We continually amaze ourselves with our ability to con, er, persuade normally right-thinking people into letting us borrow their cars for a cross-country journey. After all, most of our friends won’t let us drive their cars…..and they’re, well, friends! But, somehow or another, we managed to finagle some neat iron for this year’s trip. While we also usually take a couple of our project cars along, for ’01 only Project Z28 was alive. Alas, our Project Formula ride is sitting in the garage with the engine scattered all over the place – the unfortunate result of a broken gear in the oil pump. Project Z28 was running great, though, what with the new Vortech blower stuffing the 383 with plenty of air.

Anyway, to go along with our ’95 Z28, this year we once again hit up a GM division, Chevrolet, to be exact, and they responded by offering us their 302 Z28 SEMA show car from last year. This trick little Camaro features a Westech Automotive-built LS1 that’d been destroked to 302 cubic inches, among all kinds of other tweaks.

We also managed to talk Jim Mattison, owner of Automotive Services and Pontiac Historic Services, into letting us drive the one-off Hurst Hauler Kammback (German for station wagon?) Trans Am on the Power Tour. This car was also poised on a show stand at SEMA a few short months ago, and was a collaboration between Automotive Services, Mr. Gasket Corp., and Pontiac Motor Division. (In all modesty, we should mention that Year One did play a small part in the construction of the special rear hatch on the car.)

To celebrate the release of our very first Mustang catalog ever, we had arranged with the good folks at Holley Performance Products to drive their Holley/Crank & Chrome Mustang on this year’s tour, but alas, last-minute gremlins (and perhaps the Holley guys coming to their senses) prevented that car from making the trip. To our relief, however, Holley offered up another stout Mustang, this one a ’93 model that’d been used to develop the stout Holley SysteMax engine system for the 5.0 Mustang family. While not as visually trick as the other car, the red ’93 ran like gangbusters and never skipped a beat all the way across the country.

Click on the individual buttons below to see more shots of each car, along with a few of the technical highlights found in each. And who knows, we might be calling you next to see if your ride is available for a short run across the continent. We’ll treat it right, of course…… Always let it warm up before it’s wide open, use the clutch for all power shifts, slide it around left and right corners so the tires wear evenly, you know, take it easy on it……