WHEN HOT ROD WON THE AMBR

Hot Rod's vision of the modern street roadster wins in 1963.

-  DREW HARDIN

You know what they say about beauty and the eye of the beholder. To my eye, the angular, asymmetrical XR-6 isn't a beautiful hot rod. The judges at the Grand National Roadster Show thought differently and awarded the HOT ROD project car the America's Most Beautiful Roadster trophy in 1963.

The XR-6 (experimental roadster, six-cylinder engine) was the brainchild of Associate Editor LeRoi Smith. As he recalled in the buildup's first installment (March ¹62), he was bench racing with other staffers during a coffee break and pointed out that "the cost of the average rod had risen considerably during the past decade, but hot rod design had failed to keep pace. We were immediately frowned upon by the 'old heads. We stuck to our guns, and the result was our resolve to build a modern street roadster of our own." The car would incorporate "many of the automotive design and performance advances introduced during the past several years," but at the same time it would have to be "simple enough for anyone to build" with "no strange and exotic hard-to-duplicate items; it had to be relatively inexpensive, and we must do as much of the work ourselves as possible."