The best hot rods for blizzards.

I have never fully grasped the term “waiting out the storm.” I can understand doing so during mountaineering expeditions, but not neccessarily during a blizzard in the urban jungle. Not when there are great cars that can plow through snow faster than Tony Montana without blowing a kingpin’s fortune.

All it takes is knowledge of a few “new age” hot-rodding tricks and the vehicles that respond best to such techniques.

In the old days, most hot rodding was done with costly tricks like adding hotter cams or boring out an engine block. And even if you did add some HP, you’d be Jon Krakauer book material if you drove your rod on anything less than hot pavement.

Fortunately today a simple ECU chip upgrade can give you maximum HP without robbing you of snow and ice performance. The key is knowing what cars gain the most HP from chipping without costing a fortune. The Road Rake recommends the following two bargains:

The AudiS4 (Twin Turbo V6). This little beast puts out 250 HP to all four wheels. It runs 0-60 in 5.5. sec. Many magazines (like Sports Car Illustrated–the very best journalism on sports cars) have been less than impressed with the driving dynamics of the S4s chassis (too insulated from the road), but generally agree that it is an overall tight and fast ride.

If you live in a place that benefits from 4WD, however, you can forget all this splitting of hairs and take advantage of a far more potent insight—The S4’s 2.7 liter biturbo engine can be chipped for around $800.00 or so to produce 330 reliable HP. While Audi dissuades owners from doing this, you can simply check into TotalAudiPerformance (TAP.com), for the chip set.

The Subuaru WRX. On the same site (TAP.com) you will find a sister site for the Subuaru. They have the STI chip that pumps this car from 227 hp in stateside trim to the 276 HP you can get in the Japanese version. All for around $800.00.