Hot Rod Mavericks: The Builders, Racers, and Rebels Who Revolutionized Hot Rodding
by Tony Thacker
“Book creation is both solitary and collaborative because you write alone but you need endless outside input to get it as right as possible.
And that means avoiding the internet and old magazines and books that one hopes are accurate. It’s impossible to be 100 percent accurate because hot rodders are not good at keeping records (except for the records they set) and often, especially in the early days of lakes racing, they changed drivers and parts like underpants and did not broadcast it.”
“Avoiding the internet” when you do serious research . . . well, there’s a lesson right there! This is Thacker’s 30th book so between the writing and the multitude of other hats he’s been wearing he has learned plenty. Which is all the more remarkable because the trained engineer was the proverbial man without a plan when in 1988 he traded the grey skies of his native England for California sunshine, hoping to parlay the contacts he had already made working for hot rod magazines in England into a paying gig on these shores. And did he ever, including a stint as executive director of the Wally Parks National Hot Rod Association Museum in Pomona, California.
In the course of those pursuits he crossed paths with the very mavericks and rebels—nonconformists, individualists, eccentrics, dissidents, insurgents, radicals, activists, revolutionaries—that populate this book, about five dozen. That his listing begins with Henry Ford and ends with Jessi Combs might surprise some, but it all makes good sense.
The last photo in the book ties old and new together: Jessi Combs (b. 1980) muscling a 1917 twin-engine Model T in the 2015 Race of Gentlemen in which she was one of the first female competitors. Four years later Combs achieved 522.783 mph in a jet-powered race car attempting to beat her own four-wheel land speed record but paid for it with her life. The record was awarded posthumously.
The history of hot-rodding is still a rather too-often neglected topic. The book is quite the surprise—of the pleasant sort. In a world where format, vapid text, and eye-candy visuals dominate automotive books nowadays this one actually fills a much-needed void in the literature, and does it incredibly well. So well that one can easily see the utility of this book for, say, creating an outline or notes for a classroom lecture or conference presentation on automotive history or motorsport history. To say of a nonfiction book that it could serve as a teaching tool is a high-order compliment! The information is organized and presented in an effective way; applied to a teaching situation it could only be improved by having Tony give the talk himself! And if hot rods leave you cold, realize that the influence of the folks presented here touches every aspect of automotive activity, up into current times.
Earl Meyer’s 300SL in a 1956 photo which means the car is basically new. Says Von Dutch, “I thought they were going to lynch me for desecrating a shrine.” Too bad this is not a color photo!
In five sections, Thacker covers the topic of those who created the notion of “hot-rodding” in America, one of those cultural aspects of the modern world, such as jazz, that tends to be uniquely American in that uniquely American way. Each of the five sections—The Pioneers, Postwar Boom, Heyday, Hot Rods Go Mainstream, and Modern Rodding—features a lineup of the influential personalities of each era. You may associate Barney Oldfield with auto racing and think of Henry Ford as a taciturn industrialist in a three-piece suit but these men have not only hot rod roots but are pioneers of the hot rod scene, alongside Ed Winfield, Eddie Meyer, Frank Kurtis, Vic Edelbrock, the aforementioned Wally Parks. A nice addition to this opening section is the addition of Veda Orr. Who? Oh, the former Frieda Amelia Ludwig (1910–1989), the one who went from secretary to racer to member of the board of directors of the Southern California Timing Association.
As one moves through the Thacker monograph, names familiar and maybe not so familiar today are encountered. Bill Burke, the “father of the belly tank racer,” Alex Xydias, “world’s fastest hot rod,” and Barney Navarro, “pushing the Flathead’s limits,” are given their due right along with Stu Hilborn, Robert E. Petersen, and Ed “Isky” Iskenderian. How about, C.J. “Pappy” Hart? He didn’t invent drag racing but with his partners, Lions Drag Strip made it both available and a commercial enterprise. And on and on and on.
While hot-rodding is generally viewed as a male-dominated sphere, the women Thacker includes here are not tokens but high-level achievers: in addition to the aforementioned Veda Orr and Jessi Combs there are Paula Murphy and Shirely “Cha-Cha” Muldowney.
The snappily designed landscape-format book is produced in cooperation with Hot Rod Magazine which means Thacker is able to draw on the Motor Trend Group’s archives at the Petersen Automotive Museum. It has to recognized that it was SEMA, Thacker’s first US employer, who in 2018 awarded a $1-million grant to the Petersen to digitize 1 million photographs.
It is not often that one manages to come across a book that is a genuine pleasure. Tony Thacker manages to provide just such a book with Hot Rod Mavericks: The Builders, Racers, and Rebels Who Revolutionized Hot Rodding.
Highly recommended.
Copyright 2025, Don Capps (speedreaders.info).
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