Pro Stock great Warren Johnson used to say that it was a good thing that the NHRA Rulebook was double-spaced so that he had room to write between the lines. That’s kind of the spirit that I hope to bring to this column each week. I’m not here to rewrite history; I’m more about filling in the blanks. While I have been known to retell great tales of the past or try to put amazing moments into context, I’m not going to tell you the world is flat (heck, some dragstrips aren’t), that the moon is made of cheese, or that John Force never drove a truck.

And in much the same way as they’re never going to hire an artist to try to improve the iconic Mona Lisa painting or have someone chisel away at the famous Venus de Milo sculpture, it’s really hard to improve on the real thing anyway, so the best someone like me can do is to add texture and richness to the historic picture (and maybe even color a little outside the lines).

That said, here’s a look back at another fun year of the DRAGSTER Insider, another 12 months and 90-plus columns of doing what we do best together.

Quick note: All links in this column will spawn new windows or tabs (depending on your browser) so that as you read you can click on anything that interests you without having to leave this page, then go through all of the opened windows or tabs at your leisure later.

JANUARY

The year started, as it usually does, with me clearing out my Inbox of emails and great photos sent by the Insider Nation. There was so much stuff that it took two full columns – here and here – to get ‘er done, but there were great stories from Tom Jobe of Surfers fame, talking about their engine’s fabled “Surfers’ sound,” nitro vet Jim Murphy talking about how he got his start in the sport, and some great photos: early “Snake”; a trio of lost legends in “Diamond Jim” Annin, Mike Snively, and Keith Black; a wonderful family photo of John Force, “Uncle Beavs,” “Diesel Louie,” and Billy McCahill; a collection of Carl Casper’s Top Fuelers; the world’s only GT40 Ford Le Mans-bodied Funny Car; George Schreiber's Yellow Fang; the Mazi family blown Opel on its ramp truck; and a slew of masterful drawings.

Those two columns inspired even more fan feedback and a bunch more new photos -- including vintage stuff from England's Santa Pod Raceway -- and introduced us to a wild streamliner called the Bold Attempt, which I would write about later in this column.

The photo of the Force clan turned on the memory lightbulb over reader Paul Katata’s head, remembering that Force and McCahill’s near-matching Citation Funny Cars had been stage props for not-yet-rock-gods Mötley Crüe in an early 1980s concert. I remembered it, too, as it happened right around the time that I joined the National DRAGSTER staff, and I knew just who to ask: Steve Quercio, a promoter who had been in Force’s (then pretty small) inner circle. Turns out that he knew all about it because it was his idea, and he had the photos and info to back it up. The concert, held April 8, 1982, at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in Southern California, was the Crüe’s first major concert and played a big role in its career. On the Chronological Crüe website, Crüe expert and rock author Paul Miles reported, "Mötley plays a sold-out show at the three-and-a-half-thousand-seat capacity Santa Monica Civic, which is produced by racing car promoter Steve Quercio, who has seen them play the Whisky and wanted to help get them to the next level. … Mötley shares the stage with a couple of Funny Cars owned by John Force. As they play, they set fire to various instruments and debut their new song 'Knock 'Em Dead Kid.' The performance and number of ticket sales for a local Hollywood club band finally attracts the attention of record labels, and the event becomes a turning point for the Crüe.” Read all about it here.

My eyes are always open for ideas for columns, and the DRAGSTER staff’s winter consolidation to a single floor at our Route 66 digs unearthed a treasure trove of old stickers that had been applied to a film-persevering refrigerator by our late, great photo editor, Leslie Lovett. I spent two whole columns (here and here) drooling over the colorful images and providing back stories to the cars, people, and products featured. There was one follow-up column on decals here, which also recounts the hilarious biplane-crashing-into-the-Christmas-Tree story from the 1975 Grandnational in Canada, as told by Steve Gibbs, and features a slew of decals sent by readers, which were analzyed here.

We closed January with a fond farewell to former Funny Car owner Jim Jackson, who was remembered here by his friend and former driver Simon Menzies.

FEBRUARY

I returned to an old favorite, Fan Fotos, showcasing images taken by Canadian reader Doug McDonald at the inaugural Summernationals at York U.S. 30 Dragway near York, Pa., in July 1970 that included some really, really great old cars.

A top 10 article in the Los Angeles Times about cool Southern California athletes hit my radar screen in early February as it included our own Don Prudhomme (ninth? seriously?), and I used that as a jumping-off point for a phone call to discuss all things cool with “the Snake” (his vote for cool? Chris Karamesines) and my own reasons why I think “the Snake” is the cool one. A follow-up column naturally ensued in which the readers weighed in on who they think was/is cool, and the list was long and deep. Good work, guys.

The original Dry Hops in Heaven column from 2008 remains one of my biggest smash hits, but fans of the now-ancient but revered pre-run practice known as the dry hop really dug a column that actually showed the art of the dry hop through a couple of YouTube videos featuring a pair of Prudhomme’s Funny Cars (the Army Horizon and the Pepsi Challenger Omni) at OCIR. Even younger fans who have heard us old-timers prattling on about and fawning over the dry-hop technique for decades got a kick out of it. I’m fortunate to be pals with ex-Prudhomme crew chief Bob Brandt, whose expertise on the topic and the reasons behind the practice (and its eventual extinction) made for good reading.

With the Winternationals fast approaching, I put together a greatest hits column of past Winternationals columns that covered everything from Don Garlits’ fluky first-round win over Don Ewald at the 1975 event to the success of Roland Leong’s Hawaiian entries at the season opener and the “one-day wonder” that was the weather-besieged 1965 race.

MARCH

There was more Prudhomme to go around after my visit to the Snake Pit display at the Winternationals, which was a chilly affair worthy of its name and inspired me to re-create the iconic Winternationals starting-line shot of Al Kirschenbaum treading in the snow at the 1978 event. All I had to work with was a thin layer of ice balls, but -- what the hail – it was fun anyway.

The creativity of the Insider Nation took front and center with a column called Your Stuff that showcased drag racing drawings/paintings and models submitted by the readership.

Before I knew it, I was prepping for my annual trip to Gainesville for the Gatornationals. After the success of the Pomona column archives, I whipped together My Greatest Gatornats Hits, which covered a lot of ground from the event’s long history (including my first trip there, as a crewmember for Jim DePasse’s Top Alcohol Funny Car) and gave a look back at other great Gatornationals memories.

The event was a performance fan’s dream, which I wrote about in a post-event column, sandwiching that between road-warrior stories of braving the Speed Trap Hell that is Highway 301 between Jacksonville and Gainesville. I also recounted my chance meeting with Art Marshall – Top Fuel’s last front-engine national event winner (1972 Grandnational) – about whose would exploits I would write later in the year.

The trip to and from Gainesville was a bit of a nightmare, especially the five-hour layover in Dallas, which gave me time to read a good portion of Don Garlits’ new self-written, self-designed book, Don Garlits and his Cars, which inspired me to presented a three-part Swamp Rat Spotter's Guide, detailing each of the 46 entries that wore the famous moniker (SR 1-A through 10 | SR 11 through 20-B | SR 21 through 34). Naturally, the Garlits fest was followed up by more of your stories (and photos) and love for “Big,” which spanned two columns (here and here), the highlight of which was from Tim Bucher (son of the late Top Fuel racer Jim Bucher), who recounted his time with Garlits and how he and brothers Mike and Rick had a hand in Garlits’ 2001 Indy outing that produced Garlits’ first 300-mph pass.

APRIL

At my request, superstar drag racing artist Kenny Youngblood wrote The Story of Benito Magneto, chronicling and explaining the story behind one of his famous prints (and one that adorns my office wall). The humor-filled work, showing a hopeful Italian racer with a bag-full-of-tricks Funny Car, is filled with so much detail that I had to resort to a by-the-numbers illustration to point out all of the subtleties.

More Fan Fotos were in store after that, featuring a wide range of home-brewed images of drag cars and people spanning four decades, which was followed a week later by another assortment of your stuff. April 15, Tax Day, was a pretty taxing day for me as my head and heart hurt after we lost former Division 4 tech ace Lindy Vencill, Division 7 Top Alcohol Funny Car pioneer Lou Gasparrelli, Glynanna Ham (wife of former longtime Division 4 Director Dale Ham), and cylinder-head guru Joe Mondello within a matter of days, enraging me to write Enough! because I was growing tired of writing obituaries about my friends and heroes. It didn’t help, but it felt good to write. It also led me to a second reposting of Dry Hops in Heaven the next week.

Friends and family said goodbye to Gasparrelli at an emotional celebration of life April 22 at the NHRA Motorsports Museum, which was followed a day later at the same location by a surprise 70th birthday party for Prudhomme, both of which were recapped here. Surprise parties seldom are, but somehow wife Lynn and daughter Donna kept this one under wraps despite a large guest list that was a who’s who of the sport. No one blabbed or slipped, and the look on “the Snake’s” face when he walked through the front door (caught on video) was priceless. It was a great night filled with funny stories honoring one of the true legends of our sport and a guy who – needless to say – I’m proud considers me a friend.

I finished the month with a story about Mark "Gredzo" Gredzinski, a British model maker who obsesses over painstakingly accurate small-scale reproductions of early drag racing machines, down to the point where he makes his own barrel valves and fuel pumps from scratch and scours photos and blueprints to faithfully reproduce period-correct chassis. Check out the detailed (ha … pun!) story here. That column led to a follow-up column in early May about other modeling projects, including Roger "Riceman" Lee's one-of-a-kind brass 1/16th-scale model reproduction of Ron "Big Yohns" Johnson's Shubert/Herbert front-engine dragster.

MAY

May dawned with the exciting news that a major motion picture on the lives of Don "the Snake" Prudhomme and Tom "the Mongoose" McEwen had been green-lighted and inspired a column looking back at the last major biopic of an NHRA racer, Heart Like a Wheel, the Shirley Muldowney life story. I had some good quotes from Muldowney about Bonnie Bedelia, the actress who portrayed her (“She was very clingy”) as well as some interesting notes from former Funny Car racer Jeff Courtie, a foley artist, who described how the sound effects were created for the film’s dramatic re-creation of the crash of Connie Kalitta’s wedge Top Fueler.

As I prepared to head out to the Atlanta race and my annual trip down South, I recapped some of the memorable moments that had occurred at Atlanta Dragway, which includes a lot more history than people usually remember.

May 17 was not a good day. As I wrote for that day’s column, I had a whole other column written and copy edited and just waiting for me to push the Publish button when I got the call that James Warren had died. I bashed out a quick column that I titled A Monumental Loss because that’s how it felt. Warren was a boyhood hero of mine – and I’m guessing of most impressionable SoCal teenage Top Fuel fans of the 1970s – and his passing followed by about six months the death of his partner, Roger Coburn. While I was crying in my beer (well, Diet Coke), I wrote the second half of that column about Texas legend Ed Mabry, who had passed away while I was in Atlanta. I had worked with Ed on an Insider column in March 2008 about Don Garlits’ first trek west, which was to Texas.

I expected no less, and you guys certainly didn’t let me down with an outpouring of love, respect, and mourning over the loss of Warren. Many, many great stories and photos followed for this column and overflowed to the next, which opened with the sad news that we’d lost another fuel hero – Dick Rosberg – and continued with more great memories and photos from Warren’s career.

Rosberg’s life was remembered later that week in a wide-ranging column that also delved into the history of Prudhomme’s “Snake” logo as told by Kenny Youngblood, who also got to show off his old injected fueler and brag about the time he “beat” Prudhomme at Fremont.
 

JUNE

I wrote a column as I was preparing to head out the door to New Jersey for the Summernationals – oh, wait, it’s the SuperNationals, which explains the topic of that column, The Name Game, about how the Summernationals and SuperNationals names have moved around considerably in NHRA history.

I posted an update and photos on the progress of Don Prudhomme’s exciting restoration of Tom McEwen’s ramp truck and a few weeks later announced its completion and shared some of the first public photos of the hauler and its partner, Prudhomme’s previously restored rig.

An interesting statistic uncovered during my year-by-year recap of NHRA’s 60 seasons (published in National DRAGSTER) revealed that the 1972 season was the last time that no Top Fuel racer won more than one event in a season; never being one to leave well enough alone, I wrote a column about it. That year, Carl Olson, Don Garlits, Chip Woodall, Jeb Allen, Art Marshall, Gary Beck, Jim Walther, and Don Moody each walked away with a lone Wally, and that feat had not been repeated since. The stat intrigued me, so I broke down every season since 1974 to show why that was true with season stats appended with details. It was fun and eye-opening.

One of the drivers mentioned in that column was Bob Gibson, who had a great but very short (five-year) Top Fuel career, and he dropped me a line to talk about his great career and to thank me for not forgetting him, which you can read about in this column.
 

 JULY

July was almost entirely devoted to “the Snake” and “the Mongoose”; a thread that began July 1 addressed the concerns of some about the “Mongoose” Duster that was added to the back of the recently restored ramp truck. The Prudhomme team never said that the car was an original, as everyone knew it was a prop car (then blue) put together for the Hot Wheels 35th anniversary celebration a few years back and repainted red to match the truck. Though most understood, it did allow us to accumulate a huge number of photos of “the ‘Goose’s” red Duster for your enjoyment.

Another column followed that traced a few more of McEwen’s later Dusters and allowed me to retell the tale of McEwen – then sponsored by the Navy – pitting his Funny Car against a steam-catapult-launched Navy F-14 Tomcat fighter jet (spoiler: the jet the catapult won). That column also inspired me to write in-depth about Prudhomme’s stealth-black Snake III Cuda, and thanks to the keen memories and great photos of the Insider Nation, it was revealed that there had been, in fact, two black Cudas, based on the design of the front spoiler, which seemed to have some sort of extra lip screwed onto it that became the source of much conjecture.

While all of that was going on, a discussion raged on the whereabouts of Prudhomme’s first yellow Hot Wheels 'Cuda. While “the Snake” does have in his possession the meticulously and perfectly restored display-car version, it’s well-known that he sold the original to Sammy Miller, who was hooked up with Ken Poffenberger. At least a half-dozen experts weighed in, comparing photos of the cars and pointing out minor differences between them. The debate raged on into a second column, with a slideshow-like presentation of the evolution of the car. In the end, I don’t know that we ever really conclusively decided anything, but it was fun reading nonetheless.

Finally, sanity – in the form of Prudhomme his own bad self – stepped in and sat down with me to discuss everything from the spoiler lip to the black Cuda and origins of the short-lived rooftop spoiler, the red McEwen Duster, and so much more. And Skip Allum from the Prudhomme camp whisked me some original Chrysler PR photos of the first Hot Wheels car that truly were cool to see.

All of the fun and games came to an abrupt stop when we learned of the passing of Funny Car veteran Dave Condit, whose career I recapped here. Like James Warren's earlier in the year, Condit’s passing came unexpectedly and preempted a blog I had been working on for some time and was ready to publish, which I did later that week. That column, Food For Thought, was centered around the iconic Irwindale Raceway snack bar so prevalent in many starting-line photos from the great SoCal track. What made it special, of course, is that the plain-wrapper burgers were actually from the much-loved In-N-Out Burger chain, owned by Harry Snyder, who also had a stake in the racetrack.

AUGUST

The gastronomical memories kept coming, forcing me to run Second Helpings, a follow-up column on the topic in early August. The column included great stories and photos of other dragstrip delicacies as relished by the Insider Nation and a couple of great photos of the snack bar at Lions. A few weeks later, there were more food stories to be served up and tales from the infamous Big Texan steak house, home of the free-if-you-can-eat-it-in-an-hour 72-ounce steak, which many racers, as it turns out, did, as was recounted in yet another food column two weeks later. (Y'all like your food, don't ya?)

I finally got around to publishing the Art Marshall piece I’d been planning since March, as NHRA’s last front-engine Top Fuel winner weighed in with his account of the career weekend in The Slingshot’s Last Hurrah. I added research and interviews I had done with other racers at the event who suggested that Marshall’s team had employed some starting-line gamesmanship to secure the win, which Marshall later refuted in a follow-up column.

I had seen the photo at right plenty of times in my drag racing life but never really took a close-enough look at it to realize that it was “Jungle Jim” Liberman poised victoriously upon the Chi-Town Hustler alongside Austin Coil. I had always somehow assumed it to be Pat Minick, and I never knew that “Jungle” had driven the Hustler, which inspired my I Didn’t Know That column on the topic. I tracked down Coil, who shared – with great detail and recall – the circumstances behind the substitution and branched us out on to other topics, like the team’s million-mile ramp truck.

With two super-popular topics – the Chi-Town Hustler and “Jungle Jim” – combined into one discussion, I knew there was no way this one would escape the attraction of readers, who, sure ‘nough, filled my Inbox with the memories and love (and photos!) of both in a pair of columns, here and here. My research dug up a fine eulogy for Liberman that was printed in National DRAGSTER that cited Liberman’s role in the success of the Funny Car class and led me to wonder what might things look like now – and what “Jungle” himself might be doing now – were he still alive. “Beserko Bob” Doerrer, once a close friend of “Jungle’s,” responded to my request for his opinion and shared some great information about where Liberman’s career might have gone had be not been killed in a traffic accident in September 1977.

Out of the blue one mid-August week, Insider reader Craig Hughes wrote to ask if I’d ever heard of the 1977 NHRA U.S. Nationals Yearbook (I had) and that if he were to loan me his copy would I write a column about the book. I hadn’t seen one in years, but the yearbook was well-remembered on my end as being a great combination of descriptive writing, great photos, and fine layout.

Reviewing the book was one thing, but I knew there had to be a great story behind the story. I put on my detective hat and scoured the Internet for any trace of the staff members listed in the one-page credits. I finally tracked down John Plisky, the son of the dreamer who conceived and bankrolled the ambitious project. His dad had died the year before, probably not knowing the long-lasting impact that his work (in addition to orchestrating the whole deal, he wrote the main text) had on the drag racing community, but his son – who was 12 at the time and had a hand in the book -- sure was glad to hear it. In the column, he shared the story of the book – it’s genesis, the work involved, and its ultimate lack of financial success – and, quite naturally, Hughes and I were not alone in our memories and praise for the book, which spanned two additional columns, here and here; in the latter, I also heard from Richard Pasley, who was one of the photographers on the project and offered additional insight into this drag racing keepsake. That column was published on the 34th anniversary of Liberman's death, leading to another outpouring of sentiments and the question "What would a Liberman wedge Top Fueler have looked like?" Me and Mr. Photoshop had the answer.

SEPTEMBER

September was a great month for memorable finishes, two of which I experienced firsthand, in Indy and Dallas. The 2011 Mac Tools U.S. Nationals presented by Lucas Oil will long be remembered for what happened in the Comp eliminator final, where Brian Browell, leading by a ton against broken and out-of-shape Jirka Kaplan, lifted early only to see Kaplan’s blown altered storm by in the final few feet to claim the shocking win. As heartbroken as Browell must have been, he had good company, and I compiled a list of others who have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory through driving miscues for a column called Don’t Lift Until You Hear The Referee’s Whistle (you’ll have to read the intro to understand the title). That column spilled over to a follow-up with more instances of wins given away under the most peculiar of circumstances.

A few weeks later, in Dallas, I watched with sheer glee as good guy Bob Vandergriff Jr. ended a final-round drought of Biblical proportions with his first win in Dallas. As cool as the victory itself was, what followed was even better, as the overjoyed and overdue pilot ran back up the track – in full gear in 100-degree temps – to meet his crew halfway to begin the celebration. I’ve seen a lot of memorable things at the drags in the last 40 years, but that certainly is a top-fiver. You can read my account of that moment here as well as view a chart that I compiled comparing Vandergriff’s final-round futility with other notorious serial runner-ups.

How the Elephant Crushed the Guardrail was an interesting (and humorous) piece that had always-obliging former Top Fuel world champ Rob Bruins recounting how his short career in Funny Car included a forgettable outing in Columbus that ended with the Green Elephant flopper facing the wrong way on the National Trail Raceway dragstrip while nuzzling the guardrail.

OCTOBER

Fan Fotos returned in early October with reader Butch Massoni’s look at early 1970s Funny Cars in Northern and Southern California, which – say it with me – produced a follow-up column with great stories on some of those cars and a funny tale from our pal Henry Walther about a top-end collision between his dragster and a rabbit (well, it wasn’t as funny to the rabbit).

Reader Derek Staples shared his boyhood brush with greatness story of meeting Don Nicholson, which inspired me to write about my earliest encounter with a race car; a neighbor owned what would turn out to be a pretty memorable car (the Snodgrass and Mahnken Psycho Mustang), though I didn’t know it at the time. And, of course, there was a follow-up to that column as well, with great stories about Nicholson and more research and info supplied by the Insider Detective Agency concerning the history (and post-history) of the Psycho.

That follow-up column ended with a request from Insider regular Jon Hoffman for a column about primered Funny Cars -- “If you build it, they will come,” he said – so I put out the word and received a bunch of photos of not-ready-for-prime-time floppers that ran in a couple of columns in November. Before we could get to that, there was the business of crowning the year’s champions, which inspired me to write what I think is the first history of how NHRA points champions have been decided over the years.

Father Time was not yet done taking our heroes from us, and we closed October with a fond farewell to Phil Castronovo, of Custom Body fame, with a look back at his career in photos and words, much of the latter supplied by his nephew, Fred.

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER

After another Inbox-cleansing column that included still-more Castronovo memories and assorted odds and ends of quarter-mile minutiae, the ugliness began with the biggest collection of beat-up, taped-up, battle-scarred, primered hot rods you’ve ever seen. The column title said it all: This Could Get Ugly. Master photog Steve Reyes, who has been incredibly generous with the sharing of his amazing collection of images, got his own column’s worth of ugly in Reyes Brings On The Ugly, which branched out to his collection of Topless Funny Cars and was followed by another grouping of race car mayhem because, as I tweeted after posting this column, “Chicks dig cars with scars.”

In the course of the “ugly cars” thread, I had occasion to show two rear-engine Funny Cars, the famous machines driven by Jim Dunn and Dennis Geisler. Apparently, a few fans had never heard of such beasts, others had heard of them but never seen them, and a whole bunch just wanted to read and talk about them, which kicked off another epic DRAGSTER Insider thread that rivaled the wedge-dragster and ramp-truck threads of yore.

I kicked off the party with as thorough of a history of rear-engine Funny Cars as I could produce, from the Hemi 'Cuda and Chevoom through Geisler’s back flip at the 1975 Winternationals in Burt Berniker’s Hindsight, using plenty of good quotes from an old Dunn interview that I had conducted years ago, then zoomed off in all kinds of directions.

The plight of the Hindsight was well-cataloged here, and eventually I heard from all three of its drivers – Don Baumunk, Jim Adolph, and Geisler – as well as Hindsight crewmember Mark Johnson. Reader submissions poured in for another follow-up column that included cars like Gary Gabelich’s weird (and ill-fated four-wheel-drive rear-engine Vega panel) and a history of rear-engine Funny Cars from England.

Then it was time to turn our attention to one of the most mythical of rear-engine cars, the chain-driven Mustang built by Jack Chrisman that was sold to Roy Mehus and later became John Force’s first flopper: the Night Stalker. I was able to pull together a lot of good information and photos of the car, including a great series of images of one of Force’s first outings, at Irwindale.

Then emerged an interesting photo of the same car, in police-car livery, that led to a lot of digging around about who was behind the wheel. There was a lot of evidence suggesting Force, but Force was adamant it wasn’t him. A week later, I finally reached Mehus and got the real story, which kind of blew my mind. The revelation was just half the fun of that column, as we together all discovered new rear-engine floppers that we’d never heard of, including another chain-driven machine, Ed Lenarth’s Mid-Winder, which, like so many of its brothers, met an early end. The rear-engine thread, too, finally met its end with a final column trying to round up all of the various missing pieces of the puzzle and, oh yes, even more rare rear-engine Funny Cars.

In the midst of all of that, my new Twitter pal/fellow hockey fanatic and writer John Hoven, whose father raced Funny Cars in the 1970s, penned an eloquent tribute to his dad, filled with great photos of Hoven’s Mach I and of him with his dad’s car.

And that brings us to today and the final DRAGSTER Insider column of the year (and, by my count, the 485th). Looking back, I used the words “follow-up column” nearly 20 times in this retrospect, which says an awful lot about the contributions you all make to this little corner of the Internet. I love this job and this column, but what really makes it enjoyable is the exchanges I have with my readers, their devotion to helping get the story right, and their generosity with their memories and keepsakes.

To all of you, thank you. Thanks for all of your kind notes and kudos throughout the year and for helping me tell “the stories behind the stories.” Have a happy and safe new year; I’ll see you back here next week -- beginning Thursday -- where together we’ll kick off another year of remembering our past and saluting our heroes.

 

If Michael J. Fox can do it, so can we, so we’re going back to the future … er, back to the rear in the future – whatever. I should have known better than to call it Case Closed on the rear-engine Funny Car thread, cuz as soon as I did, here comes another barrage of interesting stuff devoted to one of drag racing’s short-lived, least-followed trends.

Joe Faraci wrote to tell me of his enjoyment of the thread (and to ask the obvious question, “Who in their right mind would drive a rear-engine Vega panel?”) and had another question.

“Way back in September 1971 when Car Craft reported about Chrisman’s sidewinder in the Elapsed Times column in their magazine, they had a picture of it and a small caption. They mentioned that if it was successful, there’s a hot Armenian and fireman next in line. I assume the fireman is [Jim] Dunn, but who would have been the ‘hot Armenian’? I can only think John Mazmanian. Who else could it have been? Was Maz thinking of a rear-engined car? Or was Car Craft just thinking out loud? Think anyone would know? It’s just something that has bugged me for only 40 years.”

I’d say your detective skills are top-notch, Joe. Obviously, despite the lack of success for Chrisman’s car, Dunn went on to build one anyway (with much more success), but as to “Big John” fielding one, it’s anyone’s guess. He certainly was of Armenian descent and certainly had a no-expenses-spared way of looking at racing. And obviously, if the rear-engine Funny Car did for the class what rear-engine dragsters did for Top Fuel, we’d have seen a lot more of them from a lot of people. But still, anyone know if "Big John" was serious?

Because I'm all about answers, Joe wants to know who would want to drive a rear-engine Vega panel Funny Car. How about Pat Parkhurst, who took Dave Bowman’s quasi-successful California Stud fuel burner to the sand after redubbing it Quick Delivery? Thanks to Tony Barraza, a talented artist who once worked here at NHRA in the Corporate Art Department and now owns Tony Barazza Designworks, for sending it; he used to crew on the car. Kudos also to TB (@TBDesignworks) for submitting this info by Twitter (a DI first!). Who else would drive a rear-engine Vega panel Funny Car? How about Tom Gambardella? He sent this image of his rear-engine Funny Car, one of many built in the mid-1970s by Umbro Engineering. The cars were built to 5/8-scale and powered by a 900cc Kawasaki (or Honda) engine with a chain-drive setup similar to Jack Chrisman’s Mustang.

The company, based in New Rochelle, N.Y., sold them for just $900 yet promised 11-second e.t.s (as well as wheelies and burnouts) out of the cars. “My car ran low 11s at around 120 mph,” reported Gambardella. “In regard to wheelies, we were testing it last year, and it carried the wheels a good foot and a half in the air for 15 feet and bent the wheelie bar! Without the wheelie bar, it would have flipped right over just like the Hindsight Duster. It really loads the rear tire hard. It does do burnouts, but you have to hold the rear of the body just like an old Pro Stock car as there are no front brakes."

These cars would seem to be predecessors to NHRA’s own Jr. Dragsters. I’m not sure that this kind of car is even legal now, but Gambardella, who recently restored his, says they were in 1977 and that he ran his at Old Bridge Township Raceway Park in Englishtown. Mark Williams was kind enough to dig back into his files to find the above image, showing the chassis of the rear-engine Vega panel Funny Car that he built for Ed Mullen, and the image of the completed car in action (with canards!) that graced the back of his 1974 catalog. He also provided the basic worksheet for the project, which set the wheelbase at 130 inches, a roll-cage design to accommodate a 6-foot-tall driver, and a completed date of September 1973. There's probably a whole other thread that could be created (don't tempt me) for Funny Cars with canards. I'm not really sure how well they worked, but I recall seeing quite a few cars sporting them in the early 1970s, including some conventionally bodied and chassised cars in dire need of downforce and directional stablility. I know there's a bunch of you old '70s Funny Car racers out there in the Insider Nation, so drop me a line. Y'know, just in case I ever do decide to go down that road.

Funny Car historian Danny White passed along the Rich Carlson photo at right of the Lil Stinker Corvair from Bellingham, Wash. Like all good Corvairs (unless you ask Ralph Nader), the engine is in the back. I asked “Flyin’ Phil” Elliott, the Great Northwest’s premier historian, for info on the car, and he passed along an early 1967 Drag News article that described the car as a ’64 Corvair with an injected 426 wedge in the back seat. The car, owned by Dave Boyd, was classed as a C/Fuel dragster (as was common with cars of that breed at the time, including Gene Snow’s famed Rambunctious Dart) and was to be driven in 1967 by Glenn Scott and with  W.L. “Dub” Queen as crew chief; it was reported that Queen would be experimenting with hydrazine in the new season, hoping to improve on driver Dave Boyd’s 1966 bests of 10.00 and 141 mph by running low nines at speeds of 170. Doesn’t appear those plans came together, as there’s no further record available on the car. “I saw it run a couple times, and it never really worked the bugs out,” said Elliott. “We never saw it in the configuration described.” Also worth noting is that the article called the car Lil Stinger, but Elliott also passed on a few other shots of the car where a skunk is clearly visible on the front fender, making me believe it was Stinker. Elliott also passed along a link to this Mike Sopko photo that he found online, showing the Slack & Hallman rear-engine Mustang, a creature that neither of us knew existed and is also not part of the DragList database. A Barracuda and Charger are listed for the team, but no Mustang, and certainly no rear-engine Mustang! Harry Hallman was the driver of the injected Ford, shown making a pass at U.S. 30 Dragstrip on Aug. 13, 1972.

And speaking of rear-engine Mustangs, I can now attach a credit (and a story) to the photo I ran recently showing the most famous of them all – John Force’s Night Stalker – at Orange County Int’l Raceway. The shot of Force leaving the line at OCIR is one of only two professional photos of the car on track of which I’m aware; the other, shot by Dave Kommel of Auto Imagery and featured in a 2004 Photo of the Week gallery on NHRA.com (link), shows that car at Irwindale Raceway.

 
Anyway, I heard this week from Jefferson Dykes, who claimed credit for the photo and provided enough anecdotal evidence to back that up and shared the story of how it came to be.

Dykes (“A Force fan before it was cool to be a Force fan,” he proudly proclaims) pinpoints the pass as an early licensing run at OCIR’s Manufacturers Meet in November 1974, and he remembers the circumstances well.

“By 1974, we all knew that rear-engine cars didn’t work worth a damn, so when it came up to the line, I watched [some of the other photographers] walk away to have a cigarette by the tower. I was maybe 100 feet downtrack and didn’t take a photo of the burnout but zoomed in as the car was staging and pushed the button when he launched. I don’t know how well it ran; I assume it went 30 feet and broke like it always did.”

Dykes continued to shoot photos and was the track photographer at Seattle Int’l Raceway in the late 1990s; he got on the other side of the lens when he built a Datsun 280ZX-bodied nostalgia BB/FC in 2006, which was called Photo Op and driven with great success by Randy Parker (website).

I've only previously shown you here the black and white version of the Force Night Stalker at OCIR because that's all I ever had (it was a digital scan, which explains why there was no photo credit attached to the image). I wanted to show you the color version, but Dykes' scanner was down. Fortunately, NHRA histornian Greg Sharp had a color copy of the photo (provided to him by Dykes some years ago) and he sent it to me, along with photos from his treasure trove showing some detail photos of the car when Jack Chrisman had it, which you can find in the gallery at right. The photos were shot at Lions Drag Strip for Hot Rod Magazine, but I'm not sure by whom.

Among the photos are a couple of close-ups of the running gear, including the front side of the engine showing the interesting fuel-pump setup located outboard of the chassis (makes me cringe thinking about the car side-swiping the guardrail) , the chain guard that covered the drive chain on the other side of the chassis, and a great look at the exhaust plumbing and the rear axle.

I got a nice note from reader James Hatley and a link directing me to his website for a look at his rear-engine machine from way back in 1960: the Vacuum Cleaner.

“I don't think we called things Funny Cars back then yet, but this may have been the first rear-engine Funny Car,” he wrote. "And we were too poor for superchargers ... but did run nitro/alcohol.” Power came from a 1953 Desoto Hemi displacing 292 cubic inches and topped with six Ford 97 carburetors on a dual-log manifold running 20 percent nitro. While the engine was down for repair, Hatley even put Northwest legend Jim Green’s 283 Chevy in the car for a while.

The car started as a ‘32 Ford coupe roller, and once the aero-trick front snout was added, the car got its nickname. “Silly I suppose now looking back, but we had a lot of fun,” he said. “The front nose was just thin aluminum with electrical EMT [conduit] bent and brazed together to make little a frame to hold it together.”

Hatley, who was based in Seattle, said that he ran 13 races with the car and lost only once, when the clutch disk surface let go.

“We towed the car to California and raced at two tracks -- a race at night at Colton, Calif., and a race during the day at Riverside, Calif. I remember how thrilled I was when Don Garlits came over to see the car. The car beat all competition in its class (B/Competition Coupe) at both tracks. Back at home, it set an NHRA national record (October 1960 at SIR), 12.12 seconds at 119.14 mph. The car actually ran 11.93 at 119.73 mph."

And finally, here’s another good look at Maynard Rupp’s Chevoom rear-engine Chevelle, referenced in an earlier column. Thanks to Richard Pederson for sending it, as well as the image below, combining two of the Insider Nation’s favorite threads: rear-engine Funny Cars and ramp trucks. Now if only there were a wedge Top Fueler parked next to it.

 
OK, folks, that's it (again, I think) for the thread. There will be no column Tuesday, but I’ll be back Friday with my yearly wrap-up of all that was wondrous and great here in 2011.
 

You don’t have to go to Disneyland to know that it’s a small world after all. Examples are everywhere around us, and the Internet surely has helped make it an even smaller world. Facebook is great, but me, I’m a bigger Twitter fan. It’s a fast way to keep up with the news about your many interests by following the feeds of the people who make the news – in my case, drivers and athletes -- or those who report the news on my favorite websites.

You don’t have to have hung around this snack bar long to know that my other sporting passion is hockey, both playing and watching, so naturally, I visit quite a few hockey websites, especially those that follow my hometown Los Angeles Kings, and follow some of the hockey bloggers on Twitter. As you may (or may not) know, when you decide to “follow” someone’s Twitter account, they’re sent an email alerting them to your interest. Sometimes you’ll get a message back thanking you for choosing to follow them, but most often not, which is why I was pretty shocked to receive this message after “following” the author of the popular Kings blog Mayor’s Manor (www.mayorsmanor.com) just prior to the NHRA Finals: “Honored for the follow. Besides hockey, my other passion in life is drag racing. My dad raced Funny Cars in the ‘70s/’80s … I was raised at Irwindale, OCIR, Firebird, etc. In fact, my dream growing up was to write for National DRAGSTER!”

Whoever he was, he was my reverse-image alter ego: a hockey writer who loves drag racing. And he even dreams of writing for “my” magazine. We exchanged emails, and I quickly found out that his father was John Hoven, whose name might be familiar to the Insider Nation denizens of the 1970s SoCal scene thanks to his Hoven’s Mach I and Midnight Special floppers. His name is also John Hoven.

It didn’t take us long to become fast friends via email, and I invited him and his 5-year-son, Sebastian (actually John Sebastian Hoven VI), to the Finals, where, after getting the behind-the-scenes nickel tour in Pomona, he did what we journalists do best: He started interviewing people. One of the more popular themes on his website is a feature called “What I’ve learned this season,” in which he asks Kings players what they’ve learned about their teammates this season, and he posed that same type of question to Ron Capps, John Force, Jack Beckman, Larry Dixon, Tony Schumacher, Antron Brown, Spencer Massey, and Jeff Arend, asking them what they’ve learned about fellow racers.

Those interviews – which included some pretty funny stuff – ran in our year-end issue of National DRAGSTER, helping fulfill one of his dreams, and he also did us the honor of sharing the story of his dad with us for today’s Insider. Enjoy!

Remembering my dad, John Hoven
by John Hoven V

Growing up, my dad always told me 1971 was his favorite year. He would often remind me it was the year he married my mom, the year he won the Division 7 points title, and the year I was born.

Still, it's only now, some 40 years later, that I'm truly beginning to understand why those 12 months were so magical for him.

Today, as a husband and a father myself, the stories mean so much more to me.

To hear his sisters tell it, my dad was always working on a race car -- for as far back as they could remember, into his early teens.

Exactly how he got into drag racing I'll never know. He grew up on a farm in Massachusetts and raced all over tracks throughout New England until he came west in 1968 for one reason: to race at Orange County Int'l Raceway.

He had thought about making the trek across the U.S. to race at Lions Drag Strip for a few years. Yet for some reason, he had a love affair with a racetrack 3,000 miles from home, and one he'd never even been to.

John Hoven, right, with driver Tom Ferraro

Me with Donna Prudhomme, March 1976

Me, left, with my quarter-midget "crew chief," John Savage

After owning, partnering, and working on several fuel altereds, including the Groundshaker Jr. and Way-Hoven-Okazaki "flower power" car, my dad built his first Funny Car, known as John Hoven's Mach I -- a car that had more purple on it than anybody had ever seen, from the paint job to the tinwork to tons of anodized parts.

A few years later, he would put together his second Funny Car, a Plymouth Satellite known as The Midnight Special. That car was believed to be the first one with a roof hatch for the driver to escape in case of a fire, now commonplace in all Funny Cars.

It was also at OCIR where that car made its last real runs, piloted by legendary Funny Car shoe -- and a man my dad had deep respect for -- Denny Savage.

While testing the car that afternoon, something broke a few hundred feet out, and the car made an immediate left, hitting the guardrail and sending the body flying.

My dad spent the next few years chasing the ever-elusive major sponsor and never returned to the track with his own car again. As an owner of a successful engine-building business, he poured his time into that venture and would help tune and offer advice to boat racers, sprint-car teams, and Funny Car operations like Powers Steel, the Red Baron, Sherm Gunn, John Martin's Jam-Air Special, and several others.

In a little-known trivia fact, both my dad's Funny Cars were featured in the movie Heart Like a Wheel about Shirley Muldowney. The producers bought the Satellite from my dad, and when they told him they were also looking for a Mustang, he put them in touch with the guy he sold the Mach 1 to years earlier. Fortunately, neither of his cars were the ones destroyed in the crash scene. And you can even see my dad's always-present purple butterfly steering wheel in a few of the scenes with “Shirley” in the driver’s seat.

All the while, I found myself roaming dragstrips as a kid, from OCIR to Ontario, Pomona, Firebird, and more, often with John Savage, Denny's son.

Trouble usually wasn't far behind, either. Two of those vivid memories include the time we were busted for standing out in front of Famoso Raceway and charging people money to park in a lot that was supposed to be free. We made a killing that day.

Also, I often profited off of kids at school. When at the drags on the weekends, I would collect the free photo cards given away by the drivers (usually by the handful) and then sell them to my classmates on Monday for a quarter. When my elementary-school teacher found out about it, I'll never forget him saying, "This is a place for learning, not selling."

Those skills came in handy years later, though, when I wanted to go racing myself. I became interested in quarter midgets and asked my parents to get me a car. My dad loved to repeat the story about how when they told me they didn't have the money, I said. “No problem; I'll just get some sponsors.”

Which I did. Using money from A&W Root Beer, Del Taco, Valvoline, and others, my parents never spent one dime on the operation, and I began racing at multiple tracks on the West Coast -- with a car that was painted to match Don Prudhomme's 1982 Pepsi Challenger car. Famed race car painter Tom Stratton did the color, and Grant Meredith, one of my dad's former drivers, did all the lettering.

Oh yeah, John Savage was listed as my crew chief on the front of the car. Nobody had a quarter midget with sponsors or a crew chief. They all thought we were nuts.

Many of the life lessons I learned as a kid revolved around racing and the people my dad came in contact with through racing. For example, he always talked about being a man of your word or doing the right thing and would recall stories like the time Connie Kalitta borrowed a magneto from him at a race. The Bounty Hunter promised to mail it back to him the following week. Instead, he sent my dad a brand-new one, which he thought was one of the most respectful moves he had ever encountered.

Eventually, I stopped racing to concentrate more on school, where writing and public speaking were always my favorite classes. I even talked about wanting to write for National DRAGSTER one day.

In addition to drag racing, we were a sports family, and my other home away from home was Dodger Stadium. However, in 1990, I quickly found a new love in hockey. After going to just one game live, I called and ordered season tickets the next day. And I've never looked back.

Within a few years, I was writing for a local publication, and fast-forwarding to the last five years or so, I've done freelance hockey writing for a variety of publications and websites as well as running my own site (www.MayorsManor.com) dedicated to inside information on the day-to-day activities surrounding the LA Kings, plus interviews with some of the biggest names in the world of hockey.

Still, my love for drag racing has remained present. So it wasn't much of a surprise when my then-girlfriend, now wife, bought me an experience at Frank Hawley's Drag Racing School one year for Christmas. My instructor was "Fast Jack" Beckman, in what turned out to be one of his last classes before moving on to drive a Funny Car full-time.

Besides the passes I made that day down the Pomona quarter-mile, two moments from that day have stuck with me. One, Beckman saying he remembered my dad and being complimentary towards his racing career. I'll never really know if he actually remembered or was just trying to be nice. Regardless, it made me feel good at the time.

The other memory is something he said to me after one of the runs. As was customary, you would drive the dragster back up the return road, and then get out and talk with Beckman about the run. One time, after he asked how it was, I said, “It left pretty good, and then it moved around out in the middle ...” He cut me off, shaking his head side to side like a disapproving father, lowered his voice, and said, “It didn't move around out there.” I just stood there and wondered, “Did it really move around or have I been to too many drag races and heard too many drivers say stuff like that?”

Either way, my five passes were just over 13 seconds each. And those may have been the best combined 65 seconds of my life.

My father was very ill his last few years and passed away in 2007. Yet up until his final days, he would summon the strength to demand to watch two things on TV: his beloved Boston Red Sox and NHRA Drag Racing.

Gone but not forgotten, he still attends two drag races each year. You see, my siblings and I spread some of his ashes at Pomona after he passed. Thus, he still gets to take in the action at the Winternationals and the Finals.

You never forget your parents after they're gone. But when I go to the drags with my son now, I can't help but look around and remember all the memories I had with my dad over there, over there, and over there.

Sharing those moments and stories with my son have just begun and are part of the reason why drag racing means more to me with each passing year.

It just takes one smell of nitro in the pits to transport me all the way back to OCIR and being a kid all over again.
 

Thanks to John for that wonderful story, which is at the heart of the Nitro Generation theme that NHRA will be pursuing in 2012. Thank you to all who sent Nitro Generation stories to me recently, many of which will be included in the annual Fan Guide early next year and others that will run in National DRAGSTER throughout the year. If you haven’t sent your story, there’s still plenty of time. You can refer back to this article to get the gist of what I’m looking for.

Speaking of the Fan Guide, that’s the project on my plate this week. We completed National DRAGSTER’s 52nd season last Wednesday with the shipping of the year’s final issue to the printer. After last Thursday’s annual NHRA holiday party – where I managed to keep alive my Vandergriffian streak of not winning even a door prize – most of my fellow staffers have hightailed it home for the holidays or are enjoying some well-deserved time off (though they remain active on Twitter).

As of this moment, I’m planning a Friday column, but that’s subject to change – after all, it’s almost time to start my Christmas shopping.

I still have a few loose ends on the rear-engine Funny Car thread to sew up (I knew we weren’t done), and then I will present my annual Insider season recap. I also may be traveling north to Santa Rosa (home of Top Fuel hero Frank “the Beard” Bradley), where my sister lives and (boast) is the city attorney to visit with the fam, but I’ll have my laptop ready.

If I don’t “see” you between now and then – I understand most of you guys also are beginning to think about getting ready to start planning when you’ll begin readying yourself to prepare to head out to do your own shopping – but in case we miss one another, Merry Christmas and happy holidays.
 

Maybe I’m overstating the case, but if you’re the kind of person who revels in the minute details of our sport’s history – and, hey, if you’re here, you probably are – I’m fixing to make your head explode like the deliciously gory scene from the classic 1981 horror flick Scanners (I was going to embed a video of that scene here but thought that not appropriate; the image at right is from the movie poster, but go ahead and search for the video on YouTube; I’ll wait).
 
Anyway, if you’re a drag racing historian, I’m going to force you to overwrite a portion of your mental hard drive with newly discovered information about the history behind the car that ultimately became John Force’s first Funny Car, the rear-engine, chain-driven Night Stalker Mustang that we’ve been discussing in the last few columns.

Ever since I first heard about the car, the story was pretty straightforward: Jack Chrisman built it but never drove it. He sold it to Roy Mehus, who crashed it on the second pass at Orange County Int’l Raceway, then repaired and rebadged it (so to speak) in a police-car theme called the Dragway Patrol (sometimes mistakenly called the Cop Patrol). Mehus then sold the car to Force. Everyone seemed to agree on those facts. So far so good, right?

Well, remember that whole debate I had with myself last Friday about whether it was Force driving the police-car-themed Dragway Patrol? Based on the helmet and face-mask design that matched those in the photos taken on the day of the ill-fated OCIR crash, I firmly believed that it was still Mehus behind the wheel; some of my historically inclined colleagues begged to differ. It’s Force, they said.

OK, are you sitting down? Good. It’s not Force. It’s not Mehus, either. Mehus NEVER drove the car. Ever.

Thanks to Adria Hight (Force’s eldest daughter) reaching out to her uncle Walker (Force’s older brother), I tracked down and spoke to Mehus Wednesday. Not being an Internet-inclined sort of fellow, he had no idea in the past interest (and errors) concerning his driving the car and certainly no knowledge of our ongoing discussion here and was quite bemused by it all.

The driver was, in fact, Bill Finacle, who had driven the Bandido fuel altered. Ta-da! Some new data for my friends at DragList.com.

(Kudos to Insider reader Mike Hedworth, who had emailed me that he believed that Mehus had a hired driver. “I remember thinking [the driver] was in law enforcement by the conversation he had with someone, and that is where I think the Dragway Patrol name came from,” he added. Half right. According to Mehus, the cop-car theme came from the idea of chasing down and catching their opponents.)

Mehus -- who knew Force because the two shared an art class at Bell Gardens High (“We were asked to create an abstract art project; John made his out of Popsicle sticks,” he recalled with a laugh. “I forget what it was, but he was pretty proud of it.”) -- confirmed that he bought the never-run Mustang from Chrisman after receiving an inheritance and put his friend Finacle behind the wheel. He never had any inclination to drive it. Finacle did indeed crash the car at OCIR and then drove it as the Dragway Patrol. Mehus remembers the car’s best performance as just 140 mph.

“It was a hard car to drive, but the idea was right,” he insisted. “The car would squat and leave hard.”

(Like Mehus, reader Allen Lasko was a firm believer in the sidewinder concept and remembers the Chrisman flopper’s debut on the pages of Hot Rod magazine. “At the time, I thought that design was sure to be the future of Funny Cars! Living in snowmobile country, I thought the next step would be to install a centrifugal clutch and drive mechanism like a snowmobile. By adjusting the clutch weights and the initial size of the sprocket, you’d have the ability to launch as hard as you’d want, and then the drive ratio would change down the track to allow a higher top-end speed. Never having read how the car actually ran up until your article, I never knew how the chain was indeed the weakest link in the system. I’m surprised you resisted using that line in your article. LOL.)”

Mehus eventually grew frustrated with footing the bill for an unsuccessful and frustrating car, got married, sold it to Force, and was part of the Force entourage into the middle 1980s as a sponsor with his Yamaha of Buena Park dealership and as a friend.

Mehus, who is retired and raises exotic birds in Arizona, fondly remembers his early involvement with the king of Funny Car and all of the wonderful things he saw and did.

“I was probably one of the first people to hold Ashley when she was a baby, and the places we went and things we did, I never would have been able to do by myself,” he said. “I learned a lot of things about racing; I would do anything to help out. We had some really good times.”

Man, you guys love your rear-engine Funny Cars! Over the course of the rear-engine Funny Car thread, a lot of interesting flotsam and jetsam has beached itself in my Inbox, adding to the sea of information on this rare breed of race car. Thanks to everyone who sent notes, photos, and clues to pursue.

Virgil Hartman, whose message-board posting concerning the fate of Force’s Night Stalker I quoted last week, provided the photo at right showing the car after he had reconfigured it to standard front-engine mode.
 
“[It’s] the one and only photo I have of the car,” he wrote. “It is a Polaroid taken of my first pass at Irwindale with the car converted to standard Funny Car configuration. As you can see, the car sits at a different attitude, I have smaller rear tires, and my face isn't plastered up against the front windshield. I made five passes that day in the car and sold it the following weekend. I left the Night Stalker name, picture, and paint job on the car because it was in very good condition and drew a lot of attention from spectators the weekend I drove at Irwindale.
 
“In my youth, I loved drag racing but just couldn't bring myself to dedicate the time needed to be a serious racer. So I bought, changed, and sold race cars to support my love of the sport while I concentrated on raising a family, serving an apprenticeship after service in the Army, and starting my own business, Hartman Enterprises, which is still active today. Along the way, I had the honor of owning some cars that have a place of historical significance in the world of drag racing.
 
“My second dragster was a Kent Fuller creation that was used as Shirley's [Muldowney] A/D in Heart Like a Wheel. It is the one that her husband Jack trashed in their front yard. I still have the front bodywork from that car in my rafters. I bought the Brissette & Drake car that Kelly Brown drove to a world championship. I ran it as a Top Gas West car, and the person I sold it to raced brackets with it for many years. I also bought an Alcohol Funny Car from Bucky Austin, ran it for six months, and sold it to Walt Austin, who rebodied the car as a Trans Am [that] was used for [Walt's son] Pat to get his first competition license with. It later was sold to Gary Densham and then Greg Daebelliehn.”

I heard from Michael Thompson, a friend of Ed Lenarth's and his family since the late 1960s who was with Lenarth during the Mid-Winder and the subsequent sidewinder dragster (both of which crashed).

“I've kept that car all these years,” he said. “Ed sent me home with the drivetrain just before his passing. We tested the dragster at Irwindale in ‘72 with success, then ran it at Orange County for the Grand American meet. The Genuine Suspension rear-engine dragster oiled the left lane right before our run. Steve [Reyes] was correct -- the car left hard, but just before half-track, she hit the slick spot and turned left. We could see the entire side of the car. Norm Wilt did an unbelievable driving job and swung her around only to smack the guardrail (still steel guardrail then) with the rear tire. It laid over about 20 of those 12-by-12 posts; the track was pissed. She never flipped, but it bent the rear axle, broke the chassis behind the driver, and generally bent her up. Norman was knocked out, and the car slid down the guardrail, through the lights, running in the sevens at 170-plus mph. I have the car. The frame’s behind the barn, and the front wheels, spokes, and axle that didn't get bent are in boxes.”

Can you say restoration?

National Trail Raceway Sales and Marketing Manager Michael Fornataro sent this great pic of Jack Ditmars’ seldom-seen rear-engine Funny Car, a stretched Vega with an injected powerplant. I was fortunate to have contact info for Ditmars, who is better known for his line of Mini Brute Opel Kadett Funny Cars, and he was happy to share the details behind the Boss Brute, which, like the Mini Brute, was built by the late Dennis Rollain at R&B Race Cars in late 1971 and debuted in early 1972. Power came from a big-block Chevy (512 cid) with Crower injectors and was transferred to the ground though a Crowerglide slipper clutch, M&M Clutchflite trans through a Greek coupler to a Strange Engineering Dana rear end with a spool. Lifelong friend Herb Moller was his crewmember.

“We ran both cars at our Injected Funny Car Circuit events till I wadded [the Boss Brute] up at Indy just before the Nationals,” he said. “The car was faster than the Mini Brute, but not always; best times were 7.40 e.t. and 191 mph. We were just getting a handle on it when I crashed it at Indy. I believe we could have got 200 [mph] out of it if it didn’t kill me first. The very day I crashed it, when I got this car home, I cut up the body and later sold the chassis to a guy who made an Alcohol Dragster out of it. I miss the Opel and the Lil Screamer but NOT the Boss Brute.”

With a wheelbase of 109 inches, the car was a spooky handler.

“Like all the rear-engine cars, if anything went wrong that affected traction, you were in for the ride of your life. In my case, it was a valve-cover gasket that blew out and oiled one tire. Because of the driver's vantage point, you were the last to know. The car sat only 46 inches off the ground to the top of the roof panel, kinda like a Dart and really low to the ground. This was not my finest hour, but only one other existed at the time, so tracks would go out of their way to get it there and paid a bit extra, too. Twice I lost it on the smoky burnout and did a 360 both times; the crowd loved it, but I was out of control. Talking to ‘Big’ [Don Garlits] about it, he said, ‘If it's not 250 inches in wheelbase, don’t drive it.' Good advice.”

Driving the car at night was especially challenging, but Ditmars had a solution for that, too.
 
“Look closely at the front of the car, and you can see a dowel rod right in the middle of the car coming out of the grille area,” he said. “This was a blue plastic rod that lit up at night and the only way this car could be driven; pretty scary in hindsight. All in all was a great car that ended poorly.”

By the way, Ditmars will be an honoree at next year’s Holley NHRA National Hot Rod Reunion in Bowling Green, Ky., and Moller will be with him to celebrate. Like I said, lifelong friends.

In addition to the Boss Brute and those noted in prior columns, there were other ill-fated rear-engine Funny Cars according to historian Dennis Doubleday. “In 1973, Larry Fullerton and Kevin Doheney built a rear-engine Trojan Horse 1973 Mustang. While testing the car in front of J&E Fiberglass, Fullerton crashed the car, destroying it and ending up with a broken collarbone. He was out from late February until about June of that year, then went back to his front-engine car. The same year, West Coast A/FC circuit regular Larry Derr debuted a rear-engine Vega panel and was killed in a testing accident.”

Derr’s accident was July 27, 1973, at Irwindale. According to reports, Derr’s car spun, flipped onto its top, and slid 170 feet along the guardrail before flipping over. He was taken to Santa Teresita Hospital in nearby Duarte, where he was pronounced dead. That was a pretty tragic summer at the ‘Dale because just two months earlier (April 21), 23-year-old Don Dieckman lost his life after crashing his Killer Whale Vega during the track’s 64 Funny Cars event.

I also heard (finally!) from Jim Adolph, the second of three drivers to try his hand in Burt Berniker’s ill-fated Hindsight entry. “I finally found this photo of the Berniker & Baumunk Hindsight, and unlike the Force confusion, this is really me driving at OCIR,” he wrote, tongue firmly planted in cheek. “Baumunk and I ran the car a few times trying to get it competitive, but it was a different animal. Like Dennis [Geisler, third driver]  said, if the front end comes up at all, you lose sight. By design, it wanted a lot of clutch, but once you got the front left up, you were driving off the guardrail, and even that line of sight was poor. Baumunk was and still is very talented with metal, but neither of us were tuners. It was a real nice car with some good parts. Fun to drive; scary, too. I moved on to race with Don Green's Rat Trap/Sundance cars from there.” I really love this shot because it shows the open windshield hatch. At right is another pretty cool photo taken by our good friend Bob Snyder that shows the Hindsight under tow en route to Orange County Int’l Raceway for the 1973 Hang Ten Funny Car 500. The low-buck open trailer and Lincoln Continental “tow vehicle” harken back to an earlier day before 18-wheelers and even Chaparral trailers.

Regarding the rear-engine Dodge Dart that Garlits got from Jay Howell (that was subsequently crashed by Emory Cook), Doubleday also sent me the above photos. “When Garlits got the car from Branster-Howell, he initially named it Polka-Dart. However, track owners wanted [the] Garlits name/black paint everyone was familiar with, and he obliged. Both photos are from the 7-66 issue of Drag Strip magazine.”

I also received this photo, purported to show Mark Williams in a rear-engine Vega panel Funny Car. Bill Holland confirmed that it was Williams in the car but that he was just shaking the car down for customer Ed Mullen of Cheyenne, Wyo. That Williams would build a rear-engine Funny Car is probably not surprising because he was a pioneer in the field of rear-engine dragsters, “having pretty much established the design and engineering standard for the breed with the Widner/Dollins car (later campaigned successfully by the Kaiser Bros.) long before Garlits' effort,” noted Holland. They've promised more information on the car, but it hadn't arrived by the time this column went live.

I received the photo at right from Ritchie Boggs, son of Joe Boggs, who was the crew chief on this Don Casto-driven rear-engine Vega, shown in this photo by Art Suiter in a moment of great distress -- and one during which I’m sure that Casto was happy to have the engine behind him – at the fall 1975 IHRA Bristol event. Drag racing historian Bret Kepner also forwarded me the same photo and a ton of information about the team.

“The duo, from the Charleston, W.Va., area, had run everything from AA/Fuel Altereds to AA/Fuel Dragsters before switching to multiple REFCs,” he wrote. “Casto originally ran his own AA/FA while Boggs ran an AA/FD with the late Jim Hundley (later of Alan Starr's Starrliner FE and RE diggers). Casto and Boggs teamed up with their own FE AA/FD in '69, and after a serious fire during qualifying at the '73 Gators, they elected to move to AA/FC with a stretched Vega on a rear-engined chassis (built I believe by J. Ed Horton), which they campaigned through 1976. More recently, the car gained a bit of notoriety from a brief appearance in film coverage of the 1975 IHRA Pro-Am National at Rockingham on Chicagoan Bud Lindemann's original Car & Track syndicated television show repackaged and rebroadcast in the 1990s by Speedvision network. (Go to 03:27 at www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbOIlMMMzbA.)
 
“The Vega was rebodied with, of all things, a '75 Grand Am; the yellow-and-white car was alarmingly huge, and Casto looked almost like an afterthought in the Pontiac's massive windshield. I watched it clock what I believe to be a career-best 7.11 at 218 mph at the IHRA Pro-Am Nats at Rockingham in 1978; the car was just plain violent on its dry hops and launches; Casto had a propensity to run any of his machines on the absolute ragged edge at all times. I distinctly remember monstrous daylight header flames from the Grand Am, and, at night ... well, it was stunning.
 
“I believe it was only a few weeks after the Rockingham appearance when the Grand Am was destroyed at Blaney, S.C. Casto teamed up again with Boggs, who had been fielding a Mustang II AA/FC with fellow West Virginian Roger Hamrick. However, the trio's new yellow Trans Am was destroyed in a horrific crash (which I also witnessed) at the '78 IHRA national event at Commerce, Ga., not too soon after its debut.
 
“While it's a relatively obscure Funny Car, Casto's Grand Am may well be the last RE AA/FC campaigned in the United States. If nothing else, I have no doubt the Insider Nation can probably come up with something I've been unable to find for decades: a photo of the World's Only Rear-Engined Grand Am Funny Car!”

I have Boggs trying to track down more information on his dad’s car and a photo of the Grand Am, but if any of you have it, whip one my way.

Kepner also directed me to the website for Mike Puzycki's rear-engine Corvette,  which may be the only contemporary back-motor car running; it competes on the Great Lakes Nostalgia Funny Car Circuit regionally in Florida.

Regarding Ed Shaver, the U.S. serviceman in England who drove the country’s most famous rear-engine Funny Car, a VX4/90, he was a friend throughout the 1990s of Racers For Christ chaplain Jim Jack, who sent background info on him.

Shaver, who also was an RFC chaplain, died May 14, 2000, at age 55. He was a United States Air Force Air Commando during the Vietnam War, during which he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star, Bronze Star with Valor, Air Force Cross, Navy Cross, Air Medal, and Airman’s Medal. He served three years in the NATO War Room during NATO exercises as air power controller. He received two Medals of Honor and the Order of Kings by the president and premier of the Republic of Vietnam.

During his racing career in England, Shaver was sponsored by Mattel, and Hot Wheels made a limited-edition diecast of his AMX; he was instrumental in the further development of drag racing in England.

Wrote Jack, “As stated in your column, Ed was a larger than life character. He told me many stories about racing and about the Vietnam War (most were not very pretty). He suffered from exposure to Agent Orange, and he was a man that lived each day as if it was his last. He was honest but at times would get in your face yet be compassionate if need be. Ed experienced three racing crashes at over 200 mph during his 12 years of professional racing. Twelve fires and the last crash broke many bones and resulted in his hairdo he carried for his last 25 years: bald. Ed knew his faith carried him through many other adventures during his last 20 years on earth.”
 
And that, my friends, barring any more jawdropping, head-exploding news, marks the end of the rear-engined Funny Car thread. I think.