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!

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.

It was no Back to the ’50s, to be sure, but the Gopher State Timing Association’s 53rd annual Rod & Custom Spectacular held March 28-29 offered a great taste of what’s to come as the weather warms up (I’m talking about the cars here, though the mini doughnuts were good, too).

More than 100 customs, hot rods, street machines and other vehicles crammed into the coliseum over the weekend. Check out the photos for some of the show’s highlights.

It won’t be long before the fairgrounds starts hosting outdoor shows again. Spring has arrived!

If anyone has given up on the idea of building a gas-guzzling, tire-shredding muscle car in this age of four-buck-a-gallon gas, it isn’t Chuck Chenvert.

His blindingly green, stupidly powerful and completely uneconomical ’69 Plymouth Road Runner was built to be driven — far.

Chenvert piloted the car on the entire Hot Rod Magazine Power Tour this year, winding thousands of miles from his home in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, to the starting point in Little Rock, Arkansas, to the end in Madison, Wisconsin, and back. That’s quite a feat considering the car runs a 440ci big block (bored and stroked to 492ci, actually) and a four speed. And the fact that Chenvert opted to leave out power steering and air conditioning.

“Being that it was a car designed before air conditioning was common, it has floor vents, so driving was never a problem,” he said.

The garage-built street machine averaged about 10 mpg on the trip, but Chenvert made it the whole way with a smile glued to his face. His car’s 471 hp and 607 lb.-ft. of torque, proven on an engine dyno, probably helped.

Chenvert, 42, is a medical device engineer by trade, but a car guy to the core. He’s a fan of muscle cars of all makes and models, but he’s got a thing for Road Runners in particular.

“Growing up, my neighbor had one across the street in ‘69,” he said. “And I’ve been a fan ever since.”

He spotted his Road Runner in a newspaper ad in 2000 after a couple years of searching. It was an Arizona car, but was in rough shape, sprayed many shades of primer, with a dented fender and rust at the bottom of the rear window corners and in the trunk. But the quarter panels were solid and there was more than enough to work with.

Chenvert spent five years, mostly during the summer, transforming the car into what it is today. He built a rotisserie from plans he found online and stripped the car completely.

“I spent a whole summer doing body work,” he said.

The car came with a 383ci mill, but Chenvert opted to upgrade to the 440 with aluminum heads, a big cam, an Edelbock single-plain intake and a 950 cfm Holley carb. Why?

“Things just kind of got out of hand,” he said.

A five-speed manual transmission was originally on Chenvert’s list, but it turned out to be too expensive, plus he said he likes the look of the four on the floor.

His mighty Mopar puts power to the street through, what else, a new Dana 60 rear end holding 3.54 gears. It handles better than it ever did in the ‘60s thanks to a completely redone suspension with polyurethane bushings, a redone K-member, front and rear sway bars, Hemi front torsion bars, heavy duty Mopar springs and KYB gas shocks.

American Racing’s always good-looking Torque Thrust II wheels and Nitto rubber keep the car glued to the road.

The black interior is new, too, outfitted with Corbeau seats, Autometer gauges, a gigantic Hurst shifter and a full cage with removable side bars to make getting in and out easier.

“Someday I might race it and it does stiffen it up because these were unibody cars,” Chenvert said about the cage. “And it’s just kind of a cool factor.”

The car was originally light metallic green, but Chenvert was set on one of two famous high impact colors: Plum Crazy or Sublime. He ended up going with an updated version of the latter, called Sunfire Green, which he sprayed himself.

Chenvert said the Road Runner ran flawlessly on the Power Tour. An aluminum radiator and an electric fan pulled from a Nissan Maxima kept the big engine below 180 degrees the whole way, he said.

The only changes he’s planning is the addition of power steering and maybe a suspension upgrade to better handle luggage and a couple passengers on the next long haul.

Chenvert documented his 2,400-mile journey last June on a blog appropriately named Loud Green Car. Check it out here.