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Ab Jenkins: Son of the Salt
EXCERPT — Utah’s 100 square-mile Bonneville salt flats are an expansive wasteland that claimed the sanity and lives of many settlers during the 1800s. Creeping across the sparse, blinding whiteness of the flats at three miles per hour was a brutal, three-day ordeal for these early settlers. It was common for them to be driven mad by thirst or mirages.…
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Bonneville Speed Week 2019
The legendary Bonneville Speed week is often described as a “bucket list” event for hot rod and racing enthusiasts. Well, the 2019 event could have used some buckets to bail out all of the standing water that settled onto the course and delayed the start of the race until Tuesday. Sadly, we had to scram before any racing took place.…
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In Search of Tiki Exhibit
Photos from the In Search of Tiki museum exhibition at the Forest Lawn Glendale Museum. The exhibition was curated by Doug Nason and Barracuda’s creator, Jeff Fox. The exhibit was on display from August 8th to January 4th. It featured traditional oceanic art, post-modern Polynesian pop and current tiki art. Artists included Shag, Mark Ryden, Marc Davis, William Stout, Edgar…
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Barracuda #28 is out!
That’s right! There’s a 16-page, long-awaited, moderately anticipated mini Barracuda revival edition bound into the middle of Dice Magazine! It features new, bodacious Barracuda Girls, Real-Man Revisited: “Wild Bill” Gelbke, The Barracuda Gourmet and stag cartoons by Chic Tongue. All of the features that’s you’ve grown to tolerate from Barracuda over the years.
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Mormon Meteor III Mystery
In Barracuda issue 11, we told the story of Ab Jenkins, the son of the salt. He pioneered salt flat racing at Bonneville before World War II and set dozens of records with his cars, the Ab Jenkins Special, the Mormon Meteor, the Mormon Meteor II and the Mormon Meteor III. At one time, Jenkins held more records than any…
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Shag’s Thunderbird
Is it wrong to love a car? Not as far as we are concerned, and not as far as artist Shag is concerned. The article is written by Shag himself and tells the story of how he found his “Flairbird” and why he loves it so much. “The year of 1964 was a historic one for Ford Motorcars. The excesses…
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Barracuda Motorsports Racing
Barracuda Magazine Racing Team drivers Don Strouse and Bill English are ready to run! For this season, they are going to be driving mainly in the Outlaw Stock class, a new class of racing started at Bridgeport Speedway in Bridgeport, NJ. The Outlaw Stock class is a variation of the Enduro class, which was created to limit the amount of…
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Duke Kahanamoku: Patron Saint of Modern Surfing
Because of surfing’s boon in America during the post-war era, it is sometimes perceived as a “modern” sport. But it is actually a very old sport. Surfing is believed to have originated in the Pacific Ocean sometime between 1500 B.C. and 400 A.D. Polynesian culture is filled with ancient legends and traditions related to surfing. Hawaiian history contains tales of…
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Meet Jeff Wasserman
Jeff Wasserman was born in 1943 and grew up in Southern California. Like so many other youngsters of the late ’50s and early ’60s, Wasserman got bit by the car bug during his teenage years and set out to build a hot rod in the garage of his parents. In 1961, while still in high school, he started creating the…
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Thor Heyerdahl: Mr. Blue Sky
Norwegian explorer/scientist Thor Heyerdahl built an ancient-styled balsa wood raft Kon-Tiki and sailed it from Peru to Polynesia to prove that ancient South American Indians could have reached Polynesia. The voyage of his raft Kon-Tiki is just one of his many true-life adventures. Heyerdahl was also the first person to do an archaeological dig on Easter Island. He also sailed…
