NHRA - National Hot Rod Association

Pomona race fans are in for a nostalgic treat in the day’s first Funny Car session when Ron Capps and Paul Lee line up and provide a fitting coda to the NHRA’s 75th Anniversary season.

Lee is running his Tom “the Mongoose” “McEwen tribute paint scheme that he debuted earlier this year in Indy so Capps will saddle up next to him in his Don “the Snake” Prudhomme tribute car that he ran at the 2024 U.S. Nationals.

It wasn’t pre-arranged, but some misfortune on Capps' part and some blind luck made it happen.

“Unfortunately, we had our accident in Dallas and lost another Funny Car body,” Capps explained. “We sent someone back to Indy to pick up another backup body, just in case. The body they picked up was the Army car we ran at Indy — the NAPA Army car. We took it to Las Vegas as a backup, but never had to use it. When we tested on Monday, we asked if we could run that car. I said, ‘Yeah, it'd be cool.’

“Paul Lee and I were talking at the professional drivers' meeting [Friday] morning. He showed me a picture he had taken when he was 16 years old at the Summernationals. It was a picture of the exact paint scheme he's running now, parked alongside the car we had run at Indy. We were joking about how cool it would be to get the two cars together for a picture. Paul knew we had the body out there, and we knew he had his car in Las Vegas. We had almost gone over to ask if we could line them up during Monday testing just for a photo.

“We ran the 'Mongoose' car at Indy, but we had such a big response from it, and everybody from California was wondering if we were gonna run it at Pomona because this Tom’s home track; there was just an overwhelming response," said Lee. }When I found out that Capps and 'Guido'  [crew chief Dean Antonelli] had the ‘Snake’ body, I texted Guido, hey, why don't we, you know, see if we can do a qualifying lap with each other, and then that's where we started.

"I was in high school -- remember I grew up in Jersey – and the first Summernationals I went to was ‘75. So, I have lots of pictures that I took from ‘75, ‘76, ‘77, ‘78. When we were doing the hero cards for Indy, I went looking through my pictures, and I found that picture I took. 

"When Paul started texting ‘Guido and I told them, ‘Look, I'll call Katherine [Wooten] at NAPA and make sure we have permission to run it, but I want to make sure everybody is good with the idea.’ " Capps said.

“There was also the matter of getting the cars together. With NHRA's qualifying procedures, you can't just pull up to the starting line whenever you want. You have to be assigned a pairing. We weren't scheduled to run together, and we weren't sure we could make it happen. Paul got hold of NHRA’s Josh [Petersen, race director] and asked if we could be the first pair out, behind the Top Fuel cars. I called Katherine at NAPA, and she loved the idea.

“Fifty years ago, those two cars were running side by side. I thought it was especially cool that Paul chose that particular paint scheme for Indy because it's not the version of the ‘Mongoose’ car that everybody remembers. Some of the newer fans might not even recognize it.

"The fact that we happened to have that particular body in our trailer, that Paul had brought back that paint scheme, and that we were both in Las Vegas at the same time made the whole thing possible. Under normal circumstances, it probably never would have happened. And to have it happen during NHRA's 75th anniversary season, at the final race of the year, made it even more special.

“I called ‘Snake’ [Don Prudhomme]. He'll be here anyway, so I asked if he'd mind coming down to the starting line.

“He said, ‘Shit, yeah. Right behind your car.’ So, yeah, very exciting.”