It's been nine years since Art Morrison experimented with his own project '55 Chevy (Project GT55) at the Goodguys "Street Machine of the Year" competition. For the project he used his own chassis design, and has since assembled and sold 1,000 of the Tri-5 GT Sport chassis. Engineered in 2004 as a groundbreaking "bolt-on" high performance chassis for 1955-57 Chevrolets, Morrison has produced a product that's established a proven reputation for success.

If you're a fan of '50 and '60's automobiles, you recognize their style from a mile away. With fender flares, distinct cone-shaped taillights and lots of chrome, these cars are more than "grocery-getters," they're art. Beyond the eye-catching exteriors, these cars have equally as impressive interiors. From the steering wheel, to the door handles - every inch of these cars are decorated in either an art deco style or the conceptual trend of the '60s. Regardless of how you perceive the styling of the '50s and '60s automobile, it's tough to not recognize the craftsmanship involved in designing, engineering and building these rides.

Maybe if the hacks in Hollywood werent so busy telling everyone how to vote, they might actually make a decent car flick. In a ridiculously obscene era of performance thats spawned 580hp ZL1 Camaros and 650hp Shelby GT 500 Mustangs, the best Tinseltown can come up with are movies in which pitching a car sideways like a hooligan is supposedly a novel concept. Please. Every good ol boy in America has been doing that since he turned 14. And thats with one hand tied behind their backs and the other hand strumming a banjo. On the flip side, back in the day filmmakers had a knack for making something out of nothing.

Smudges on the shifter handle? Yes, sir! Dirt, wood chips, and tiny pebbles embedded in the carpet? You bet! A fresh layer of dust caked on the valve covers? Of course! When the task at hand is making a car look all pretty for photos, stuff like this can drive you nuts, and Randy Robison's '70 Mustang fastback is guilty of all three offenses. It even has a subtle-yet-peculiar wrinkle on the driver-side quarter-panel. For those who value pragmatism over pretentiousness, however, there's an endearing element of authenticity to all these quirks. You see, you'll never find minor blemishes like this in the typical checkbook machine because that would require actually driving the damn thing. In contrast, Randy drives his car often, he drives it hard, and he built it himself on a real working stiff's budget. While pricier g-Machines might flash more bling, this pony stomps them all with a big wallop of track-honed pedigree.

Remember those games in kids' magazines where you try to spot the differences between two pictures? Bob Bertelsen's '71 Camaro would be great for the car guy's version of this game. There's not a body panel on it that hasn't been re-formed, modified, or otherwise massaged, but most of the changes are so subtle, without a stock example sitting next to it, they escape the eye. That exemplifies what Bob does as a car builder. He works with the original design, and without trepidation, crafts it into the vision of how he sees the car in his mind.

Got a car you want the world to see?
Send specs and pix to johnnyhunkins@yahoo.com

They say what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. When it comes to the SEMA show however, nothing could be further from the truth. Every year in early November, the Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) holds its annual trade show in Las Vegas at the Las Vegas Convention Center-the crossroads when it comes to all things performance and automotive aftermarket. Vendors, buyers, and automotive media occupy this jewel in the desert for an entire week, catching up on what's hot for the coming year. To show off their wares, companies entice the best car builders with the most creative chops to display their masterpieces under the spotlight. It is indeed a spectacle like no other, and in spite of SEMA being a trade-only affair, you can't blame us or anyone else for telling the world. Nope, the secrets of SEMA are not stayin' in Vegas!

If you nicked Robert Turner, he'd probably bleed Ford Blue. He can still describe the exact moment the true-blue brand loyalty was seared into his being. "My love for Fords was started by my brother, who's a little bit older than me," Robert says. "I still remember the day he brought home a red '70 Mustang Boss 302. I had dreams of someday buying that car from him. He owned several throughout the years before I was able to drive."

Put down the Xbox controller. Dave Leisinger's '71 Camaro isn't a digital video game creation that you drive in some virtual la-la land with your thumbs. No sir, this thing is the real deal, and with so many complex contours blending harmoniously into one coherent shape, it's almost impossible to comprehend how something like this can be hand-fabricated from real sheetmetal. That wow factor permeates well beneath the surface, as the F-body's gracefully flowing skin conceals some seriously heavy-hitting hardware. Fire the beast up, and it goes thumpity-thump like only a 500ci, mega-compression, Q16-burning, Warren Johnson-built LS small-block can. The foundation for all this madness is a full-frame Art Morrison chassis that boasts aluminum C6 Corvette suspension bits. As one of the wildest street machines in existence, Dave's Camaro just kicked the Pro Touring bar way up, and the long line of copycats that will inevitably attempt to emulate its excellence starts right here.

Chevrolet

One of the coolest things about PHR’s annual readers’ rides issue (otherwise known as the photo contest issue) is that anybody can get in. In fact, when we announced the photo contest in the Aug. ’12 issue, we promised we’d do our best to print all of them—and that’s exactly what we’re doing. If you sent in photos of your car by our August 1 deadline and provided all the technical stuff we asked for, your car is right here. The only exception is that we’re going to run our PHR ladies in a later issue. (If your car isn’t in here and you sent us an entry, send a short email to john.hunkins@sorc.com with the subject line “Photo Contest,” and we will answer your questions.)

Please don’t sue us for your frostbitten fingers. That’s just the price you have to pay for reading about a car that packs as much cryogenic coolness as Kevin Miller’s ’69 Camaro. Yeah, we know the Velveeta Patrol is going to ticket us for cheesy lines like that, but please bear with us as we try to prove our case. When Kevin says that he built his car, he really means it. We’re talking about some serious custom fabrication, not the typical bolting on of mail-order parts. Using nothing more than his bare hands and a welder, Kevin fabbed his own rollcage, tubular front subframe, rear sway bar, control arms, and chassis bracing. How cool is that? Fabrication skills aside, the dude can flat out drive, too. Going up against the biggest-name shops in the country at PHR’s inaugural Muscle Car of the Year competition last summer, Kevin’s Camaro posted the third-fastest autocross lap average. That’s despite nursing a fragged clutch. So while you might run across a nicer Pro Touring machine, if there’s a cooler car/builder/driver package than Kevin and his Camaro, we’ve yet to find it.

The year was 1976. We were listening to the Bay City Rollers and ABBA—(OK, I was listening to Aerosmith and ZZ Top). The Cold War raged, the Concorde flew commercially for the first time, we had 59-cent-a-gallon gas, Apple Computer was born, the VHS recorder made its debut, the ozone hole was discovered, the first space shuttle was revealed, and Detroit was reeling from the one-two punch of the OPEC oil embargo and new federal safety regulations. It might sound like a throwaway year when compared to benchmarks like 1969 or 1957, but it’s my era, so this month we’re going to belly up to the bar and drink deeply.

Good work, good reputation, and positive press go far in the hot rodding industry; they’re the key components that can make you or break you, and make your shop a household name or an unknown. It can also land you some incredible opportunities to build award-winning cars that push the boundaries of style and performance. All it takes is getting the right call from a guy ready to think big.

Once upon a Camaro, the Pro Touring movement was made up of just a handful of cars that stood out from the street machine crowd. Their purposeful tires, large brakes, and apex-defying suspensions quickly elevated them to holy status as their owners/builders piloted them to insane speeds on closed public roads. The rest of the world watched with awe and envy. Suddenly, that Dobbertin-inspired Pro Streeter in the garage—pie cutters up front and a polished blower through the hood—seemed trite and tired.

It’s called “stealing a shot,” a Hollywood term that means shooting commercial footage without a permit. Technically, anytime you whip out a camera in the L.A. Basin with the intent to publish the results (movie, print, interwebs, whatever) for personal gain, you need a permit.

If the goal was stealth, then we don’t know how well that was really achieved. Mike Ardito of Tri Power Automotive of Libertyville, Illinois, says a “stealth” look was what car owner Pete Krehbiel was shooting for when he originally commissioned Mike and his crew to build this Firebird. Well, the blown ’67 Pontiac showed up on PHR’s radar as big as a B52 bomber with an incredibly aggressive “get out of my way” rearview mirror factor and “see you later” rear end.

Car chicks have it rough. On one hand, they have to deal with egomaniacs stricken with wee-man syndrome refusing to believe that a woman can actually build or drive a car better than they can. On the flip side, there’s no shortage of creepy bald dudes who are too busy ogling them to fully appreciate their wrenching or driving talent. A certain open-wheel-turned-stock-car racer of GoDaddy.com fame comes to mind. Michelle Harvey has been dealing with this kind of nonsense her entire life, so she gets a kick out of sticking it to the boys in her ’68 Camaro. Before anyone gets the wrong idea, the fact that this F-body is owned by a woman has nothing to do with why it’s getting featured in the pages of PHR. To the contrary, it’s a homebuilt, autocross-ripping, big-block–powered g-Machine worthy of the limelight in any arena that just happens to be owned and driven by a woman. And whether you have one X chromosome or two, it’s a muscle car from which everyone can take a few pointers.

If you’re a rogue nation looking for instantaneous street cred, you can’t go wrong with a covert missile program. It’s a time-honored strategy, proven by generations of international tyrants, that instantly puts your shenanigans on the big stage. Similarly, as the Big Three waged war over muscle car supremacy in the ’60s and ’70s, Chrysler never conquered as many subjects as its crosstown rivals, despite kicking out what was arguably the most diverse lineup of extreme performance machines. Not surprisingly, Mopar Nation went rogue by developing a potent yet little-known weapons program of its own. No, we’re not talking about Hemis stomping all comers at Daytona in 1964, or the Elephant motor’s dominance in Top Fuel. To the contrary, the Mopar Missile program of the early ’70s produced a triumvirate of legendary drag machines that dominated NHRA Pro Stock. Now the Missile is back, this time reincarnated as a cutting-edge, Gen III Hemi-powered, IRS-equipped Pro Touring machine that pays homage to its legendary forbear in unexpected ways.

Lots of guys own muscle cars-some are restored, while others are modified to varying degrees. Nevertheless, only a small subset of them are driven enthusiastically. Those that are can usually be found at the dragstrip, where they express vigorous forward motion just 1,320 precious feet at a time-and oftentimes much less than that. But there are a select few guys and girls who choose to live life with their street machines to the fullest extent. During the week, the owners of these rides can be found tooling around town doing all the normal mundane things with their muscle cars. Then on the weekend, it's off to the autocross, road course, dragstrip, or open highway.

Failure is a beautiful thing. As crazy as that sounds, history doesn’t lie. A curious pharmacist whipped up Coke as a cure for headaches, a Kodak engineer accidently invented superglue while designing a plastic gun sight lens, and Play-Doh was originally marketed as a cleaning paste. Granted no one aspires to suck, but sometimes failure can lead to greatness. Jon Clark’s 1968 Plymouth Valiant is a perfect example. Despite packing 528 ci of aluminum big-block fury in a teeny-weeny A-Body—the smallest in fact—Jon insists that the end product is an utter failure. That’s because what was supposed to be a simple, low-buck build got out of hand with a full Pro Touring suspension, a six-speed stick, and paint that’s way too nice for a humble A-Body. While it’s understandable to be disappointed when a finished project car deviates from your original vision, in the walk of Pro Touring machines, it’s one of the best damn failures you’ll ever see.

Extreme machines call for extreme ornamentation, so it’s hardly surprising that muscle cars and wild graphics schemes have peacefully coexisted for decades. Whether it’s a screaming chicken or a pissed-off bumblebee, the most iconic muscle cars of all time have relied on clever graphics for that extra bit of visual pop. Unfortunately, applying graphics can be a touchy proposition. There’s a fine line between boldness and tastelessness, and one wrong move while walking the tightrope is the difference between gloriously reaching the other side or ending up at the bottom of the cliff. To get a fresh take on modern graphics that pay homage to the past, we consulted with the top automotive designers in the business, and had them sketch some cutting-edge ideas that can be applied to any ride. To make things more interesting, we intentionally selected some less-than-mainstream muscle to use as blank canvasses to further reinforce how profoundly a simple graphics scheme can change the entire personality of a car.

Although they don’t carry the stigma of a minivan, four-door sedans don’t get much respect. It could be the styling revision the extra doors cost or perhaps chassis rigidity. We doubt it. At the end of the day, we avoid four-door sedans because they are responsible, sensible things, attributes not normally associated with fun cars. And then there are people like Dick Eytchison, who refuse to play the hand dealt. “This is the fourth Chevelle I’ve built,” Dick says. “The first three were show cars. One’s a driver.

If you happen to be one of the quickest and hardest hitting cornerbacks in the NFL, you can bet when the time comes to build a special ride that it is going to show some serious muscle. DeAngelo Hall of the Washington Redskins had gotten to know the folks over at YearOne during his time with the Atlanta Falcons, and when the idea for this radical ’69 Dodge Charger began to take shape, he turned to YearOne’s Ghostworks division to make it happen. The game plan was specific; it had to turn the stats with numbers that impress, and more importantly it had to be usable. Unlike some of the all-show Pro Touring machines, this Charger is no Pro Poser. Here we are talking much more than packing plenty of power in the engine room, with handling and braking ranking just as high on the scorecard. Yes, in terms of performance it was going to do everything a car should do in a bigger and better way than any stock ’60s Charger, but most of all it was going to be far more refined than a typical Pro Touring machine or any stock muscle car from back in the day.

In the history world of automotive design, the line between hit and miss is often a fine one. After all, there are a million ways to configure a good car, but even more ways to create an ugly one. The fact is, cars were created by a committee of people with varying degrees of good and bad taste, and it didn’t take much to slip one way or the other. For example, a car might’ve had a good overall shape or body line, but was ruined by a heinous grille, goofy bumpers, unflattering roofline, or awkward wheelwells. Rooflines especially—that’s one of the biggest killers for any body style. And then there were those cars that looked good as is, but were practically begging for the design cues to have been pushed just a bit further to take them from good to great.