We tapped former Hot Rod, Car Craft, and Chevy High-Performance magazine editor Jeff Smith to share a few behind-the-scenes stories from some of his favorite hot rod road trips. Jeff has logged thousands of miles in some unforgettable machines with equally memorable people. In this story, he looks back on several of those trips — including time behind the wheel of Scott Sullivan’s “Cheez Whiz” 1955 Chevy, an Olds F-85 adventure with current Hot Rod editor-in-chief, John McGann, and a road adventure with Will Handzel in his Budget Beater Model A. Each with details never before published.
Pro-Interstate: Driving a 1955 Chevy Cross Country
My first big road trip story is one that some veteran magazine readers may be familiar with. The tale revolves around driving Scott Sullivan’s Cheez Whiz 1955 Chevy from his shop in Dayton, Ohio, to Los Angeles. He had just won the prestigious Pro Street award at the 1988 Street Machine Nationals in Du Quoin, Illinois, and he wanted to prove his car was more than a show queen – it could knock down a serious cross-country journey. I was the editor of Hot Rod at the time, and I volunteered to ride shotgun and document the trip.
Most of the exciting stuff we experienced I recorded in the two-part story in Hot Rod in the December 1988 and January 1989 issues of the magazine. The main issue that immediately surfaced was that Scott had black-chromed the Holley carburetor for a better look which unfortunately deposited a small chuck of debris in the idle mixture passage on the right side of the Holley’s primary metering block. At various times it would move a fraction of an inch and block the idle circuit which would immediately make the Lingenfelter-built 496ci Rat motor run ratty at highway speeds.
We developed a repair process that we practiced at nearly every fuel stop after the first half of the journey. When approaching the gas station, Scott would kill the electric fuel pump to empty the primary fuel bowl. The engine would stall about a block from the station and we’d roll in dead stick. Scott would get out and pump gas while I opened the hood, yanked the primary fuel bowl and metering block, and ask the attendant to use his compressed air. We made sure to stop only at gas stations that had a service bay which meant they had an air compressor.
I would use their air gun to blow out the primary meter block, reassemble the carburetor, turn on the fuel pump to check for leaks, check the oil, and then close the hood. I could perform that entire process in about five to seven minutes which by that time, Scott had filled the tri-five with fuel, bought us a couple of Gatorades, washed the windshield, and we were ready to fly. At one stop, the attendant came out to watch and commented that this looked like a NASCAR pit stop. I imagined the process a little closer to a scene from the movie Two-Lane Blacktop.
The original Hot Rod magazine story outlined how one of Scott’s custom-machined, front wheels cracked, stranding us in the middle of the Utah desert. A young hot rodder named Glenn Knotts befriended us twice in two days to get us back on the road. One episode I didn’t mention in the article was when we eventually arrived at a tire store on Interstate 15, we needed two new front tires. Scott had chosen the front tires to look good but they weren’t rated to carry the load of an iron big-block, all-steel 1955 Chevy.
We found ourselves at a local tire store south of Salt Lake City arguing over tire sizes. The car now was fitted with stock steel front 15-inch junkyard wheels Scott had scored but he still wanted tiny tires. I objected. A lively discussion ensued for the next five minutes until the counter guy finally said, “When you two ladies decide which size tires you want, just let me know. I’ll be in the back!”
We finally compromised, and the car finished the trip with no additional tire drama. But our running against the wind was not quite over. Trudging south out of Las Vegas, we hit a fierce thunderstorm that tore through the tiny town of Baker, California, just as we entered from the north. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were literally a few hundred yards away from where ferocious winds ripped up the rest of the town. We finally arrived at my house in the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles around 4:00 a.m. absolutely frazzled but with the ’55 intact.
There is a little-known sidebar that reveals how luck seems to follow Scott Sullivan around like a lost puppy. After we arrived safely at my house, my two-car garage was located in the backyard with a long driveway that was barely one car-width wide and bordered by a chain link fence on one side and the west wall of my house on the other. It was so narrow that we decided to just push the ’55 into the backyard. Scott steered while I pushed from behind.
He suddenly said, “Hey, look at this.” He was freely spinning the steering wheel, but the wheels were not turning. When Scott originally built the ’55, he Z’d the 1970 Nova front subframe to the 1955 frame to lower the ride height which required a universal joint in the steering shaft to connect its divergent angle to the steering box. He disassembled that u-joint to paint it during final assembly and apparently the bolts were not sufficiently torqued. The u-joint came apart in the driveway! I just looked at him and said, “You are the luckiest S-O-B on the planet!”
Scott just smiled.
One final episode occurred when we took the ’55 to the drag strip. He wanted to show the car was no poseur when it came to straight-line performance with a goal of a nitrous-assisted 10-second pass. I was elected to drive. After several attempts at manually moving the column shifter while simultaneously hitting the nitrous button with the same hand, we finally achieved the altitude-corrected high 10-second pass and decided to brave the highway back to my shop.
We had put slicks on the Cheez Whizzer for traction but we couldn’t find an open trailer wide enough to offer sufficient rocker panel clearance for Scott’s very low ’55. We finally decided to drive the car to the track using my 1965 El Camino as the support vehicle. After leaving the drag strip, we pulled onto the freeway and a California Highway Patrol car passed us and then quickly decelerated until he was behind the ’55. He pulled us over and wrote a ticket for unsafe tires. Scott just looked at me and said, “You’re paying for this.”
Scott and I talked about a reprise of that original voyage for Hot Rod a couple of years back but nothing ever came of it. Perhaps the magazine’s new owners at Hearst Publishing might be willing to endorse the trip. It doesn’t seem possible, but in a couple of years it will have been 40 years ago we made that adventure cross America’s highways. There would likely be no drama to accompany the new trip. The reason it would be boring is we wouldn’t leave without a spare front tire and I’d insist on more tools than Scott’s original collection of end wrenches dumped into a Tupperware bin. The real question is whether we’ve truly used up all of Scott’s automotive Karma.
Early Power Tour Adventures
Hot Rod magazine’s first Power Tour in 1995 found the staffers driving their own cars accompanied by a few brave readers to cut a trail from our Los Angeles Petersen Publishing offices all the way to Sandusky, Ohio. I drove my 1965 Chevelle on the tour using a 355ci small-block Chevy with a relatively new Accel/DFI ECU tuning, a Lingenfelter Super Ram intake and a Richmond 6-speed overdrive transmission. We managed 21 mpg for the entire trip with a car that could run low 12-second quarter mile times.
For the second Power Tour, I challenged the staff to each build a car that could make good horsepower yet also get excellent mileage, but nobody was interested. With no takers, I decided I’d simply mount the challenge myself. The plan was to build a small-block Chevy that could make 550 flywheel horsepower yet also knock down 25 mpg on the freeway for the trip from Los Angeles to Detroit. Today, that would be easy with a fuel injected and turbocharged LS engine, but in 1996 I decided the solution was a Vortech V1 centrifugal supercharger on my Gen 1 small-block.
The engine I built started with a Chevrolet Performance Bow Tie iron block 302 with a 4.00-inch bore and 3.00-inch stroke using a crower rotating assembly with only 9:1 compression. Crane Cams ground a 210/220-degree mechanical roller cam that we combined with a set of then-new AFR 190cc aluminum heads. We topped it off with the same John Lingenfelter-designed Super Ram intake manifold and Accel/DFI fuel injection that I had on the previous engine.
Testing the engine on Kenny Duttweiler’s dyno was a challenge because it shredded a 6-rib blower drive belt on each full dyno pull. We had to increase the blower pulley size for the cross-country drive because we didn’t want to destroy belts. The engine made 549.6 hp at 13 psi of boost. The hardest part of the tour was driving the Chevelle with a consistently light foot to maximize fuel economy. I even tried drafting behind semi-tractor trailers to improve the mileage which oddly didn’t seem to help.
I did however average 22.2 mile-per-gallon for the 2,900-mile trip which I was a little disappointed with. The Chevelle’s mileage ranged between an 18-mpg section to Las Vegas to multiple 23+ mpg sessions. I still have the 302 short-block and more than once I’ve thought about changing pistons and building that Crower rotating assembly into a normally aspirated rpm motor. But for now, that’s just another project sitting on the shelf.
My friend Jim Losee was working for Edelbrock at the time, and we often cruised together on the trip. He told me it took him awhile to figure out why it appeared that I spent half my time looking down to my right during the first few days of the Tour. Then he realized that I had my laptop on the passenger seat and was tuning while I was driving. It became a bit of an obsession – a problem I still wrestle with because I can’t leave anything alone.
See the USA in an Olds F-85
I was selling the Olds to a woman who worked for the vestiges of what was once the mighty Petersen Publishing company. Her 16-year-old son in Indiana was looking for something cool to drive. We offered to deliver the Olds and pull off a road trip story at the same time. I had rebuilt the 455 engine that Tim had originally swapped into the car along with a TH400 transmission. As you can see from the photos, the Olds was a classic patina cruiser. A neighbor once complained that when I parked it out front of my house, it lowered his property value. I took that as a badge of honor. Better yet, with no overdrive, it produced terrible fuel mileage which made it the perfect car to choose for a long-distance cruise when somebody else was footing the fuel bill.
We left in late August through sweltering desert heat on old Route 66 into Arizona where we drove up through Oatman, which is an old gold-mining town complete with Bureau of Land Management-protected burros and the ancient Oatman Hotel plastered with dollar bills stapled to its interior walls.
We ended up staying the night a day or so later in Tucumcari, New Mexico. As we were checking out the next morning, I noticed something on the wall behind the counter which was a map of the old 1800s Santa Fe and Chisum Trails which were the main cattle routes destined for the railhead in Abilene, Kansas. Those trails had now become Highway 54 that meanders from New Mexico to Dalhart, Texas, through the panhandle of Oklahoma and up into Wichita, Kansas.
When I asked the woman behind the counter if Highway 54 was the Santa Fe Trail, she just looked at me and said, “Well… yeah,” as if I was the latest in a string of dumb gringos she had to endure from behind her counter.
With that bit of insight, McGann and I headed straight up State Highway 54 until we took a detour up to Dodge City so we could see Boot Hill. One tombstone reads “Here Lies Lester Moore, Four Slugs from a 44, No Les, No More.” We ended up in McPherson, Kansas, for the night and were headed that Sunday morning of Labor Day for Kansas City and eventually southern Iowa where we were going to visit my buddy, Bill Irwin.
That’s when my Olds horse let us down.
Out on some lonely primary highway in the wilds of Kansas on a Sunday morning the temperature gauge hit 230 and then plummeted which was a sure sign of lost coolant. We woke up a farmer who provided water and plenty of 1960s automotive advice, “It’s probably the thermostat.” But after adding water we tried to start the 455 – the starter motor couldn’t crank the engine because a cylinder was full of water. It was clear we had lost a head gasket, and we were not going anywhere under our own power.
The AAA flatbed driver was cool, but he could only take us 100 miles which wasn’t even close to halfway to Iowa unless I was willing to pay big dollars. Instead, I relied on the courtesy of a friend. I called my buddy Bill at 10 o’clock on Sunday morning and said, “I’m about to ruin your day.” He immediately connected his trailer to his Suburban and drove roughly 250 miles from Osceola, Iowa, to a truck stop on the Kansas Turnpike where the AAA driver had dropped us.
The next day was Monday of Labor Day weekend, and we honored that idea with our own industry, pulling the Edelbrock heads off in Bill’s shop. A couple of head bolts had mysteriously loosened which caused the problem. We had to wait another day for head gaskets to show up but were finally on the road early Wednesday. The original plan had John driving to Indiana by himself. The plan still held but it was now a test of how well we had reassembled the engine.
With perhaps slightly less trust in the machine, John bravely took the helm as I had to return home to make time for other projects. He made the rest of the trip with no problem and when I last spoke to its new owner, Palmer Schmitz, he had zero interest in allowing me to buy the car back. He loves the Olds, even though it uses oil.
Open Air Cruising in a Model A Roadster
Among the select few men I can call my best friends is my buddy Will Handzel. Many moons ago he built a 1931 Model A roadster that was called the Budget Beater in Hot Rod for the first two trips on Hot Rod Power Tour. All these years later, he is still driving the car. He now lives in the Detroit area and sent the roadster to Los Angeles-based Total Cost Involved (TCI) for some chassis updates after 30,000 miles of street abuse.
We were talking one day on the phone about the car when I asked if he was going to ship it back to Detroit after TCI finished the work.
“No, I’m gonna drive it back,” he said.
“Alone? That’s crazy!” Then I found myself saying “I’ll go with you.” Which was exactly what he wanted me to say.
“Up to this point, I had exactly zero seat time in any roadster, and found myself wondering what I had just stumbled into. But a couple of months later, I was sitting in the ’31 on the freeway, once again thumbing my nose at the heat of a Labor Day weekend heading east. We didn’t get even a third of the way up the climb on Interstate 15 toward Las Vegas before the roadster overheated. We poured water over the radiator and limped along at 50 mph while the rest of Los Angeles was ripping by us at 80-plus mph. Even semis were passing us going up the grade.
Will Handzel’s Budget Beater 1931 Model A roadster before its later upgrades, including a TCI chassis and small-block Chevy power. Even in its rough-and-ready form, the car had already logged tens of thousands of miles proving that a true hot rod belongs on the highway.
After limping along the Interstate, we coasted into a rest stop and after a long struggle against pressurized steam with only a large towel, I managed to remove the roadster’s radiator cap. Filling the radiator with at least six 12-ounce bottles of water from the bathroom faucet – one trip at a time – I thought we’d fixed the problem. But this just brought the 230-degree water temp down to a more manageable 220 degrees. Our goal for the night was the Arizona oasis of Lake Havasu City where Will had a friend who could help us diagnose this problem. We arrived at 10:30 pm with chapped lips and desiccated spirit.
I was still contemplating overheating issues when we ran out of gas…for the first time. In the writing business, that’s called foreshadowing. We had just cleared what we later learned was the last gas station for about 50 miles in the Arizona desert. Will’s roadster carries a pair of saddle fuel tanks with 7½ gallons on each side. Will’s approach was to run on the passenger side tank until it ran dry and then switch. But over the miles, he’d lost track and the roadster stalled just past the on-ramp.
Will’s favorite saying is the Lord watches out over fools, drunks, and children and we certainly qualified for at least one, if not two of these categories. We pushed the roadster down the on-ramp and then 100 yards uphill slightly to the gas station. After recovering from that cardio workout, Will put 16 gallons of gas in the two tanks plus the fuel cross-over tube. That’s when a young father with his two small boys complete with cowboy hats and oversize belt buckles walked up to ask us about the car.
To the casual observer, the ’31 looked like we’d just pulled it out of a desert boneyard hours before. Complete with rust holes in the body and a patina that resembled 60-grit sandpaper, the Model A appears every bit the part of a desert rat. That’s when mom appeared just as we announced that we were headed for Detroit.
The father asked, “Where’s your support truck?”
Will answered, “We don’t have one. This is it – just us.”
The look on his wife’s face was a cross between pure astonishment and imagining that we’d just stumbled out of the sagebrush. She instinctually moved closer to her husband and children as if to protect them from these two, clearly unhinged individuals. The father told us they had just moved to New Mexico so he could hunt elk. We parted soon after and I’m not sure which of the two parties came away the more bewildered. Likely mom probably counselled her two young sons with something like “Those guys are crazy!”
Will’s friend Dan Van Auken in Lake Havasu City helped us sort through the roadster’s issues — tightening the fan belt, replacing the vacuum advance and even TIG-welding a cracked fender mount before sending us back onto the highway.
With the thought of encountering an oversized elk with a ’31 Model A firmly in my head, we again hit the road with the intent of following the Santa Fe Trail and turning northeast on Highway 54. After losing and then miraculously finding an errant Go-Pro camera that had rattled off its magnetic mount, we entered Dalhart, Texas, just as evening approached.
That’s when – wait for it – we ran out of gas…again.
This time, the gas station was only a few feet away and we pushed the roadster up to a pump. It was at this point that I staged a minor Model A mutiny by claiming complete control over refueling for the remainder of our trip. The image of the cartoon character Quick Draw McGraw entered my head with his classic quote “I’ll do the thinnin’ ‘round here!”
The next morning dawned with a darkened sky and we proceeded to put on every piece of clothing we had brought with us until the clouds parted a few hours later and it warmed up. I was granted one small backpack for the trip as there’s not much room beneath the fully upholstered rumble seat. Charging at 80 mph with the temp at 50 degrees feels like just above freezing, but we survived. Now we stopped for fuel soon every time after Will switched tanks, and miraculously, we didn’t run out of fuel again.
The rest of the trip was almost anti-climatic based on the comedy of the previous days’ adventures. The freeway jaunt into Kansas and eventually Iowa was more like a pleasure cruise but still fraught with wind buffeting to the extreme since Will likes pushing the roadster to 80-plus mph. The wind buffeting that occurs at that speed is akin to having two big friends beating you alongside the head with large pillows for hours on end.
My portion of the trip was to end at my southern Iowa home while Will intended to pick up his cousin in Des Moines and continue the trip to Detroit. Before the trip began, I expected to arrive at my house beat up and road weary, happy to be at the trail’s end.
What I discovered was something quite the opposite. As I watched Will pull out of my driveway and do a small burnout, all I wanted to do was to keep riding. It was the most fun I’ve had on the highway in a very long time and the hours I spent with my close friend will be a memory I will cherish forever.
So hit the road with a friend and the more things that happen, the better the stories will subsequently become! Just remember to never trust the gas gauge.