NHRA - National Hot Rod Association

Fan voting ended earlier this week in the Top 20 Funny Cars poll, and we’ll begin to reveal the results in the very near future. It has been a fun exercise, especially the creation of the list and everything that went into it, as well as hearing some of your comments about the list’s makeup and your picks to win.

Thousands of votes were cast by a wide audience of fans who no doubt included history buffs such as the regular readers of this column and some who might know only the names and not the histories of the cars/drivers, so the results reflect an overall consensus.

If you’ve been around this column long enough, you might remember the fun we had in the summer of 2008, when readers voted in what I called the Favorite Race Car Ever poll. I broke it down into segments, by car type and decade (Exhibition Cars, Early Door Cars/Roadsters, Early Dragsters, Early Funny Cars, 1970s Top Fuelers, 1970s Funny Cars, then a catchall 1980s and Beyond for all classes), then took the top vote-getters from each group and put them together for a final vote-off. If you go into the Blog Archive widget at right and set the Insider Wayback Machine to July and August 2008, you can relive those results, which is an interesting exercise because many on our Top 20 Funny Cars list were also part of that voting.

Anyway, I thought it would be fun to get a straw poll from only the Insider faithful to see how this group of experts would have rated the top 20. I’ve hidden the post-vote results to keep things interesting, but I’ll definitely share them in the future. So have at it, and be sure to drop me a line explaining your vote (click on my byline above).

We’ll be unveiling the first results from the poll next Saturday, during the Summit Racing Equipment NHRA Southern Nationals, first on the FOX TV show and then immediately thereafter on NHRA.com. If you’ve been following along, Tony Pedregon, the two-time Funny Car world champ and now TV analyst, has already started rolling out his own Top 20 list, and we’ll sync up with him in Atlanta, where he will reveal his No. 18 pick, which means we’ll unveil our Nos. 18-20 at the same time.

In case you missed his first two picks, his No. 20 was the Detroit Tiger Monza of Tom Prock and Pancho Rendon, and his No. 19 was Mike Kase’s Dale Armstrong-driven Speed Racer – both pretty good picks. (Pedregon’s picks are not restricted to the Top 20 list in the fan vote.)

After that, we’ll reveal one new driver on each Saturday of each national event weekend, culminating at the fall Las Vegas event, where we’ll reveal No. 3 and be down to the final two. We’ll have a big buildup to the announcement of No. 1 at the season-ending Auto Club NHRA Finals.

Thanks for playing.