Location: Savage, Minn.

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More participants than ever before turned out for the 29th annual GMCCA Car Show and Swap Meet June 5 at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds.

The weekend’s perfect weather, a first for this car show season, probably had a lot to do with it. Event official Hal Rogers said the show usually draws about 500 cars. This year 550 people registered, but total participation was between 600 and 700, he said.

Back when the fairgrounds still had a full racetrack, this show was held in the infield, with swappers lined up around the oval. That shows how much the event has grown; this year’s group wouldn’t have come close to fitting in that space.

Twelve local car clubs sponsored the show, which featured participant voting for 23 classes split up by make and year. Only the event’s most prominent models, Corvettes and Corvairs, had their own classes.

Check out the photo gallery for highlights from the sunny day, which was hopefully one of many more to come.

Location: Blaine, MN

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For all these reasons, it was my engine of choice when I decided way back in 2003 that my ‘84 Monte Carlo SS needed a little more oomph than the stock 190 hp 305 could offer. I was in college, on a shoestring budget and willing to space out my purchases. It took a bit longer than expected, but I finally completed the swap last spring, thanks in large part to Shakopee-based engine builder Steve Vermeer and my dad, shown yanking the 305 in the photo above.

The new engine is a 350 that was already built and bored .030 over when I bought it dirt cheap from a friend six years ago. I was shocked to find out that that friend, a colleague at my college newspaper named Nate Denay, died in a canoe accident last April, one day after I started the engine for the first time.

Nate was planning to put the engine in a Mazda for the shock factor, but didn’t get around to finishing the project. He hauled it all the way from Michigan in the back of a tiny Subaru wagon before I picked it up. He never started it, sadly. I wish he could have seen it run, even though it’s not quite what it was when I bought it.

My dad and I tore everything apart after the purchase to see what we had to work with and what we might need to buy to meet my modest goal of 400 hp. We found what Nate said we would: a four-bolt-main block from a ’70s truck, a mystery-brand cam with 222/236 duration and .466/.501 lift at .050, Speed Pro flat-top pistons, stiffer aftermarket valve springs and pretty much stock everything else.

The engine came with TBI “swirl port” heads and a Weiand single-plane intake. After a little research, I decided to ditch the heads for a used set of iron Vortecs, which I found on Craigslist along with a pair of valve covers. I sold the old intake and bought an Edelbrock air-gap intake.

Last winter, after accumulating myriad other parts and changing my mind about stuff a million times, I decided it was time to get the engine back together and in my car. To make sure it was done right, I sent everything to Vermeer, who has spent decades building high-performance engines of just about every make imaginable.

Topped with a 600 cfm Holley carb and MSD distributor, the engine made 417 hp at 6,100 rpm and 386 lb-ft of torque at 4,300 rpm on Vermeer’s dyno. It’s exactly what I was hoping for, built with mostly used parts that either came with the engine or were found online.

My dad and I spent a couple months worth of weekends swapping the old engine, which is still pristine with about 35,000 miles on it, with the new one. We cleaned and painted everything along the way, which added some time, but made a huge difference visually.

I put about 1,000 miles on the car last summer and I couldn’t be happier with it, though it still needs a little fine tuning. It feels much faster and I can’t wait to get it to a track. During the 2009 Hot Rod Power Tour, the car ran 16 seconds flat at 85 mph. I think it’ll do much better now, though a new problem has emerged: traction.

The engine is backed with a 700R4 transmission and a 2,200 stall converter and the car has its stock 3.42 gears with no posi. That will change when I have the funds. Until then, I’ll enjoy smoking one wheel at a time.

Car Craft magazine’s annual street-machine event returned to the Minnesota State Fairgrounds July 16-18, drawing thousands of cars and spectators on a steamy, stormy weekend.

Muscle-era vehicles have long been the mainstay of the Car Craft Summer Nationals and they were not in short supply this year, but the event also featured plenty of newer cars as well as old-school street rods and classics. The event’s always popular burnout competition was back, as was the dyno challenge, the launch-box competition and a longer version of the autocross.

The Minnesota Street Rod Association’s 37th annual Back to the ’50s weekend June 18-20 featured nearly 12,000 registered street rods, customs and classics and drew more 100,000 spectators to the Minnesota State Fairgrounds.

As if that wasn’t enough, more than 350 vendors and exhibits, live music, loads of fair food, a Mecum-hosted auction and a huge swap meet added to the hoopla.

Here is a tiny sampling of this massive event, which gets bigger and better each year.

Go to msra.com for more information on Back to the ’50s and stay tuned for details on next year’s show!

It’s easy to go broke building an engine, especially if you’re starting from scratch. But with a little patience and a lot of searching, affordable performance is not out of reach.

My first engine build is a testament to that. It’s not as cheap as it possibly could be, but it is a budget-built mill that manages to crank out 417 hp at 6,100 rpm and 386 lb-ft of torque at 4,300 rpm using mostly second-hand parts.

The engine, which I’ve dubbed the Thrifty 350, has been six years in the making. It was finally completed this month and it will soon replace the stock 305 in my ‘84 Monte Carlo SS. Check back for details on the build and the swap and visit the multimedia page to see a video of the 350 roaring on the engine Dyno.

A chat with Car Craft and Hot Rod Publisher Jerry Pitt at this year’s Summer Nationals.

The Car Craft Summer Nationals returned to the Minnesota State Fairgrounds July 17-19, this time with a political agenda.

Car Craft magazine’s annual street machine event, sponsored by GM Performance Division, has drawn thousands of muscle cars, late models and other vehicles to the fairgrounds each year for the past decade. With a dyno challenge, autocross course, launch box competition and burnout contest, the Summer Nationals has become more than a show.

The event continues to grow each year, but with the Big Three’s troubles, the push for ever “greener” auto technology and the launching of government programs that threaten many of the vehicles Car Craft is all about, the mood was more defensive this year than ever before. I heard the concerns from show-goers – and loud and clear from Car Craft and Hot Rod Publisher Jerry Pitt.

“We’ve got this opportunity to take a message to this group here,” Pitt said. “Don’t leave without knowing our community is in jeopardy. There are people out there who don’t want you to drive your car anymore. There are people that think that they have a better answer. They don’t have a better answer.”

Pitt said Car Craft is “deeply vigilant” about protecting car hobbyists’ rights to own and drive their vehicles and lately, that effort has become a top priority.

He said many of the people out there waving a green flag don’t realize that much of what they’re fighting against is actually what they want.

“Turning in an old car doesn’t help the economy or the environment,” Pitt said. “They need to recognize that most of these cars are our hobby cars. We don’t use them all the time.

“A ‘69 Chevelle that’s been restored twice has a much smaller carbon footprint than a brand new Prius, because a Prius has parts that come from all over the world, it’s got to be plugged into the wall [to draw power from a plant somewhere], and where do those batteries go when they go south?”

Pitt, who organizes the Hot Rod Power Tour as well as the Summer Nationals, is pushing hard to grow both events in the face of the hobby’s challenges. The Summer Nationals will continue to be in St. Paul, a site suggested back when Chuck Schifsky (son of drag-race legend Bill Schifsky) was editor of Car Craft.

“He always touted how big the car culture was in Minnesota,” Pitt said. “He got into a position of influence on Car Craft and said what we really need to do is have a summer nationals event at the fairgrounds or do something in Minnesota.”

So the event was born. Schifsky is no longer with the magazine (which is based on the west coast), but Car Craft keeps coming back here.

“Why do we come here? Well, you know, nobody’s from L.A. We all grew up somewhere else,” Pitt said. “And we just know that car culture and the center of the world as it relates to car culture is really back east, it’s in the Midwest, it’s a two-day drive from Columbus, Ohio and you have 80 percent of America’s car enthusiasts.

“Yeah, there’s a great amount of car enthusiasts in California, but they don’t go anywhere and they have soccer games on the weekend. You go to a car show in L.A. and it’s 5:30 to 8:30 in the morning at Donut Derelicts on Huntington Beach and it’s over.”

The Summer Nationals drew a little more than 1,000 cars the first year and has grown to roughly 5,000 in more than a decade. That’s still only half the size of the Minnesota Street Rod Association’s annual Back to the ‘50s show, but Pitt expects it to keep growing.

“I want to make this as big as Power Tour is from the standpoint of its veracity and its acceptance and I want more companies and more people to understand how big this show really is,” he said.

This year’s event incorporated Car Craft’s Real Street Eliminator competition – a combination of autocross, dyno and launch box competitions. A braking challenge held last year was scrapped after a Mustang careened off the track and into a cement barricade. Safety is a priority, Pitt said, and magazine staffers worked closely with professionals from the Sports Car Club of America to make sure nothing went wrong at this year’s track events.

The fairgrounds don’t have much to offer these days when it comes to motorsports, but Car Craft makes it work.

“We’d love to have a dragstrip here, we’d love to have a roundy-round track, we’d love to have a demolition derby, we’d love to have a bikini contest every day, but at some point, you’ve got to say there’s just too much,” Pitt said. “People come out, they’re religious about getting here early, they get their spot, they cruise the fairgrounds, they talk to the vendors, they meet friends that they saw last year and it’s a very comfortable car existence.”

He said Car Craft is working hard to keep it that way for years to come.

Go to the multimedia section for videos from the Car Craft Summer Nationals.

Location: Belview, MN

Want to see your ride on Minnesota Motorhead? Send a photo with the make, model and year of your vehicle to jake@mnmotorhead.com. Include your full name, the city you live in and a few details about your car.

Location: Prior Lake

Cool stuff: Beaufoy’s Nova packs a 454 small block (that’s not a typo) making 600 hp, a five-speed Tremec transmission, Dana 60 rear and 4:10 gears. And he drives it on the street.

Want to see your ride on Minnesota Motorhead? Send a photo with the make, model and year of your vehicle to jake@mnmotorhead.com. Include your full name, the city you live in and a few details about your car.