Another column, another collection of awesome ramp-truck shots sent by the Insider Nation. Anymore, I'm finding it cooler to ogle the cars on the backs of the trucks than I am the trucks themselves. As we are rediscovering/re-remembering, the use of ramp trucks was not confined just to the Funny Cars of our most prominent memories.

Like the wedge-dragster thread that we reference for its similar runaway nature – we went from talking specifically about the very few wedge Top Fuelers to a discussion and show-and-tell of all manner of streamlined vehicles – this thread long ago seems to have left the tracks (hence my Photoshopped sign) and devolved into something much broader.

I appreciate all of the mailings because the photos truly offer us a look back at that aspect of our sport. We're always so interested in what these cars looked like on the track – smoke billowing from the rear tires or the front wheels hiked on a ripping run – that we sometimes forget all the rest of what it took to get them there, and, again, it's not just the nitroburners. Some very creative thinking was going on back then about how to get the race car to the track not only in the most efficient way but sometimes in a battle of one-upsmanship.

Anyway, as we head into the weekend and many of us are finishing off our to-do lists before heading to Indy next week, I'll leave you with another batch of reader-submitted ramp trucks that covers a variety of cars and classes. This may be the last batch because I'm beginning to see a bit of repetition in the ranks, and I'd hate to bore you to tears with that. Besides, I have a very interesting thread to begin next week that's sure to inspire debate among the masses.

In response to my query about Don Schumacher's Funny Car being loaded into an enclosed car carrier bearing Tommy Smith's name, James DeSalvo, who grew up next door to Schumacher, remembered The Don buying the hauler from Smith and going right out on tour with it before he got around to having the truck repainted. "It was an awesome sight at night to see the car loaded in the back of that truck all lit up by the spotlights," he remembered.

After running a shot Tuesday of the enclosed trailer carrying Dick Titsworth's Seaport Automotive flopper, I heard form his son, Jeff, who sent this link with a whole lot of photos of the truck in its many phases. "You can see that it went from short and standard to stretched with sleeper to enclosed as your picture shows," he wrote. Check it out.
 
I received an interesting note from Mike Hooks, who said that Mattel is going to make the Cha Cha Mustang Funny Car (featured in Tuesday's column) this year to add to its DragStrip Demons lineup as well as another go-round of "the Snake" and "Mongoose" wedge Top Fuelers. He said that there also have been a lot of rumors of ramp-truck sets coming later. How cool would that be???
 

Quite a few of you found significant humor in Leigh Buttera's tongue-in-cheek request for a wedge Top Fueler on a ramp truck. "Those two angles were meant to be together," agreed Trevor Caswell.

Well, try as I might – and as could probably be expected – I couldn’t find any reference to (and certainly no photos of) a wedge dragster strapped to a ramp truck, so I made my own. First off, do you know how hard it is to find a photo of a ramp truck that doesn’t have something on its back? Or a nice side shot of a wedge Top Fueler? So I ended up digitally removing the enclosed portion of a ramp truck and using the only side shot I could find – of Kenney Goodell's wedge – for this quick conceptual look of how one might have looked. To be fair, I didn't spend a lot of time in Photoshop to create this, and I certainly didn’t add whatever bracing would have been necessary for anyone to even think about this. But, nonetheless, here's what it might have looked like. Maybe someone actually did have one, but I doubt it.
 

Nostalgia-loving National DRAGSTER readers are in for a real treat with this week's upcoming issue, which focuses almost exclusively on the current nostalgia racing scene. It's packed with tons of photos of today's hottest "newstalgia" iron, with features on Adam Sorokin, Leah Pruett LeDuc, Mendy Fry, and the Paso Posse Top Fuel team; an interview with nostalgia tuning guru Roland Leong; a look at the fleet of tribute Funny Cars; a visit to Donnie Couch's West Coast Funny Car Factory; a look at the DRO Challenge Funny Car Series; a photo feature on the "Sportsman" stars of the NHRA Hot Rod Heritage Racing Series; and a great look at NHRA's role in the preservation of our sport's history, from the creation of the Historical Services department through the creation of the Wally Parks NHRA Motorsports Museum presented by Automobile Club of Southern California, the Hot Rod Reunions, and the Heritage Series, as told by the guy who was there for it all, Steve Gibbs. It's going to be a fun issue.

OK, I'll see you next week. I'll probably only have one column because I'll be traveling to Indy Thursday, and we have some really cool new ways to cover the event that will keep me busier than ever at the race. And with Indy being Indy and finishing Monday, we travel home Tuesday, so I'm not even sure when I’ll have a column that week, but I'll be working toward something, I promise.