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The Hot Rod Power Tour gets
Hot and Humid in the South!
Hot Rod Power Tour 2003I believe this was the 9th Hot Rod Magazine Power Tour, it’s hard to tell after being on all but the first one. Distinguishing the years of certain memories, the people, the stories and even what we drove is beginning to all blur together. Anyone that’s been on the Tour understands what I’m talking about. But we were looking forward to adding new stories and fun to our archives so we packed up the ’99 Suburban and headed towards Nashville.

MSD is proud to be a part of this traveling circus of horsepower. It gives us a great opportunity to talk with customers, see what they are using on their cars and what parts they need. It works great as we can answer everyone’s questions and you answer our questions!

The ’03 Tour packed seven car shows and cruise nights in seven days and in a different city each day. It was a lot of work, but also a lot of fun. We’ll see you all next year!

The vehicle of choice this year was our own Ed Monte’s ’99 Suburban. If it looks familiar, well, it should. We drove it a few years ago but had to return it to BFG. This time, it’s all Ed’s and the big beast made the trip without a hiccup (except a door handle). The big block even was able to pull down an economical 12 mpg!

At first glance at the itinerary, the Tour route didn’t seem to cover a lot of ground. The staff made the drives fun by leading tourers down some nice back roads to get everyone off the beaten path. From the stories we heard about each day’s drive, it all seemed to work out in the end (which is how things generally work on the tour).

Our tour started on Wednesday, the 28th as we left El Paso heading to Nashville. We hit Texarkana in just over nine hours! That’s nine hours in the same state - Texas is too darn big.

We made it to Carlisle, Arkansas, where we called it a night. The morning light (which came far too soon) showed the carnage of the thousands of bugs we killed through our 800 mile jaunt.

In the morning we came upon our first group of Power Tour participants. The group was led by none other than our pal Rick Love at Vintage Air.

Close behind Rick we passed Don Hardy and his wife in their restored ’67 Impala with a 427 and all sorts of cool options.


When we pulled into the Opryland hotel extravaganza we found the crew from Speed Tek already parked and with their display up. These guys have speed shops in Texas and Oklahoma and were nice enough to tote our display around. Here we see Robert in the calm before the storm.

The kick-off cruise day was huge! Some of the cars on hand you’d never believe were going to be driven on the tour.

Chevrolet has been a major part of the Power Tour for a long time. They always bring out some cool cars you can only dream of owning. This year there were a bunch of Berger Camaros in with the mix of Bowtie performance.

This concept truck drew a lot of attention…weren’t they supposed to build these things a few years ago?

After finding a power wash to rid the thousands of bug carcasses, Ed put the Mothers shine to the ‘burb. Cleaning that thing every day is quite a workout but hey, it sure beats sitting in the office, right?

How about a screaming yellow AMX? Chances are that our in-house AMX guru, Rick, knows this guy. Is it just me or do all AMX owners seem to know each other?


The fresh Ultima of Jeff and Dale Schwartz is quite a change from the toured and proven Cadillac Coupe De’Ville that he used to win the Car Craft Real Street Eliminator.

The light weight car is full of carbon fiber and has a Chevy LS-6 engine for power. One problem Jeff didn’t foresee was having an AC line rupture. Remember, this thing doesn’t have windows that roll down!


Our pals Tim and John from 76 Racing Fuels were on hand with barrels of 76 antenna balls for tourers. John cruised his ’72 Chevelle from Illinois to take in several stops before having to head back to the office.

Even if you don’t get your project done in time for tour, that’s no excuse not to come along. This guy has been on every tour and by the time we got to Arlington his rental had shelf paper flames. He still wins funniest hat of the tour.

On the opposite side of the rental car spectrum is this way cool lead sled. This would be a great cruiser for cross country haulin’. I need to talk with the boss at MSD about next year.

Nightfall didn’t keep people from cruising the parking area or that last minute fix or tune before the drive.

After a such a great kick-off we knew that we’d better get an early start to beat the Tour traffic. We didn’t see too many rods along the way, but this coupe certainly can’t go unnoticed.

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