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Indiana has early roots in the high-performance automotive aftermarket.
The Business of Speed: the Hot Rod Industry in America, 1915-1990The Business of Speed: the Hot Rod Industry in America, 1915-1990, gives a comprehensive look at the high-performance automotive aftermarket from the Ford Model T era to the 1990s. During this 75 year time frame, auto enthusiasts have continually reengineered and rebuilt their vehicles in their quest for speed and style. These roots are traced from the Midwest across the country to southern California. By 1915, Ford Motor Company had produced 1.5 million Model Ts. This versatile auto would serve as the platform that launched the performance industry. Indiana has early roots in the business, Roof Auto Specialty of Anderson and Chevrolet Brothers Manufacturing of Indianapolis, capitalized on developing overhead-valve cylinder heads for the 4-cylinder Model T. Plus, a Chevrolet built Fronty-Ford race car placed fifth in the 1923 Indianapolis 500, and the Chevrolet Brothers went on to build over 10,000 conversions for the Model T engine. Ford debuted its flathead V-8 engine in 1932. This engine would serve as the basis for performance tuning for almost 20 years. Some of the popular speed equipment for this engine were Winfield camshafts, Edelbrock manifolds, Hunt ignitions, and Belond exhaust systems. Southern California firms dominated the American V-8 speed equipment business in this era by a margin of three to one. Hot Rod culture began to rise in the post World War II era. The introduction of overhead-valve V-8 engines by most all American manufacturers in the early 1950s marked a new age for the high-performance aftermarket. In 1954, there were 158 manufacturers in the United States, with 111 in the Los Angeles area. Southern California companies like Weiand, Offenhauser, Iskenderian, Edelbrock, Fenton, Johns and McCulloch were responsible for the vast majority of aftermarket components in this time frame. In 1963, the predecessor of the Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) was launched to work with regulatory agencies to develop relationships beneficial to speed equipment manufacturers. SEMA worked with local, state, and federal officials to ensure that high-performance tuning and other sorts of end-user modifications remained legal. The emergence of electronic control units in the 1980s allowed the performance tuning industry to develop components to work within the emissions-control and fuel-efficiency mandates and still develop gains. Author David Lucsko does an exceptional job of telling the story of the performance tuning industry’s evolution over seven decades. The book is thoroughly researched, including the players, the genesis of the automotive aftermarket industry, and how the business of speed evolved across America.
Peruse The Business of Speed: the Hot Rod Industry in America, 1915-1990 at Amazon.com Back to: Book Review – reviews of current and other auto-related books
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