NHRA - National Hot Rod Association

The Chevrolet Monza remains one of the immortal early Funny Car body designs in drag racing history, alongside other popular models such as the Vega, Mustang, and Barracuda. When it was introduced in 1975, Chevy flopper stalwarts who had been running the Vega design since its inception in 1971 immediately flocked to the sexier and sleeker Monza body. General Motors' John DeLorean nicknamed it the "Italian Vega," citing styling with a strong resemblance to the Ferrari 365 GTC/4. The “Monza” name, of course, evokes the fabled Italian racetrack and was first used by Chevy on some Corvairs back in the early 1960s.

For its first three years, the Vega had a flat and probably not-too-aerodynamic front nose, but 1974 brought a laid-back grille to the Vega, but the Monza was so much cooler looking, and even its large, trademark rectangular headlights (a first among auto manufacturers) didn’t seem to faze anyone looking to reduce frontal drag.

The Monza, as it came from the Chevrolet factory, was four inches longer than the Vega and just looked faster. Chevy put Corvette engines in them to run the IMSA GT Series to compete with the best GT cars in the world, including the dominating Porsche Carreras, which won class championships in 1976 and ’77, but it was the drag racers who really took to the Monza.

There are 662 Monza Funny Cars in the DragList.com database, and nearly half of them (318) were blown nitro burners. The most famous, of course, was Don Prudhomme’s virtually unbeatable Army Monza, to which I’ve devoted thousands of words over the years. The way I obsessed over it, you’d think there wasn’t another Monza Funny Car on the planet. This column will set that straight with a gallery of other cool old Monza photos.

Drivers who buckled in beneath Monza shells make up a Who’s Who of the class with household names including Prudhomme, “Jungle Jim” Liberman, “240 Gordie” Bonin, “Wild Willie” Borsch, Gary Burgin, Gary Densham, Dale Emery, Tim Grose, Tom Hoover, Bruce Larson, Roger Lindamood, Jim Nicoll, Tom Prock, Dale Pulde, Al Segrini, Tripp Shumake, Paul Smith, Gene Snow, and some guy named John Force. 

Force began his long association with chassis builder Steve Plueger with this car, which had a Milodon powerplant.

Among the notable Funny Car guys not on this list are Tom McEwen (Dusters then Corvettes), Ed McCulloch (Dodge/Plymouth), Pat Foster (pretty much everything but a Monza), Don Schumacher (ran Vegas in ‘73 and ’74, then quit the year before the Monza), Al Hoffman (ran Vegas, then switched to Arrow), Jerry Ruth, Larry Fullerton, Lew Arrington, and Al Hanna (Mustang guys), Shirl Greer (Mustangs then Firebirds), Dave Condit (Mustangs, then Arrows), and Kenny Bernstein (not driving during the Monza years).

If ever there was a guy destined to drive a Monza Funny Car, it’s Bruce Larson, who spent almost his entire career beneath the shell of a Chevy: Chevelles, Camaros, and Vegas preceded this Rollie Linblad-built Monza, which eventually ended up in the hands of Chuck Etchells a few years later. Larson went on to wheel Chevy Corvettes and Berettas, but ironically, his greatest success, the 1989 NHRA Funny Car championship, came in an Oldsmobile.

Ditto for “Jungle Jim” Liberman, a dedicated Chevy guy throughout his career, from Chevy IIs to Camaros to Vegas and, of course, the Monzas that were his last ride before his tragic death in 1977. “Jungle” won his only NHRA national event in Englishtown in 1975 while still driving his ’74 Vega and switched to the Monza for 1976-77. He didn’t do well at national events those two years, but that was never his real thing, but he won match races from coast to coast, from Bakersfield’s March Meet to Reading’s Dutch Classic. The final Monza we saw in 1977 was painted orange for some reason and emblazoned with hopeful sponsorship from 7-Eleven.

This Monza, I think, is one of the most beautiful of Joe Pisano’s many gorgeous-looking cars, but that’s not the usual handler Sush Matsubara at the wheel at the ’75 Winternationals. It’s two-time championship runner-up Jake Johnston, who got the call from Papa Joe when Matsubara broke a leg in an off-road motorcycle crash. Johnston filled in for him at the 1975 preseason Winter Classic in Phoenix and Pomona, but when Matsubara was unable to return, JJ kept the job through 1977. He finished an impressive eighth in points in 1976 and was runner-up behind Johnny White at the 1977 Cajun Nationals, the same year that he and Pisano won the Division 7 championship.

Before gaining national fame in Roger Guzman’s Assassination Funny Car later in the decade, Rob Williams drove a variety of blown and unblown nitro dragsters and then nitro Funny Cars before first partnering with Guzman and Ron Kerchal on the Super Rat Monza in 1975-76. Despite the car name, it was powered by a Keith Black Hemi.

Dennis Fowler’s Sundance was one of the prettiest Monzas on the planet and also graced the final cover of Drag Racing USA magazine (May 1975). Russell Long initially wheeled the car in 1975 for Fowler, who hailed from Alaska but kept the car in the warm Southwest, before Tripp Shumake took over in 1976 and enjoyed success on the match-race tour, most notably in the Coca-Cola Cavalcade of Stars, where they notched three wins and eight runner-ups in the 16-race schedule.

Famed Funny Car pilot “Flash Gordon” Mineo was a hardcore Pontiac racer from his earliest days in the class in 1967 but went Chevy in the 1970s, first with a Vega and then the inevitable Monza, 1976-78, before going back to his Pontiac roots in 1979.

“Mighty Mike” Van Sant was one of the most sought-after Funny Car pilots of the early 1970s, driving for everyone from Mickey Thompson to Stone, Woods, and Cooke to Roland Leong but always came back to his own line of “Invader” Funny Cars, including this Monza, which took flight at the 1977 U.S. Nationals with this wheelie-bar-ending launch.

And speaking of the late, great Leong, his famous Hawaiian also was a Monza in the mid-1970s as he briefly shed his career-long association with Dodge to try the sleek new Monza with drivers like Norm Wilcox, Larry Arnold, and Ron Colson in the saddle. Colson, of course, provided the car’s most ignominious moment at the 1978 U.S. Nationals, where he crossed the centerline on a second-round single, clearing the path for Tom McEwen to make an important solo semifinal test run that led to his emotional final-round win over Don Prudhomme. Leong stayed with Chevy through 1980 with a Corvette before returning to his Dodge roots and continuing to make history.

“Superman” Jim Nicoll had a pretty good run in Top Fuel, including being named Drag News Top Fuel Driver of the Year in 1970 despite his memorable crash alongside Don Prudhomme in the U.S. Nationals final, but he already really had his eyes set on the increasingly popular Funny Car class. At the end of the 1972 season, he switched to Funny Cars, partnering with Chuck Tanko, owner of Texas-based Speed Equipment World. Their first car was the Barry Setzer Vega formerly driven by Pat Foster. After the company went bankrupt, Nicoll ran under his own name, culminating in 1976 with this Monza before lack of sponsorship and some nasty crashes forced him to the sidelines. “I crashed a lot of cars at a lot of places,” he told me in 2008. “I had worse crashes than the Indy one; they just weren’t caught on TV. I crashed at Cordova in my Funny Car one time when I blew a tire and did some endos in the lights; that was pretty horrible.”

Tom Hoover was a Dodge and Plymouth stalwart early in his Funny Car career but switched to Chevy in 1974 when he bought Don Prudhomme’s too-trick-for-its-own-good Buttera Vega, then quickly upgraded to a Monza in 1975. Although this isn’t one of his best lookers (or I’d be bummed not to have a color photo on hand), it is the first of Hoover’s cars with the cool neon-tubing font for the Showtime name. 

Long before he became one of the go-to chassis builders for nitro cars, Murf McKinney drove one, too. This Monza, dubbed Kentuckiana (an amalgamation of Kentucky and his home state of Indiana, I’m guessing), is credited by DragList.com as coming out of the Hume and Foster chassis works, though McKinney may have had a hand in its development leading to the 1981 founding of his own business.

Chuck Etchells called his early Funny Cars “Future Force,” and he did eventually become one of the first drivers to record a four-second Funny Car elapsed time in 1993, but the force that he felt after this starting-line explosion at the 1980 Summernationals in his ex-Bruce Larson Monza was not the kind he was looking for. Etchells scored 13 NHRA Funny Car wins and died of cancer in July 2016.

Frank Mancuso’s Monza also had an unforgettable moment in Englishtown in late 1978 when his Travel Agent entry got loose and crossed in front of and was T-boned by Mike Evegens’ Earthquake jet dragster. Mancuso broke both feet and his right leg was nearly severed, but he still was far enough ahead in points to win the Division 1 championship that year.

The predecessor to the super successful Bubble Up Trans Am of the Pacemaker team was this Gordie Bonin-driven Monza, shown at the 1976 Summernationals. The car was runner-up at the 1976 March Meet behind “Jungle Jim” Liberman and eventually got the more familiar white with green stripes design made famous on the Trans Am beginning in 1977.

After much success in his Mustang II — including being the only guy to beat Don Prudhomme at a national event in 1976 — Gary Burgin switched to this “Orange Baron” Monza for the 1977 season. Although he didn’t win another national event until he returned to a Mustang in 1979, Burgin was a terror on the match-race circuit with big wins at the 1977 Olympics of Drag Racing and PHR Championships. He did qualify No. 1 at the NHRA Springnationals and World Finals, won the IHRA Northern Nationals, and qualified No. 2 in Indy and went to the semifinals before his parachute fell out against long-shot Richard Rogers. His 1978 campaign in the Monza included a runner-up to Prudhomme at Le Grandnational and a win at the UDRA North American Grandnationals.

Legendary wheelman and tuner Dale “the Snail” Emery only made it to two final rounds as a driver and the first one, at the 1973 Supernationals, he didn’t even get to race in after blowing up the JEGS Camaro in a semifinal win over Don Prudhomme, allowing Tom McEwen to solo for his first carer win. The second was in “Big Mike” Burkart’s Monza at the 1976 Cajun Nationals, where he lost in the final to his future boss, Raymond Beadle, and the Blue Max.

The Cassidy brothers, driver Les and tuner John, ran this Monza on both nitro and alcohol on the East Coast. The car was initially powered by a Donovan but switched to the more conventional KB power.

During his early Top Fuel days, Dave Uyehara jokingly referred to himself as "the world's oldest living Kamikaze pilot," and the name carried over to this Monza with former Top Fuel partner Dick Oswald. Uyehara, of course, returned to his Top Fuel roots in the late 1970s and then became one of the pre-eminent chassis builders on the West Coast and developer of the first 300-inch Top Fuel chassis (Frank Bradley, 1988).

Here’s two Monzas for the price of one as Jim West, brother of longtime nitro driver/tuner Johnny West, and his Wild, Wild West entry squared off with Al Arriaga’s ex-Hawaiian Spanish Galleon in an all-Arizona battle. Arriaga’s son, Scott, is still a presence in the sport, wheeling a jet dragster.

And speaking of Arizonians, there was nothing not to like about Phoenix’s Curt Wheeler, who tried so hard in his Donovan-powered Monza in the early 1980s. From the hand-drawn 16-bit video-game-like lettering on its flanks to a never-say-quit attitude, the NHRA National Dragster staff always rooted for him.

Kansan Danny Pickett teamed with Larry Hunter on the seldom-seen Overland Express Monza in 1976-77 and was the first-round victim for Johnny White en route to the Houston Hustler’s lone national event Funny Car win at the 1977 Cajun Nationals.

The better-known Mr. Pickett, West Coast favorite Bob Pickett, was a strong runner in the mid-to-late-1970s, but this isn’t a Monza, as the Mickey Thompson/U.S. Marines entry that was actually branded as an Olds Starfire was the corporate brother of Chevy’s Monza.

Monzas, of course, were not limited to the nitro ranks, and one of the greatest Top Fuel drivers in history, Joe Amato, got his career rolling in the Gabriel Hijacker Monza, sponsored by the shock absorber company. Amato switched to Alcohol Dragster in 1979 and then into Top Fuel in 1982. The rest is history.

Half a dozen years before he became a world championship nitro force with Austin Coil in the Chi-Town Hustler, Frank Hawley was wheeling his family-owned Monza with alcohol in the tank.

Long before he became better known as the super supportive father of future Top Alcohol Dragster and Top Fuel star Darrell Gwynn, Jerry Gwynn was a successful driver in his own right, winning the 1969 Super Eliminator championship in his Baby Huey ’23-T by winning that year’s World Finals in Dallas. Jerry transferred to the Alcohol Funny Car ranks with a Vega in 1975 followed by this Monza the next year.

The Monza was produced by Chevrolet through 1980, and a total of 731,504 Monzas were built in six model years until the Monza was replaced in the GM lineup by front-wheel-drive cars like the Chevrolet Cavalier and Oldsmobile Firenza, which went on to become semi-popular Funny Car and Pro Stock models, but never replaced the Monza’s popularity, nor that of the sometimes cursed Corvette Funny Cars of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Phil Burgess can be reached at pburgess@nhra.com

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