red, he painted the car the wrong color. Consequently, the owner lost interest in the Camaro, and that's when Jerry showed up and purchased it for $3,500. Pretty sweet deal, eh?

On January 5, 1965, George Hurst threw a huge PR party around the swimming pool at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California. At that Tuesday bash, Hurst introduced his newest product, a forged aluminum custom wheel. Hurst knew a good promotion when he saw one, and he chose to debut his new wheel in Southern California, the cradle of hot rodding, and the home of Petersen Publishing Company. Petersen had the largest circulation automotive magazines in the country with titles like Hot Rod, Car Craft, and its flagship, Motor Trend, which was the sponsor of the upcoming Riverside 500 NASCAR race.

"I'm sure everyone has their own story of the one they shouldn't have let go. For me, it's the car I owned in college-the one I owned when I met my very understanding wife. It was a bright aqua '72 Monte Carlo with a tired 350 and the three-foot-long fan shroud. Man, I miss that car.

The evolution versus creationism debate is one of those volatile subjects you just shouldn't discuss, but for the sake of debate, we're going to do it anyway. What prompts such dialogue in a car magazine is a vehicular specimen that transforms what is typically an either-or proposition into a harmonious coexistence of both beliefs. A front-engine, Buick-powered Corvair that runs 10s and rides on a G-body chassis doesn't just spontaneously materialize by itself. The ingenuity of its craftsmanship and the diversity of its gene pool most certainly required an omnipotent creator. Nevertheless, had the lineage of rear-engine Chevys not gone sterile, it may have evolved into something that bears an uncanny resemblance to Larry Bell's '67 Corvair. It's a fascinating convergence of diametrically divergent ideologies, but when it comes to cars, two schools of thought are better than one.

The mind reels. It wasn't too long ago a Camaro like this wouldn't get a passing glance. Road kill was more interesting. No matter that the car was clean, it was just flat undesirable; not among the hallowed. Not cool. Had to have that shiny side up. Had to have the right owner.

The evolution versus creationism debate is one of those volatile subjects you just shouldn't discuss, but for the sake of debate, we're going to do it anyway. What prompts such dialogue in a car magazine is a vehicular specimen that transforms what is typically an either-or proposition into a harmonious coexistence of both beliefs. A front-engine, Buick-powered Corvair that runs 10s and rides on a G-body chassis doesn't just spontaneously materialize by itself. The ingenuity of its craftsmanship and the diversity of its gene pool most certainly required an omnipotent creator. Nevertheless, had the lineage of rear-engine Chevys not gone sterile, it may have evolved into something that bears an uncanny resemblance to Larry Bell's '67 Corvair. It's a fascinating convergence of diametrically divergent ideologies, but when it comes to cars, two schools of thought are better than one.

Some chump just dished out $752,467 for a freakin' baseball. This particular ball happens to represent Barry Bonds' record-breaking 756th home run, but nonetheless, it's physically identical to any official MLB game ball available at your local sporting goods store for $13. Unfortunately, with Hemi 'Cudas selling for as much as $3 million these days, it's questionable whether or not hot rodders are any wiser. Although the figures aren't always so preposterous, our hobby's chump population isn't lacking, either. Sure, cars like Hemi-powered Mopars and SS Chevys offer some enhanced mechanical bits over their lesser platform counterparts, but what their enormous price premiums really buy is mystique. If the price of mystique is what's driving up the cost of musclecars, then thank goodness for guys like Bob Davis. His car isn't a GTO. It just shares 99 percent of its parts with one, and is much faster than any comparable Goat built on a similar budget.

'70 Nova SnowballedWhen 17-year-old Colin Russ, of Houston, Texas, bought his first project car, he thought it would be simple to work on with his dad, but it didn't happen that way. The good news was that the '70 Nova only set him back $800. Colin explained the bad news: "when we started the teardown, we realized we had a whole lot more to do than just replace the interior and stick in a new engine. we had the car completely blasted, and we found that it was in much rougher shape than we thought." It required a new floor pan, trunk pan, and the mini-tubs already on it were done badly and had to be replaced. The ex-drag car also had a fiberglass front end, so the pair decided to replace that with sheetmetal as well. originally, the plan was to restore the car, but Colin stumbled onto Pro-Touring.com, and the project took a 180-degree turn. Colin says, "we now want it to handle better than a new sports car, but still have the vintage feel. we haven't decided on the chassis yet. It's between the art Morrison Max-G chassis and a full dSe setup, but either way, the idea is for the car to handle like it's on rails." He also assured us that this Nova isn't going to be a garage queen and will see plenty of action on the road. we're holding him to it!

1973 Laguna"I just had to make this car red. It's an homage to the Hawaiian Tropic sponsored cup car driven by Mel Tillis and Terry Bradshaw in the movie Cannonball Run, but that's where the similarities end. This car has a high-end Autobahn influence for going coast-to-coast fast and in style."

From the 1950s through the late 1960s, top executives at Chrysler, Ford, and GM commissioned their respective design studios to create custom rides for their personal transportation. One of those executives was Bill Mitchell, who had come to power in 1958 as Vice President of General Motors Design Staff. Mitchell had replaced the legendary Harley Earl and was instrumental in the fresh new look of GM products throughout the 1960s.

Everyone has their own take on the same thing. One man's erotica is another man's ennui. What's cool to us may not be cool to you. Ron DeRaad's Ford-powered Camaro could well be the epitome of this paradox. It wasn't too long ago when the entirety of hot rodding was based on the almighty engine swap, you know, like putting a Chevy motor in the engine compartment of a Ford, for instance. We're thinking heavy about the Fox-body Mustang Vinnie "The Hitman" Kung defiled with a Chevy LS motor in the pages of this mag just last year. Love it or hate, you got to admire the cheek it took to even think about it.

"Rosebud ..." The last, enigmatic gasp of Orson Wells' character, Kane, in the famous 1941 classic Citizen Kane is the subject of much lofty debate in cinema classes worldwide, but it also provides a timely lesson here. In the movie-a thinly disguised biography of publishing mogul William Randolph Hearst-Kane's dying thoughts jolt to the lost innocence of his youth, and the pure joy of an old toy sled burning in a huge fire in his mansion's fireplace. In the movie, Kane has achieved wealth and greatness, but at the expense of his humanity. In the final moments of life, Kane grasps for purity-but it's too late.

Richard Evans was destined to be become a gearhead. He learned to drive in his parents' '69 Mach I Mustang with a 351 under the hood and a four-speed trans, so he had an early appreciation for American muscle. "My mom would take me out to practice driving and tell me it was better to spin the tires than to let the car stall," says Richard. "When we got back home, my dad would show me the ropes on maintenance and performance." Add to the mix an older brother with a slick '67 'Stang, and it's easy to see why Richard is where he's at.