The top 10 Hemmings blog posts of 2009
It’s been another banner year for the Hemmings blog. We recently published our 3,000th post, traffic’s increasing, and we’re still having fun writing the posts and connecting with readers. And of course, we can’t help but be curious as to which posts contributed to this banner year, so we’re going to take a quick look back at the 10 most popular posts from 2009, as we’ve done the last few years. Starting with:
#10 – Le Freak, not so chic: Tour de France promotional vehicles. One surefire way to attract a lot of readers: Throw a lot of photographs and information at them. Another surefire way to attract readers: Highlight the most wacked-out French promotional vehicles ever. David TA covered both of those bases, so it’s amazing this one didn’t rank higher.
#9 – Save these cars: The Spring of the Estate. Another photo-filled TA post, only this time, he pushed the Abandoned Cars button. The junkyards and abandoned vehicles category is consistently tops with our readers, so no surprise here. Hey, if you bought a vehicle at one of these auctions, let us know.
#8 – Theft of ‘69 Mustang thwarted, but at what price? Some stories need to be told, such as that of Mike Gomez, whose just-restored Mustang was nabbed right out from under his nose. What he did next certainly took courage.
#7 – 2009 Japanese Classic Car Show. Remember that rule about lots of photos? Jeff Koch exploited it well with his coverage of the Japanese Classic Car Show. Even though he posted well after most other blogs had, he still got a huge response.
#6 – Driven: A 600hp LS7 Camaro… with a warranty. One of the coolest things about the musclecar era were the tuner shops that built more powerful cars than the factory was willing to build, and then sell them to the public. DeNooyer Chevrolet in Albany has built the modern version of the tuner Camaro, and Mike McNessor was there to document it. He followed up in October with a more powerful version as well.
#5 – from the fertile mind of Joseph Ihnat, part 1 – Poppen’s Special kid’s racer. The ingenuity that Joseph Ihnat put into the pedal car he built for his four-year-old captured the imagination of the DIY crowd this year, and for good reason – half his kitchen went into the build of the pint-sized racer.
#4 – 2010 Camaro: Every single option revealed. Yes, we’re an old-car blog, but the new Camaro, with its retro styling and musclecar cred, has been worth covering on occasion, such as when TA scooped the blogosphere with the entire option list for the Camaro.
#3 – A neat trick for removing bearing races. David LaChance’s exploits with old British tin have proved quite popular this year, and he earned a good amount of attention when he ran into a unique problem with the axles on his Triumph Spitfire, solved with a bit of ingenuity and a welder.
#2 – Nobody drives my van, but me! I’ll admit that this post was expressly written to take advantage of the forthcoming A-Team movie and the hype surrounding it. I’ll also admit here that, as much as I love the General Lee, I’ll take B.A. Baracus’s GMC over it any day of the week.
#1 – NASA gets Spiritual and drops Stirling engines in some odd vehicles. Green power has been one of the biggest topics in the automotive world the last couple of years, just as it was in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when NASA experimented with Stirling-engined automobiles. We did some digging to bring to light the results of those experiments, along with the reason why NASA chose an AMC Spirit, of all vehicles, to accept such an unusual engine.
Sorry to say that neither of the Bugazzi posts made the list.