Exclusive: What’s Next for David Freiburger After Roadkill

David Freiburger has been in automotive enthusiast media for decades. He helmed Petersen’s 4-Wheel & Off-Road, Car Craft, and Hot Rod, where he became most well-known as the co-host of Roadkill on YouTube alongside Hot Rod Staff Editor Mike Finnegan. Roadkill‘s run ended late last year, so I wanted to catch up and see what Freiburger has planned for the future. We met for lunch in Burbank and then visited his home garage to see some of his stash of hot rod parts and current projects.

A bit of background: Freiburger hired me at Hot Rod in 2011, just in time to go on that year’s Power Tour. In addition to serving as an associate editor of the magazine at the time, I helped out a bit on the first season of Roadkill and helped the show get its name. Because I could tow a trailer, I was often on standby in case things went sideways, which they often did. In TV parlance, I was a “Production Assistant” or “Production Driver.” I also spent some long nights in the shop and on set with the rest of the film crew and Hot Rod staff, wrenching on cars or in “production meetings” brainstorming ideas that could salvage an entertaining show after some mechanical disaster or another. It was hectic, but it was also a lot of fun.

Post-Roadkill, Freiburger has a lot of irons in the fire. The one that he’s most excited about is his recent move to announcing NHRA drag racing. “I’m doing in-booth announcing, what they call in-venue. It’s not for Fox TV, but they do stream it on NHRA.TV. I’m also working for NHRA on Fox doing top-end interviews, in-the-pits interviews, basically what they call field reporting.” He’ll be covering eight events this year: two at Pomona, two at Vegas, plus Gainesville, Chicago, Bristol, and Indy.

Just like any professional sport, there is a tremendous amount of backstory that can give context to every NHRA event, plus the myriad statistics that can help fans appreciate each pass. Matchups against other drivers, personal best reaction times and trap speeds, margins of victory—the list goes on.

“I do research and study for at least two days before every single event,” Freiburger said, “just to familiarize myself with the progress of every racer and who’s doing what in the point standings, and you’re looking for storylines. For example, Tony Stewart: Indy car guy, NASCAR champion, Sprint Car champion, Midget champion. He’s the greatest driver of our generation, and he’s now doing NHRA drag racing, but he had struggled and not won anything in his first year. Then this weekend he won for the first time.”

When drivers get out of their cars on the top end, field reporters like Freiburger have about 10 seconds to ask a question, hoping the driver can offer a good response while coming down from a 300-mph adrenaline high.

The transition from Hot Rod to NHRA has rich precedent. The magazine’s founder and first Editor, Wally Parks, also founded the NHRA. Freiburger’s Editor-in-Chief successor at Hot Rod, David Kennedy, also left for the NHRA.

“I feel like it’s kind of an extension of the heritage of hot-rodding and what I do for a living,” Freiburger said. Helping to make the move even easier, Freiburger gets to work in the booth alongside Brian Lohnes, who announced Drag Week with Freiburger for years. For those that don’t know, Drag Week is a Hot Rod magazine event created by Freiburger to torture drag racers… and they keep signing up for it. Racers must make at least one pass at a dragstrip and then drive along a prescribed route with checkpoints to make it to a separate dragstrip to race the following day. Racers rack up about 1000 miles on their drag cars over five days of racing to claim the title of World’s Fastest Street Car. Lohnes and Freiburger provided hours of announcing and commentary for five straight days of racing during many Drag Week events, helping build great chemistry.

“Brian Lohnes and I actually met at the very first Drag Week in 2005.” Freiburger recalled, “He was a cub reporter for Competition Plus. We hit it off and have been friends ever since, and he definitely helped me get the job. I also benefited, I think, from just being a guy hanging around NHRA races for like five or six years. Most of the people there were familiar with me, so it’s a pretty comfortable fit to just slide in and do the job.”

All of the engine tech articles and dyno sessions Freiburger has been a part of over his automotive career have prepared him for this NHRA role. “I think the thing I’m best at there is I do technical standups explaining things, which is just like what I was doing on Engine Masters TV. That’s what I’m most comfortable with there.” Freiburger said.

The fast-paced nature of a live event means that the tech explanations must be broad and quick, but you’ve got to know the details to summarize them in digestible bits that can fit into a dynamic broadcast.

“You can’t go deep into any subject, but you can give people the ‘wow, I bet you didn’t know this’ kind of highlights,” said Freiburger. One of his recent tech tidbits was an explanation of pedaling a drag car: “You’re in a Top Fuel car and it breaks the tires loose at half track, and you obviously have to get throttle control to regain traction or do the best you can to get the finish line before the other guy. It’s just more complicated than you think it is because the pedals on those things have very little travel,” Freiburger explained. “One thing I didn’t know, that I learned from J.R. Todd, a Funny Car driver, is that there’s all the butterflies on the injector hat on top of the supercharger, and when you’re at half-track and you’re wide open and the thing’s making 12,000 horsepower, you’ve gotta pedal it and close the throttle blades a little bit, but there’s so much airflow coming in from the supercharger that it wants to suck the throttle shut. They have to actually work against that while they’re modulating the throttle.”

The NHRA work on camera is the newest endeavor, but Freiburger’s main job is still his YouTube channel, @TheDavidFreiburger, which he started with a rusty Buick road trip that was a proto-Roadkill episode. Hitting the highway in a dodgy rattletrap is Freiburger’s milieu. “I do a lot of road trips, but that’s not 100% of it,” Freiburger said of his YouTube channel, which also includes tours of the San Fernando Valley and Southern California desert that point out places of interest to hot-rodders. “I probably do YouTube wrong because the algorithm wants you to post essentially the same video every single week at the same time. . . I do car stuff every single week, but sometimes it’s, ‘hey, look at this cool car I got that I’m gonna flip’, and sometimes it’s ‘look at this road trip!’ Sometimes it’s a 4×4. Sometimes it’s a drag car, so it’s kind of all over the map.”

That variety, though, is what his viewers have come to expect and appreciate.

Freiburger’s worked with several other hot-rodding personalities over the years, and many fans have been wondering if he’d team up with anyone on his new channel. They didn’t have to wait long for an answer.

“I guess the breaking news is Finnegan and I are gonna do an episode next week,” said Freiburger. “It’s the first time on YouTube that he and I will get back together after Roadkill and do a cross-country road trip.

“You came up with Roadkill, we need another [name].” Freiburger said, putting me on the spot. I suggested “Skidmarks” because that was my personal frontrunner back int he day, before I also suggested “Roadkill” as the name—not for the YouTube show, but for a one-shot magazine of rat rods and other strange rides that our company at the time didn’t have a proper venue to feature. That magazine eventually became Overkill, which ran for a few issues. (As far as I can tell, the Skidmarks name is, for some reason, still up for grabs.)

Freiburger’s YouTube channel will also be one of the best ways to keep up on developments of many of the former Roadkill project cars, as he bought 11 of them when the company sold them off. Finnegan also scooped up a few for himself. “I’m looking forward to getting after stubby Bob,” Freiburger noted, referencing the heavy-duty Ford dump truck that was turned into a wheelstander by shortening the wheelbase and installing a mid-engine big-block Chevy V-8 and a V-drive. “It needs everything. The transmission is brand new. It’s got a GearStar 4L80E in it, but the engine’s blown up, the rear end’s blown up, the suspension front and rear is trash. It needs brakes. . . I mean, it’s a disaster.”

Aside from former Roadkill project cars, Freiburger is always looking for low-buck project cars and 4x4s that he can wrench on and road trip. “I gave away a ‘68 Camaro last year. The people who won it flew into L.A., drove it all the way home to Atlanta, and they got 20 miles per gallon the whole way,” he said. He’s got a 1972 RoadRunner that he’s been finishing up that will likely be used for the next sweepstakes on his YouTube channel, but he also has an exciting new project that he’ll keep for himself that he’s been hoping to do for ages. We won’t ruin that surprise, but here’s a hint: his Mopar roots have been calling.

Without episodes of Roadkill keeping him on the road for a week at a time, Freiburger has been free to take on some additional new assignments. Cleetus McFarland invited him to announce the Freedom 500, an annual race of retired Crown Victoria cop cars that McFarland hosts on the circle track he owns. Freiburger has raced it himself, and other drivers have included NASCAR’s Corey LaJoie and Michael Waltrip, as well as last year’s race winner, Travis Pastrana. There’s also the Duct Tape Drags, an event Freiburger started that he describes as a tongue-in-cheek drag race version of 24 Hours of Lemons. “It’s a cool event because there are imports and trucks and muscle cars and late models and old guys and young guys,” Freiburger said.  “Everybody shows up at this thing because it’s just a party.” The event details are still being negotiated, but you can expect a similar party in Tucson again this year.

Between his YouTube channel and announcing at NHRA races, the Freedom 500, and the Duct Tape Drags, he’ll be putting plenty of miles on his flip-flops this year. He continues to preach the gospel of internal combustion.