Road Rash: by Ro McGonegal VOLUME 1, ISSUE 1

Thanks for logging on and welcome to the premier issue of MuscleRides. Our goal is to further the Pro Touring ethic, but not Pro Touring per se. It's not whether a car physically fits some presupposed niche but rather how it performs overall. Our champions handle, brake, and rip tarmac in equal measures, regardless of the metal they're wrapped in or what their popular pigeonhole might be. But won't there be interpretations? Yes, there will be and that's one good reason for MuscleRides.

So you know who's on your side, everyone involved with MuscleRides is a refugee from the print medium, spent their entire careers being micro-managed by people who sold advertising for a living and had little or no regard for creativity. Isn't creativity what endears people to the book in the first place? In mainstream American publishing there is virtually no separation of church and state. That advertising dollars run the communications world is a given. Dictated editorial content is a way of life (hey, worms, we sold X-number of pages to Joe Blow's Oven Mitt company, make sure you take care of them in the book right away). Happily, there's none of that going on here.

I've been a stone car geek since I was 10 and I've spent the past 37 years driving, abusing, sleeping in, and writing about cars of all stripes. I have been the editor of Car Craft, Hot Rod, and Chevy High Performance and did a three-year jolt at Motor Trend in the late OE70s. This is my first adventure in cyberspace. My sense of direction is primitive, intuitive, and usually lacking so I'm dropping the clutch, matting the throttle, and driving headlong into the Ethernet. Maybe I'll ask questions later.

I've had a '66 Biscayne jones for 40 years. I loved these animals because they had the sparsest interior and the sleepiest of bodies. They were minimal, nothing there but the essentials, clean lines, and had a regular production 425 horsepower big-block. I loved the radio delete option. Biscaynes were the antithesis of the flash-ride Impala SS. They didn't screech "let's rock" to every worthy opponent on the parkway. They crept around like zombies, dog dishes stuck to steel wheels, patiently waiting to drop the hammer on some distracted botflies. I'd had two '40 Chevy Coupes, '55 Chevy D/Gasser, a 270hp '55 Bel-Air, a 350hp tri-power 348 in a '60 Biscayne, Fuelie '62 Corvette, a '67 L79 Malibu, an L72 COPO Camaro, and various beater wagons, but not the Biscayne, the fish that really hooked me.

In '98, I bought one, a refrigerator white whale from Chuck "ACES" Hanson. He'd tarted it up with body-colored painted Rally wheels and big fat tires as if he knew that'd clinch the deal (it did). It was an all-original 283 OEGlide car with 89,000 miles on it. Hanson had fixed the fist-sized rust holes in the front fenders and had somebody blow on a cheapie enamel job. The LS engine had debuted in the Corvette a year earlier. I wanted to marry the two, and I thought that the car's construction and scope should be as close to a home-built hot rod as possible. I found it increasingly more difficult not to slap anyone who insisted that I put a Rat in it because the new small-block was gay. So?.I got a C5-R race block and made it into a 448ci displacement rumbler. With a mild GM Hot Cam, it makes 551 hp and 575 lb-ft.

When I climbed on the merry-go-round, nobody made aftermarket parts for this engine or the car (other than straight resto pieces). Forget about engine swap kits, tubular control arms, axle swaps, or anything else that was readily available for the A-, F-, and X-body cars. Biscaynes make fine restos I guess, but I'd rather drink gasoline than have one of those things.

I wanted to vitalize the wallowing pig's physique, give it better brakes, quicker steering, a powerful suspension, minimal unsprung weight, and sticky, quick-response rubber on featherweight wheels. I wanted it to benefit from as much modern equipment as possible. I wanted to incorporate the Pro Touring ethic before there was such a thing. It just made sense from a safety standpoint, you know, being able to steer or accelerate away from grief rather than plow straight into it like a pie to the kisser. There's a lot more to this, of course, and you will see the perennially un-finished product here soon.

I wanted to build a Biscayne, an unpopular car universally shunned for the smaller, lighter iterations that have become so popular. I burned to drive something different. Did I accomplish my goal? Yes and no. For several reasons, I stopped messing with it after we screwed the body to the scrubbed and painted frame, attached the rear axle, and put the front suspension back where it belonged. At least I had a roller. From then on, a select group of others helped me along the way, did the work while I watched through a camera viewfinder, or coached them from the other side of the world. I wanted to maintain the simplicity of the venture, so that it (or something like it) could be recreated by anyone else, and without custom-made pieces that might pose a problem down the road. Parts are available for this engine in several different chassis now, but you still can't get them for the B-body Biscayne.

I firmly believe that's why you're here. You have the same discipline and desire to build something different. You know that even if your car looks like someone else's, it is still exclusive to you and that it's virtually impossible for anyone to make the exact same changes that you have made. That's the underlying theme. Build your car. Drive your car. Share your car. And get divine.-RM