Author Archive: Bryan McTaggart
Best of 2020: Digging Out An Old Ford Cement Mixer From The Grasp Of The Canadian Cold
Mark my words, if I am anywhere in the world that has a frost layer that can be measured in inches, I am not a happy human being. I’ll roast my ass off in the desert before I freeze my bits in...
Best of 2020: The 1979 Frank Winchell Speech To The Corvair Society of America
On the surface, the story is well-known: An attorney by the name of Ralph Nader takes aim at General Motors and in particular, the 1960-64 Chevrolet Corvair, in the name of consumer protectionism....
Best of 2020: 2003 Dodge Caravan Dump Truck. Yeah, That’s No Typo.
My official stance on trucks: If you need something sincerely heavy-duty, the kind of rig to tow cars home with, to tote a 5th-wheel or gooseneck camper with, the kind of machine you’ll haul a...
Best of 2020: 2017 IRPA Nationals – A Five-Way Sudden Death Match!
Every race is competitive…everybody wants to win. But there are different forms of winning. Take NASCAR, for example. Some want to catch every checkered flag, whether it’s black and white...
Best of 2020: Speedbird: The Story Of The EPA’s Plymouth Superbird Test Car!
Of all of the things I’ve ever heard of about a car “back in the day”, this one is by far the most amusing one. At the beginning of the 1970s, the Environmental Protection Agency...
Best of 2020: 1992 Chrysler Phantom R/T – The Mexicans Got The Good Mopars!
I’ll say it right now: between the end of the Musclecar era and the arrival of the Dodge Viper, the United States got shafted and Mexico got spoiled. Proof: We got the Dodge Dart Sport, the...
Daydream Into Drift: A Bit Of Russian Sideways Action Courtesy Of A Mushroom Trip
There are some days, usually the sunny warm ones with the long hours, where reality can go and screw itself. These are the days when you are usually out “fishing” on the water, where the...
Best of 2020: 1966 Mercedes-Benz Unimog 406 Car Hauler
It’s easy to take a jab or two at Brian Lohnes’ love of big trucks, but his kryptonite, without a doubt, are Mercedes-Benz Unimogs. At least his rationale behind the obsession is...
Best of 2020: Check Out This Fully Functional Remote-Controlled Ekranoplan!
When the KM ekranoplan was discovered by spy photography in 1967, Western countries could not understand quite what they were looking at. The idea of a ground-effect craft, or ekranoplan, was not on...
Best Of 2020: Ryan Newman’s Last Lap Crash At The 2020 Daytona 500
Nineteen years ago, I was in a classroom in a high school in Illinois, working on a project during a study hall session when I learned what happened: during the running of the 2001 Daytona 500 the...
Merry Christmas From All Of Us At BangShift.com!
A Merry Christmas to you, BangShifters! We hope that you are enjoying the magic that this day brings, whether young or old. Regardless of whether it’s presents, family time, or the time away...
Best of 2020: The Right And Wrong Way To Sell The 1982 Ford Mustang
One of the first rules of marketing is that once you’ve identified which product is your cash cow, you throw a majority of your efforts behind that to keep it front and center of the masses....
Best of 2020: Supercharged Rolls-Royce Meteor V-12 Out Of Zoomies
Oh, you’re a violent little thing, aint’cha? This one goes out to every 200-horsepower 350-powered hot rod that is around…we may never know for sure, but when the earliest hot...
Best of 2020: 1980 GMC C35 With Holmes 480 Towing Equipment
I swear, I’m not doing this on purpose. Teasing Brian with big trucks that we all know he loves dearly sometimes is fun. But I’m pretty sure that over the last couple of months, that...