I've known about this deal for a long time but was sworn to secrecy until now and I'm happy as can be to let the drag racing world know about this.

Let's flash back to 1975. Jungle won his first and only NHRA national event, the Summernationals at Englishtown. He had a few cars back then but drove this red Vega to the winner's circle. That's Richard Dilworth from Winston, "Jungle Pam" Hardy, Wally Parks, and Russell James Liberman posing for pictures on, believe it or not, a Tuesday morning about 1 a.m. Lot of rain that weekend.

Anyway there were a couple of dudes from Sweden, (Björn Andersson/Tage Hammerman) who were at that race and were so impressed with "JJ" that they made a deal to buy the car. At the end of the season "Jungle" took the car to Port Newark, N.J., loaded it into a container and off it went.

Here's a shot of the car when it arrived in Sweden in December of 1975. As you can see it was rode hard and put away wet and was in pretty rough shape. To make a long story short the car was raced for a while with a couple of different bodies on it but the original Vega body survived. Eventually the car was parked.

As you can see by these recent photos Jan has done an amazing job with the restoration. He's got a pretty nice shop with a lot of toys huh? Anyway, the project is nearing completion and plans are to bring the car to the U.S. when it's finished for a tour.

By the way, the car will not be raced but Jan plans to burn a lot of nitro at displays by cackling the car any time he can. My kind of guy.

The significance of this is that this car is a real piece of drag racing history and thanks to Jan it's been saved forever.

I'm on vacation, type at you next year.

BB