Third Time’s A Charm By Keith Maney

It’s all about having fun with cars. And trucks. And just about any other type of wheeled vehicle you can imagine.

Yep, the Hot Rod Magazine Power Tour exists for one main reason, and that reason is to get a few hundred gearheads together for a couple weeks and drive across this fantastic country of ours. There are other things going on of course, like business stuff, but that’s all secondary to the main focus of the HRMPT, which is simply a celebration of cars and car people and highways and motels and a lot of other stuff we probably shouldn’t mention here.

This was our third trip, and we have to say it was the best one we’ve been on - for a couple of reasons. First, unlike the HRMPT East in ’99, where we drove from Massachusetts to Florida, or last year’s California to Florida run, the weather on this trip was mostly fantastic. In ’99 we could’ve made better time in a boat due to the virtually continuous rain (damn hurricane), and last year it was extremely hot for most of the trip, and our ride didn’t have A/C. (Okay, I admit I can be a wimp sometimes, but just try sitting in traffic for a few hours in Phoenix when it’s 107-degrees ambient. You people that live in Phoenix don’t count since you choose to reside in the middle of the desert, and have apparently developed some sort of physical resistance to terribly oppressive heat. It’s a bit rough on those of us who hail from the lush forests of the South.)

Anyway, this year the Tour was run a month earlier, in May instead of June, and we took a more northerly route, which kept us out of the blast furnace that is southern Arizona. And we also happened to be in cars that had A/C this year, which was handy on those occasions when the temperature rose above the moderate range.

The second reason we had so much fun this year was simply because it was huge. Uhh, let me rephrase that, it was HUGE! That’s better. The kickoff party just outside Detroit had almost 2,000 cars. There were approximately 500 cars registered as Long Haulers, which is the label affixed to those demented souls who attempt to do the entire Power Tour. Well, it’s the polite label, anyway. The point is this year’s event was the largest we’ve been on, and Long Haulers are like money and horsepower – the more the better.

The ’01 HRMPT kicked off in Pontiac, Michigan, and ended up some nine days later in San Bernardino, California. In between those points was more than we can put into words, so it’s a good thing we had cameras. Once again we managed to sweet-talk the good folks at GM into letting us drive a couple of their special cars on the trip, and we even managed to wrangle a test car out of Holley. Click on the Cars button below to check out our rides on this year’s Tour. Each individual stop also has a button in case you want to survey the mayhem that took place on each stop, or on our way there. A better idea is to start at the beginning and go through all the pages to see the action in sequence.

But really, the absolute best idea is to make plans to go yourself next year. If you dig cars, driving, hanging out with fellow gearheads, driving, attending a car show every night for almost two weeks, driving, experiencing the all the variety the American landscape has to offer, driving, and seeing some of the most outrageous cars in the country completely overwhelm some poor gas station in the middle of nowhere, you gotta experience it for yourself. Oh yeah, you have to like driving, too.

See you in ’02!

We’ve listed all the stops below as links. Simply click on one of the city names for the rundown on the trip to the stop and what it was like when we got there.