HOT ROD Magazine: 75 Years

HOT ROD Magazine: 75 Years celebrates the stunning content that has been created and published by the magazine’s staff in all or parts of nine decades. Witness how HOT ROD has been on scene for the entirety of the postwar performance movement with photographs and articles detailing dragsters, roadsters, slingshots, Funny Cars, coupes, customs, lead sleds, muscle cars, and their builders and owners.

Take a look back through pages that have captured the imaginations of gearheads nationwide by featuring the works of customizing greats like Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, Von Dutch, and George Barris, to name a few. There’s also a look at the great journalism of such hot-rodding legends as Gray Baskerville, and the creations of builders like Pete Chapouris, Boyd Coddington, Steve Moal, Roy Brizio, and Chip Foose—complete with decades of archival black and white and color photographs of the cars and personalities that comprise hot rodding history.

In the late 1940s, a young photographer and Army Air Corps veteran named Robert E. Petersen astutely noted the rapidly growing hot rod scene in Southern California. Buoyed by war veterans with tech savvy, disposable income, and a need for speed, the hot-rodding hobby was without much in the way of informational publishing. In a brilliant stroke, Petersen stepped into the void in 1948, launching HOT ROD magazine. Petersen Publishing would grow into a worldwide media empire featuring several publications. Today, HOT ROD magazine endures as one of the most iconic enthusiast publications ever.