HOT ROD’s DIY Legacy Still Fuels Garage-Born Greatness
HOT ROD Magazine has always informed and inspired its readers to get their hands dirty.
In the Summer 2025 issue of HOT ROD, we celebrated home-built cars—built not bought, as some would say—and that is a large part of HOT ROD’s legacy. Since the first issue, our mantra has been to inform and inspire, and every issue since then has some sort of how-to or tech column. The first issue, printed in January 1948, featured a column by noted race engine builder George Riley. For those unaware, Riley had been building racing components since the 1920s through his company Multi-Lift. It was known for its rocker-arm F-heads for the A/B Ford, which was a common engine for racing at that time. The column broke down the typical after-race inspection process the professionals used at the time.
AI Quick Summary
HOT ROD Magazine's Summer 2025 issue celebrates the tradition of home-built cars, emphasizing DIY culture since its 1948 debut. Despite fewer print how-tos, the HOT ROD website continues to offer extensive guides, inspiring generations to embrace hands-on car crafting.
This summary was generated by AI using content from this MotorTrend article
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The half-page stories became a regular column from a rotating cast of writers, eventually leading into the how-to genre of magazine articles. The influence these articles have had on hot-rodding over the past 77 years is profound, enabling generations of enthusiasts to pick up tools and begin wrenching, and I am one of them. I am not a mechanic. My high school didn’t offer a shop class to learn how to work on cars, nor did I spend countless hours in the garage with my father. But I grew up reading car magazines, learning about the latest parts and how stuff worked. It would be applied once I slid behind the wheel and realized I needed to go faster. You won’t find me building an NHRA Pro Stock car or Ridler-contender any time soon, but I know my way around enough to survive.
The Summer 2025 issue put the home-built cars and trucks on a pedestal, ones where owners picked up the welder, spent way too much on the Snap-On tools truck, and learned a craft so they didn’t have to pay someone to do it. With our publication cycle moving to quarterly issues, it has gotten harder to do a significant number of in-depth how-to articles in print, but our website is still filled with thousands of articles covering everything from bolting on cylinder heads to chassis modifications. The how-to assignments are one of the core elements of HOT ROD content, and we continue writing them today.
HOT ROD Summer 2025 Stories
- A Hand-Built Homage to a Street Racing Icon
- This 1927 Ford Roadster was Built by a 16-Year-Old!
- Garage-Built NHRA Top Fuel Funny Car Defies All Odds
- Home Builds and High-End Builds: Striking That Balance
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"Finish Line" is HOT ROD network director Mike Galimi’s quarterly look at what's going on in the hot-rodding world. Follow HOT ROD on social media (Instagram, Facebook, X, and TikTok), then shoot an email to the staff at HOTROD@HotRod.com and let them know what's going on in your automotive world!
I’ve been fortunate enough to blur the line between career and hobby/passions for over 25 years, and it has been a rather unusual pathway to my current role as the Network Director of HOT ROD. Naturally, cars have been a large part of my life since I was a young kid—complete with car posters on the wall and a chest full of toy cars. As time marched by it was R/C cars and trucks until finally, into the big leagues when I turned 16. By that time my life was heavily influenced by magazines like HOT ROD and Car Craft, and it was the 5.0 Mustang that piqued my interest thanks to a heavy dose of the local car scene that I experienced through my two older brothers. I was fortunate enough to grow up as the Fox Body Mustang scene began to flourish, however at no time did I ever imagine a media career in the automotive-enthusiast aftermarket. Life after college was spent behind the desk as a stock analyst, but every other waking moment was occupied by Mustang drag racing. It was a friendship that changed my life from the rat race to the drag race, I was given a chance to contribute to a fledging new title for a quickly growing racing organization, one that focused on my true passions—Mustangs and street-legal drag racing. The opportunity eventually turned into a full-time gig in the early 2000s, despite no formal journalism degree or photography courses. By 2003, I was offered the dream job of joining the staff of Muscle Mustangs & Fast Fords, which was the bible for the late-model Mustang movement that was taking over the world. One thing led to another, and I ended up back at the drag racing sanctioning body in which I had started my career as the content and marketing director, a role I occupied for a decade. In 2022, I was offered a chance to step into the network director role for the largest automotive-enthusiast aftermarket brand, the revered and legendary HOT ROD.
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