"Before I was old enough to walk, my dad was taking me to various types of racing events, from local drag racing to the Daytona 500," says Patrick Rall, a lifetime automotive expert, diehard Dodge fan, and respected auto journalist for over 10 years. "He owned a repair shop and had a variety of performance cars when I was young, but by the time I was 16, he was ready to build me my first drag car – a 1983 Dodge Mirada that ran low 12s. I spent 10 years traveling around the country, racing with my dad by my side. While we live in different areas of the country, my dad still drag races at 80 years old in the car that he built when I was 16 while I race other vehicles, including my 2017 Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat and my 1972 Dodge Demon 340.
"Although I went to college for accounting, my time in my dad’s shop growing up allowed me the knowledge to spend time working as a mechanic before getting my accounting degree, at which point I worked in the office of a dealership group. While I was working in the accounting world, I continued racing and taking pictures of cars at the track. Over time, I began showing off those pictures online and that led to my writing.
"Ten years ago, I left the accounting world to become a full-time automotive writer and I am living proof that if you love what you do, you will never “work” a day in your life," adds Rall, who has clocked in time as an auto mechanic, longtime drag racer and now automotive journalist who contributes to nearly a dozen popular auto websites dedicated to fellow enthusiasts.
"I love covering the automotive industry and everything involved with the job. I was fortunate to turn my love of the automotive world into a hobby that led to an exciting career, with my past of working as a mechanic and as an accountant in the automotive world provides me with a unique perspective of the industry.
"My experience drag racing for more than 20 years coupled with a newfound interest in road racing over the past decade allows me to push performance cars to their limit, while my role as a horse stable manager gives me vast experience towing and hauling with all of the newest trucks on the market today.
In the mid 1960s, both Ford Motor Company and the Dodge Brothers were toying with a shift from a traditional pickup truck style to a cab-forward design. Dodge introduced the A100 and Ford’s answer was the 1964 Econoline pickup. This week’s vintage video features the television commercial for the 1964 Econoline pickup and while this […] More »
The Ford F-150 Raptor from SVT is engineered to be the best off-road performance truck to ever come off of a factory assembly line, but when you add a supercharger and take the Raptor to a rain soaked road course – the off-roading monster becomes a drift happy beast. Today’s Truckin’ Fast video features one […] More »
The Ford F-150 featured in this week’s Tire Smokin’ video was being turned in on the Cash for Clunkers campaign that helped to remove older vehicles from the road while spurring new car sales. This government program paid people to turn in their aging vehicle, which would then be crushed and recycled so before the […] More »
Typically when you see a Ford F-150 with a set of big, shiny 20 inch wheels the first thing that you think is “I bet that guy doesn’t do anything with that truck”…and you would be right in most cases. However, this week’s Muddy video features a 2004 F-150 fitted with a set of flashy […] More »
It has been a handful of years since Ford Motor Company offered a manual transmission in the F-150 pickups and although the improvement in automatic transmission technology has allowed the self-shifting gears boxes to offer many of the same attributes as the manual – there are still times when it would be better to have […] More »
For this week’s Throwback video I dug up an old segment from MotorWeek that included their first take on the then-new 1993 Ford F-150 Lightning – the truck billed as a Mustang GT with a cargo bed. After going over the exterior aspects that allowed the early Lightning to stand apart from the non-performance F-150 […] More »
The only thing better than watching one really quick Ford F-150 stretch its legs is watching two built half ton Ford trucks go head to head at incredible speeds so this week’s Truckin Fast Wednesday feature has a pair of 2013 F-150s showing off what they can do. While the EcoBoost has become the most […] More »