Just listen to these lyrics from the Beach Boys' "Little Deuce Coupe": "And comin' off the line when the light turns green, Well she blows 'em outta the water like you never seen, I get pushed out of shape and it's hard to steer, When I get rubber in all four gears."

That's right, illegal street racing. Brian Wilson is Vin Diesel.

OK, not really, but still, listen to that close-harmony homage to hot-rodding and you can't help wondering what possessed the mild-mannered Beach Boy to pen a song about doing "a hundred and forty in the top-end floored." At least, that's something I've always wondered, up until checking out this year's Deuce Days event in downtown Victoria.

Turns out the Little Deuce Coupe has quite the following, as there were more than 900 cars there. 900! That's an entire Northshore Auto Mall full of hot-rodded pre-'51 American Iron. Apparently the San Francisco contingent, 215 strong, booked out an entire ferry for the trip. Can you imagine the noise when it was time to unload?

But what's a Deuce anyway? Well, quite simply, it's the most popular hot-rod ever. In 1932 ('32 being where the Deuce moniker comes from), Ford was still doing what Ford does best: bringing mobility to the people. Their Model B had various improvements over the Model A it produced, and was available in so many variants as to make modern car choices look boring: coupe, cabriolet, phaeton, delivery van, sedan, convertible sedan, roadster and the iconic "Woodie" station wagon.

The best improvement Ford made? Making their flathead V-8 available in pretty much every model. This made the '32 the first mass-produced car with V-8 muscle, although it wasn't much muscle to begin with. The original flathead produced something in the neighbourhood of 65 horsepower, which meant that even a car we consider a bit weedy today, like a 106 h.p. Toyota Yaris, could theoretically kick sand in its face. However, the '32 has several advantages over its cartoonish modern rivals.

First of all, a V-8 Ford was cheap: $490 for a roadster. Secondly, it was light, with body-on-frame construction, and no safety equipment on-board unless you bought yourself a Bible and kept it in the glove compartment for Last Rites. Lastly, that flathead V-8 was just waiting for somebody to open it up, port the heads, bump the compression ratio, tune the carburettor, rig up a set of headers and straight-pipes, and just generally make it faster.

But this was the '30s, and few people who could afford a car were interested in making anything that we'd recognize as a "hot rod" today. Sure, there were cars that were fiddled with for more power, but generally, they weren't being modified for the fun of it, but for more nefarious reasons. Witness public enemy number one John Dillinger's famous letter to Henry Ford, thanking him for "building the Ford V-8 as fast and as sturdy a car as you did, otherwise I would not have gotten away from the coppers in that Wisconsin, Minnesota case."

However, like many things in North American culture, the roots of all kinds of car-related activities can be traced back to the end of the Second World War and the influx of G.I.s, marines, sailors and airmen, all of whom had money in their pockets and a desire to shake off authority after the rigid rules of armed service.

Anybody who watches Mad Men knows what that '50s era of prosperity was like in the East. Generally speaking, it was the factory workers and managers who had stayed home throughout the war that drove most of the boom. They had plenty of savings from the war years and spent them on the streamlined, bechromed behemoths of the '40s and '50s. These were lead sleds, big heavy cars built more for comfort than for speed.

So what happened to all the light cheap Fords? Well, the keys to all those trade-ins were ending up in the pockets of returning troops, and in the growing new cultural centre of Southern California, young men were stripping them down and building them up.

The hot rod scene was both culture and counter culture; young people were rebelling against the staid world of fedoras and suburbs with rockabilly music, denim and speed. By the early '60s, when the Beach Boys came on the scene, the mix of surf music, golden California beaches and hot rods was completely interwoven in the public conscience. Kids in wintry Maine dreamed of surf boards, bikinis, and a flat-black, flamed, flathead V-8 '32 roadster.

Eventually, with the dull, ponderous slowness that was to cause so many problems for them in later years, the major American car manufacturers caught on to the fact that the youth market favoured straight-line speed over deluxe interiors and thus started the pony car wars, and eventually the era of the muscle car eclipsed the hot rod in the popular imagination.

Still, for the 900-odd hot-rodders that filled the streets around our province's capital over the weekend, that dream of individualism and creativity is as strong as it ever was. Whether roadster, coupe or sedan, most of the cars would have been nearly indistinguishable to start with, but each has been treated like a blank canvas. Every possible variation was there, from ZZ-Top-style three-window coupe with a ten-grand paint job, to checker-pattern engine bay and dog-dish hub caps, to "Big Daddy" Roth-style kustom, to original condition patina'd cars with blown Chevy 350s.

Whether or not you're a hot rodder yourself, without the influence of these cars and their owners, everyone would be driving near-identical cars, without the ability to choose spoilers or alloy wheels or even colours. Through them, the car became more than just transportation, it became a symbol of freedom of expression.

As for myself, as a modern hot-rodder, I tip my cap at my predecessors and their stripped-out, hopped-up deuces. Mine might be a wagon, but like the song says, "you don't know what I got."

Brendan McAleer is a freelance writer and automotive enthusiast. If you have a suggestion for a column, or would be interested in having your car club featured, please contact him at mcaleer.nsnews@gmail.com.