Will the REAL “Mod Rod” Please Stand Up?

For our second installment of Modelo En Bofus, I’m already stepping outside the box to take a look at something unconventional: this is a deeper look at one of the more recent Hot Wheels fantasy cars.

I picked this one for two reasons: first, because it has a design element that particularly appeals to me, and I’ll get to that in a minute, but beforehand, I’ll discuss the second reason why I’m focused on this one, and that’s its name.

Any of y’all who read this blog know that I grew up a Matchbox collector, and we all know that Mattel won the “toy car wars” and now owns the Matchbox brand. So, you may be aware that in 1971, Lesney Products & Co Ltd was attempting to out hot-wheel Hot Wheels by making a series of their own weird fantasy cars, and many of these were arguably worse than the weird schtuff that Hot Wheels was coming up with at the same time. One of the cars they released in that year as #1 in their 1-75 series was called the Mod Rod.

It was a bizarre and ugly car, an example of Lesney trying and failing to do something they never should have done, but ugly though it may be, it’s also a part of my childhood. I have several versions of this car in my collection, and it’s a piece that has some particular interest for collectors like me as it is the only car (that I am aware of) ever released in the 1-75 series with red wheels, although the red-wheeled version is a fairly rare variation: most releases have conventional black wheels. While it is a generic enough name that they can’t be accused of plagiarism, it is interesting to note that Mattel chose to reuse that name on this Hot Wheels release. Then again, even if we did call it plagiarism, we couldn’t very well call it theft, since they own the Matchbox name and all of its intellectual property anyway!

So, this modern day Mod Rod made its first appearance in 2019. It was designed by Dmitriy Shakhmatov, a Ukrainian who worked as a Hot Wheels designer from 2014 to 2023. One wonders why anyone would ever leave such a job, but during his nine years at Mattel, he was quite prolific, responsible for the design of dozens of cool cars. This, IMHO, was one of his best.

The combination of the wraparound glass with the classic de-fendered hot rod shape and stance is interesting: if someone had described it to me verbally, I would’ve shaken my head and said it would never work, but surprisingly enough it actually does: no one would ever mistake this as a production car, but as a one-off custom, it looks like a viable operable car, which is one of the things that makes it interesting.

However, the car’s most interesting feature, IMHO, is what’s powering it upfront! If you look very closely at the engine of this car, you might notice something different than what you usually expect to see powering a Hot Wheels, hot rod: this is not a blown big block, V8! Rather, it appears to my eye to be a very deliberate model of a Chevrolet/GMC “Stovebolt” inline 6!

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this blog – principally in this post – I have owned several vehicles powered by this engine throughout my life, and I have a real affinity for them. Although many hot rodders whiff at 6-poppers, and the customizers of the day considered them to be boat anchors, today’s “retro rodders” and “home-bilders” have developed a real respect for the “Stovebolt,” and I’ve seen some really cool ones built with really impressive vintage speed equipment. I myself had a Fenton dual carb manifold for one of these topped with two Carter YF carburetors back in my own hot-rodding days. I bought that piece for installation in the ‘56 Chevy 210 2-door sedan that I owned at the time, although I never got around to doing an engine rebuild on that car before financial disaster struck as a result of the 2008 crash and forced me to sell most of what I owned. The plan was, though, to keep the inline-6 in that car. That made my friend and mentor Ken Leib apoplectic, because he was one of those very old-school hot rodders who thought of Stovebolts as boat anchors, but to this day I still think it would be cool to build one up like the one shown right here on this model! It’s true that even with speed equipment there’s a limit to how much power you can get out of such a primitive long stroke pushrod engine, but everyone knows that what these power plants lack in performance, they more than make up for in durability and longevity, and that’s worth a lot, even to a hot rodder! That’s why it made my own personal list of the 10 greatest automotive engines of all time.

For that reason alone, I thought the Mod Rod was worthy of a closer look, and like all modern day Hot Wheels, it’s been re-issued so many times in so many colors that it’s almost impossible to keep track of without a spreadsheet. I myself have acquired six variations of it, including the original release in slate blue and my favorite one, the satin black version with red scallops. There’s also a reverse color issue in metallic red with black scallops, and one of the more recent issues in mint green with black scallops is one of the best looking hot rods Hot Wheels has ever made! The most recent issue is metallic black and yellow, with an Ed Roth-style monster face painted on the side and the name “Broken Promises” stenciled across the doors with a brush… an excellent recreation of the past, making it look like it just drove out of Roth’s own studio back in the early 1960s!

It’s little vintage touches like these that make modern day Hot Wheels so cool to Kustom Kulture fanatics like me, and they send a message to us that there are still some cool people out there making decisions even in a massive company like Mattel, and they’re still paying attention to what we like and want! There’s still a few of us “old skool” guys out there!

It may be too much to hope for that the Mod Rod will undergo a transformation into a real car the way the Twin Mill did some years ago, but it sure looks like it could be real if someone wanted to build one… Any of you genius fabricators out there thinking about taking that project on? 😃