16-03-2004, 16:01 PM
Väike jutt selle termini päritolu kohta, kopitud ühest arvutiteemalisest foorumist (sic!). Minu meelest päris hästi lahti seletatud (kuigi ei ütle, et see nüüd mingi absoluutne ja lõplik tõde on...). Noorematele foorumiliikmetele ehk huvitav teada.
During WWII, the US built military airbases all over the country. When the war ended, many were abandoned, leaving what were their runways easily accessible to the general public.
The US saw enormous industrial growth in the post-war period, and the average family’s level of disposable income grew to new highs. All this prosperity led to an idle youth with lots of pocket money. And, kids being kids, they went out looking for thrills.
For kids near those abandoned airbases, a common pastime was to use those old runways as racetracks. They created a form of straight-line, standing-start acceleration tests we now call drag racing.
America’s economy had become very consumer-item driven and owning a shiny, new automobile was all the rage. This left a surplus of cheap, older cars, especially those built before the war. Since Mom & Dad’s new Lincoln wasn’t fast enough on the track, the kids would buy these old, cheap cars and modify them for racing.
They would soup up the engines of course, but that cost money. Stripping off weight also made them faster, and that was free. So they’d pull everything off the car that didn’t serve to make it go faster. Fenders, seats, sometimes the whole body (remember this was in the era of heavy-gauge steel bodies, and a car’s body was anything but light-weight) got tossed in the dustbin.
Missing fenders and body panels usually left frame rails exposed and cars so modified were nicknamed ‘rods.’ Those that were faster were ‘hotter,’ so they became ‘hot rods’. In time that was shortened to hotrod and later that evolved into a verb describing any activity aimed at taking an ordinary item and modifying it expressly to make it faster.
During WWII, the US built military airbases all over the country. When the war ended, many were abandoned, leaving what were their runways easily accessible to the general public.
The US saw enormous industrial growth in the post-war period, and the average family’s level of disposable income grew to new highs. All this prosperity led to an idle youth with lots of pocket money. And, kids being kids, they went out looking for thrills.
For kids near those abandoned airbases, a common pastime was to use those old runways as racetracks. They created a form of straight-line, standing-start acceleration tests we now call drag racing.
America’s economy had become very consumer-item driven and owning a shiny, new automobile was all the rage. This left a surplus of cheap, older cars, especially those built before the war. Since Mom & Dad’s new Lincoln wasn’t fast enough on the track, the kids would buy these old, cheap cars and modify them for racing.
They would soup up the engines of course, but that cost money. Stripping off weight also made them faster, and that was free. So they’d pull everything off the car that didn’t serve to make it go faster. Fenders, seats, sometimes the whole body (remember this was in the era of heavy-gauge steel bodies, and a car’s body was anything but light-weight) got tossed in the dustbin.
Missing fenders and body panels usually left frame rails exposed and cars so modified were nicknamed ‘rods.’ Those that were faster were ‘hotter,’ so they became ‘hot rods’. In time that was shortened to hotrod and later that evolved into a verb describing any activity aimed at taking an ordinary item and modifying it expressly to make it faster.