National Tour of Customized Hot Rods Revs Up at Museum

The National Hot Rod Power Tour may be the ultimate car lover’s dream.

A caravan of custom-built hot rods will make its way across the country, starting today at 9 a.m. from the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles. Hundreds of cars parked Thursday at the museum, while the car owners prepared for the tour.

The drivers will wind their way from the West Coast to Ohio, where a hot rod festival will is scheduled next weekend. After the entourage leaves Los Angeles, traveling out of the city along Interstate 10, it will stop for the first night in Las Vegas and spend some time at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, a race track under construction.

The tour is to travel about 2,500 miles through Colorado, Kansas, Illinois and Detroit before ending up in Ohio. About 200 will start the trek from Petersen, but more are expected to join along the way--a total of about 1,000 cars by the tour’s finish.

Hot rods come in many styles and types, but they have one thing in common: they are high-performance vehicles that can travel fast.

“But we’re only going 65 [mph] on this trip, I swear,” said Joseph Molina, a spokesman for the tour.

A typical hot rod is built in the style of a car from the 1930s, Molina said. The prices for these specialty cars are $15,000 to $150,000, and some go for as much as $300,000, he said.

The national tour is sponsored for the second consecutive year by Hot Rod magazine, which has been published since the late 1940s by Petersen Publishing.

“When we first started the magazine, people said it wouldn’t last--that hot rods were just a fad,” said Robert E. Petersen, chairman of the board for Petersen Publishing. “Well, we’re still going.”

Petersen will be leading this year’s hot rod tour in a green 1935 Ford.