Torque

Loved and Lost

About once a week, usually as I’m leaving my house in the morning in my white 2016 GMC pickup, I hear a little voice. It pipes up as I drop the shifter silently into gear, lamenting the fact that last year, I sold my noisy old orange-and-white 1972 Chevrolet K10. […]

Horsepower Reborn

Back in April, the all-new Dodge Challenger Demon hit the scene. By now, I’m sure you’ve heard all the metrics: 840 horsepower, 9.60s in the quarter, supercharger feeding on cold air from the a/c system, and a transbrake to help yank the wheels off the tarmac. Dodge plans to lash […]

Impala Hunting

This month’s Readers’ Forum question is all about our best car buys — those cars that were steals, deals, or just turned out to be a lot better than we ever dreamed they would. For some of you, it was a brush with an icon, like a 427 Cobra or […]

Judging the Market

A few Septembers back, a friend of mine called me to ask if I’d be a judge at his church’s car show. It was a small show — about 50 or so cars — and he was hunting for car people to team up with members of the church’s youth […]

The Complete Experience

Before my time as a magazine writer and editor, I spent my days fixing people’s cars. The small shop where I worked would fix just about anything, but my specialty was the old stuff — the cars our flat-rate auto technicians avoided. For me, as a young paid-by-the-hour car kid, […]

Drive ’em Because You Can

For me, Monterey Car Week started off with a bang. That bang was the sound of my brand-new Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat, on loan from FCA for a review in ACC, getting punched in the rear bumper by a Honda CR-V in stop-and-go freeway traffic somewhere outside San Jose. I’d […]

I’ll Build it Someday

A few weeks ago, while on a walk with my daughter in my neighborhood, I caught a glimpse of a rounded metal roof peeking out from behind a fence. I stood up tall to look over and saw a ’56 Chevy 2-door post. Half-consumed by blackberry bushes, it sat with its […]

Horsepower 101

This month’s Race profile takes a look at a basic Nova drag car — the kind of understated monster that stands out to car crazies like us, bright as a neon sign, even from 100 paces. And at the same time, it’s the kind of car everyday people tend to […]