Legends of Hot Rodding – Rex Burnett, the X-Ray Illustrator of Rodding’s Golden Era
In the beginning, before hot rodding became a billion-dollar industry spitting out million-dollar rods, it was a primitive world of greasy-fingered WWII vets, lake beds of salt and dust, and shade-tree mechanics making-do.
But when a young Hollywood publicist named Robert E. Petersen launched Hot Rod magazine, he tapped into this cauldron of automotive passion. Uniquely, HRM offered more than photographs of fast cars and tech how-to articles. It also added a novel visual hook that helped pry a few extra dimes out of a rodder’s 30W-stained Levis at the newsstand.
To do so, Hot Rod featured cutaway drawings, that is an under-the-skin look at some of the feature vehicles and prominent racecars. Hot Rod utilized these cutaways from the very first issues. Stroker McGurk cartoonist Tom Medley handled the first few cutaways, before this month’s Legend took over.
His name was Rex Burnett, an unassuming former aerospace illustrator, who provided rodders for years the literal blueprint on how a rod and custom was built. If Medley gave the early hot rod movement its laugh track, Rex Burnett would give it its structural foundation.
Known as the “Cutaway King,” Burnett possessed a level of mechanical and artistic acumen that allowed him to review a pile of disassembled, grimy parts and mentally construct a transparent, three-dimensional vehicle on paper. Think of it as skinning a car, revealing its inner workings.
Born in 1918, Burnett spent the war years working in Tulsa for Douglas Aircraft, drawing highly complex assembly instruction schematics for military aircraft. The details of these drawing had to be perfect. An errant line or an inaccurate scale could be cause for structural failure at 10,000 feet. Burnett applied the same standard of mechanical precision to his automotive cutaways.
When the war ended, Burnett moved to Southern California. There he joined automotive oddball Gary Davis in creating a three-wheeled contraption called the Davis Divan. While the Divan quickly wobbled into obscurity, Burnett’s technical drawings caught the eye of Petersen, who quickly recognized Rex’s talent. Pete hired Burnett posthaste. Burnett’s first published cutaway appeared in the September 1948 issue of Hot Rod, illustrating the legendary Pierson Brothers ’34 Ford three-window coupe.
The timing was perfect. Readers were transfixed by this unique view. Burnett’s renderings also helped mute hot-rodding’s rough-and-tumble image. Cars that appeared to be rudimentary were instead pieces of sophisticated design and engineering.
In 2026, an artist can create 3D models with the click of a mouse. Not so in 1948. When viewed today, Burnett’s drawings show a degree of detail worthy of a Gray’s Anatomy textbook.
Burnett’s modus operandi went like this. He would start by visiting the car builder’s shop and shoot black-and-white photographs of individual, raw components — bare frame rails, a quick-change rearend, a detached intake manifold, a naked steering box, etc. Back at his drawing board, he used the black-and-white images as a mental guide before carefully calculating perspective and geometry, Next he sketched out the car’s complete structure on tracing paper.
Rex would next overlay a sheet of vellum (a semi-transparent paper) upon which he used a technical pen dipped in India ink to finalize the drawing. His drawings became blueprint-level roadmaps for hot rodders figuring out how to channel a body, drop an axle, or route a steering column.
Throughout the late 1940s and mid-1950s, Burnett’s work accompanied the “Hot Rod of the Month” feature, providing the definitive visual record of the sport’s most historic machines, racers, rods, and customs.
Legendary cars that earned the Burnett treatment include the Bob McGee ’32 Ford roadster, the Alex Xydias So-Cal Speed Shop belly tank, the Dean Batchelor-designed Shadoff Special streamliner, plus the roadsters of Dick Flint and Bill Niekamp. And the HRM cutaways were Burnett’s side hustle! Yes, Burnett maintained this heavy creative output for Hot Rod while working a full-time job in the aerospace industry. 
Rex Burnett passed away in 2004 at the age of 86. For decades, much of his original artwork remained tucked away in boxes, unseen by the modern public. Rex’s sons, John and Brian Burnett, and The Rodder’s Journal, however, have worked to save and restore many of his original art boards.
The fact that they can do so is a bit of a miracle. When Petersen Publishing thought it was a good idea to purge the archives of “old” files and artwork, much of Burnett’s original art (as well as thousands of photo images) were tossed in the bin, Medley and other staffers who recognized Burnett’s genius literally rooted through trash containers to rescue the priceless work. The editorial staff knew that Burnett’s distinctive style possessed an exceptional visual clarity, making even the complicated machinery of a land speed racer remarkably easy to understand.
The cutaway drawings of Burnett showcase a time capsule of postwar American ingenuity. Burnett documented that raw ingenuity, line by painstaking line, and in doing so, he taught a young subculture exactly how its dreams were put together.
