I’m very honored to announce that Liz Miles has come on board Popular Hot Rodding as our new Tech Editor. She replaces Steven Rupp, who has moved over to our sister publication, Camaro Performers. I’m really excited about Liz being here for a bunch of reasons, but first some background. You may remember that Liz was featured in Hot Rod magazine two years ago for the work she did on her outstanding ’68 Camaro. As a Wyotech graduate, Liz built her car entirely by herself, and that included building the small-block, fabricating much of the chassis, and painting it. Liz is truly a Jack (Jill?) of all trades!
As if that weren’t enough, Liz is an avid road race junkie. When she’s not out carving up the mountain roads with her Suzuki GSX-R, she’s out flogging her Camaro. (You may have seen her drifting it recently in Flowmaster’s TV ad, where she lifts the inside front wheel.) Liz brings a wealth of experience to PHR in her short 22 years, and I’m thrilled to have her handling the tech duties at PHR.
Working with Liz has been a lot of fun. Her youth gives me a much better insight into the thought process of our younger readers, and that’s important. If we don’t actively seek out, and meet the needs of younger readers, the muscle car hobby could go the way of the street rod, with rich guys sitting around polishing $30,000 paint jobs on manicured fairgrounds. That isn’t Liz, I’m happy to report. She’s had to get by on a skinny-kid budget, scraping up pennies for parts and doing all the work herself. In an odd way, she’s got a lot in common with us family guy types who scrape and save enough for the occasional swap meet trip while putting food on the table.
Ignoring the fact that Liz is a woman would be like pretending that there isn’t an elephant in your living room when there really is. I believe that having a positive female role model in our muscle car hobby can have a profound effect on men and women alike. We all have seen the token TV sidekick chick on our favorite Saturday car shows, but once again, that isn’t Liz. She’s the real deal. She counts among her favorite tools a 220v Lincoln MIG welder, and she uses it often.
Liz is already weaving her spell around the PHR digs, getting excited about all the future projects she’s planning, and all the track days she’s looking forward to. And it's infectious. In fact, her very first day on the job, she dived right into the engine compartment of my 2003 Mustang GT to swap the spark plugs for our upcoming Vortech supercharger installation story. Make-up and manicures? Yeah, she still does all that shtick, but to see her pull those filthy plugs in no time flat without breaking a nail was impressive. (I live with women, so trust me on this.) I confess, I felt kind of embarrassed. My normal routine on a location shoot is to suddenly become engrossed with some detail on my camera the moment anything difficult comes up.
And I suspect she’ll have that effect on many of you. “Hey, if a girl can do it, how hard can it be?” you may find yourself asking. The only problem with that, of course, is that she’s a serious trained professional under that attractive exterior. If you think being a woman in some way marginalizes what she’s doing, you’re going to get burned, pal. But if it gets you off the sofa and into the garage, then it’s all for the better!