Words & Photos: Tommy Parry

Most rat rods grace green lawns or paved parking lots when they want to be seen. Some find their way onto the drag strip for a duel, but very few engage in the sideways stuff so popular with the youngsters today. Embracing both the old and the new, German car enthusiast Patrick Becker and his Magic Motors Speedshop put together a classic ‘29 Ford with a Chevy LS to go drifting. It’s not a conventional platform, but with the torque offered by the LS and the short wheelbase, it seems to handle the demands of drifting pretty well.

The fiberglass Tudor body would be sufficiently light for drifting, but with the demands of the sport and the torque from the proposed powerplant, it would need a little more rigidity. Becker took the body and designed a comprehensive space frame, scrapping the stock floor in process. A pair of Kirkey seats, adjustable pedals, and a minimalist wheel were added for a simplistic racer’s interior.

A beam axle up front and a solid axle with a four-link setup in back make up the suspension, while the classic Rocket Racing wheels, pushed out with massive spacers, sit at all four corners. The wheels help keep some of that classic look, but offer enough meat for the LS to spin up while carrying remarkable speed.

After growing tired of his Opel Kadett drifter, he took this icon and went full Americana. The ‘29 Ford he’s dubbed “The Flamethrower” was cleaned, primed, and painted in full camouflage. Not content with only the battlefield color scheme, he added the shark-toothed, gaping mouth graphics associated with WWII-era fighter planes. The imagery was already quite thick, but the icing on the cake were the California license plate and the Confederate Flag sticker adorning the Ford’s rear end. To complement that mish-mash of classic American imagery, Becker gave it a full Rockabilly soundtrack with a snarling Chevrolet V8.

With a positive displacement supercharger sitting on top of the exposed LS and a set of weed-burner style shorty headers, the engine makes more than enough power and sound to turn heads if the crowd finds the sight of a rat rod drifting too tame. Rigged to spit flames, this engine and the car it sits in are attention magnets, and while the collection of Americana adorning the body is a little much, it’s a German interpretation. At the end of the day, it wins drift events, gets fans out of their seats, and pulls more steering angle than most straight-axle rat rods in existence, so even if the Spitfire-styling is a bit strong, it’s ok!