NHRA - National Hot Rod Association

Today’s Funny Car fans root for maybe three-dozen nitro burners across the country, but back in the sport’s earlier years, Funny Cars were everywhere, and some of them were seldom seen outside of their region.

Here’s a look back at a collection of Funny Cars from our archives, cars that you might only have seen at your local track. First of two parts.

Clyde Morgan’s Exp. Javelin (assuming this stood for experimental?) was a West Coast regular in the late 1960s. Morgan, who had driven for Dickie Harrell as well as Tom Sturm, ran this car for three seasons, starting with a 427 Chevy for power in ‘68 and ’69 before switching to a Hemi in 1970. Regular Dragster Insider contributor Al Kean remembers the car well. "I saw Clyde Morgan win the 1970 Northwest National Open at (then) Seattle International Raceway (Bill Doner's first big event) back in April of that year," he said. "It was still Chevy-powered  at that time. That was his first and maybe only big win. He won the event when his final-round opponent (Mike Snively driving the "Diamond Jim Annin" Challenger) was shut off with an oil leak. He made the run,  (a then-competitive 7.55) then, under power, drove the car back down the return road (trailing the chute) to the starting line, then shut the engine off. That is definitely something you would never see today."

AMC Funny Cars were surprisingly popular in the 1960s, largely with Javelins, including Doug Thorley’s wild-but-star-crossed rear-engine car) as well as some AMC Rebels and Preston Honea’s one-off AMC Marlin and Lou Azar’s Funny Gremlin. I did some columns on these a few years ago that you can find here and here.

Californian Bob Weidlein started his career under the aforementioned AMC Rebel body before switching to this Mustang, the injected-fuel Chain Gang, in the early 1970s, and shown at Lions Dragstrip in about 1972. Note Hall of Fame Lions/OCIR starter Larry Sutton at far left observing.

Like a lot of Funny Car racers back in the day, Corpus Christi, Texas’ Bill Rogers (who, according to DragList, was a welder at NASA) got his start in Top Fuel before moving to Funny Car in the 1970s, and was one of a number of drivers (more than 50!) who tried, with little success, to make the Vega panel wagon bodywork, including the memorable Wonder Wagon entries. It probably won’t surprise you to know that I also did a couple of columns on Vega panels that you can find here and here.

I’ve always been a fan of what we at NHRA National Dragster used to label as “low-buck” Funny Cars, and in my earliest years on the staff, Chris Martin and I rooted hard for this guy, New Jersey-based Dale Barlet, and his Iron Eagle Chevy Citation, shown on fire (as it sometimes was) at the 1984 NHRA Gatornationals. Barlet’s lightly funded team ran throughout the 1980s, cherry-picking national events as they could.

Another East Coast guy that we all loved was Bobby Lagana Sr. with his Twilight Zone entries. Lagana, whose sons Bobby Jr. and Dom we all know today as brilliant nitro tuners/car owners/fabricators, had a 20-plus-year run in Funny Car before turning over the wheel to his kids and becoming their biggest fans, as they were once his.

From Connecticut comes Bob Tardugno and his Roman Rat Nova, which reportedly was powered by a 427 Chevy marine engine. Tardugno was a match race regular in the 1970s before getting out of the sport in 1974 and turning to racing horses.

From the great Northwest comes the little-known Alcohol Funny Cars of Bill Moore, including this 'Cuda, shown in 1976 at Idaho’s Firebird Raceway. Although his cars were primarily alcohol-fueled, he’d sometimes throw some nitro in the tank for match races.

Minnesota has a rich tradition of nitro Funny Cars with guys like Tom Hoover, Doc Halladay, Bill Schifsky, Mike Edstrom, Al Tschida, and Jerry Boldenow, and Alcohol Funny Car racer Bruce Nilsen joined them when he moved up from the alcohol ranks to nitro in the early 1990s with this Corvette.

Five years before Bruce Springsteen rolled down Thunder Road, Atlanta’s Dee Simmons was rocking this wonderful Corvette roadster of the same name. Simmons, who among other nicknames went by "Mr. Soul," was among a group of emerging Black racers who made a name for themselves on the match race circuit alongside people like Malcolm Durham, Lee Jones, and Western Bunns on the East Coast and Clarence Bailey, Leon Cain, Barry “Machine Gun” Kelly, and Rodney Flournoy on the West Coast.

Gervase O'Neil and brother Johnny moved from Canada to Southern California, where Johnny had a tune-up shop in Gardena. After an A/FX Chevelle, they built the King Rat Corvette and then the Camaro shown here, which was restored in 2017 and became a regular at concours car shows.

Dennis Piranio was a professional engine builder out of Dallas with his Performance Engines entries, including this Vega trying to take flight in 1974. He ran his own cars for years but finished out in the Jordan Bros.’ cool Ford-powered alky burner in the Probe in the early 1990s. I met Dennis when he was helping out on Dal and Deborah Denton’s hard-running Alcohol Funny Car in the mid-1980s, and I got to be part of the crew for a memorable story in National Dragster. Good dude.

Eddie Pauling, who more recent Funny Car fans may remember as one of the drivers of fellow Arizonian Johnny Loper’s Lil Hoss entries, had this cool rear-engine 392-powered Mercury Cougar that won the 1968 AHRA Springnationals four years before Jim Dunn got the notoriety as the first and only rear-engined Funny Car winner in NHRA history.

Ed O'Brien's Qu Voe Charger (backed by the Qu Voe Chemical Company, which made its name with a patented process for removing contaminants in waste crankcase oil) was a Midwest staple in the early 1970s. O’Brien and tuner Paul Stendquist ran several cars after this, and he was one of the last drivers of the much-passed-around Chicago Patrol Mustang.

Current Funny Car driver Dave Richards and brother Paul were born into the flopper world courtesy of their father, Gary Richards, who ran his Black Shadow entries in the Northeast in the 1960s and ‘70s.

When Firebird International Raceway opened in 1984, Gary Thompson emerged as one of the track’s regular stars with his good-running Checker Auto Parts Citation. You might recognize the guy in the other lane, who was still working hard to earn a bigger name for himself and was one of track owner Charlie Allen’s regular buy-ins: John Force.

More next week!

Phil Burgess can be reached at pburgess@nhra.com

Hundreds of more articles like this can be found in the DRAGSTER INSIDER COLUMN ARCHIVE

Or try the Random Dragster Insider story generator