This full-page ad in Popular Hot Rodding dates from 1979, and really brings back memories.

I recently spent a day going through the old Popular Hot Rodding archives. I plan to bring you some of the more intriguing tidbits as blogs over the next few weeks, and this old ad from Hurst really made the memories flood back. The ad features a guy in a ’78 or ’79 Camaro, who stops to chat up a cute girl, presumably at the local cruise scene. The inference is that having a cool set of shifters will help you pick up girls.

I remember checking out a used ’84 Hurst Olds Cutlass 442 at a Pontiac dealer around 1988 or ’89. It had the same Hurst Lightning Rods as in the ad, only they were factory installed. I’d never seen them before, and immediately associated them with the levers of a Lenco transmission—which is exactly what Hurst intended. The car salesman gave me a 10-minute demo before he let me drive the car. There was an elaborate procedure for upshifting and downshifting (according to him), and if I did it wrong, I was told, the trans might break! That 307 Olds motor couldn’t peel the skin off butterscotch pudding, and that salesman tried over and over to light the tires on the 1-2 shift, but to no avail.

The bottom line was that this was a very fun product, and it really got the driver involved. The Lightning Rods were more fun than a barrel full of monkeys, and turned an automatic transmission back into a manual.