Just My Thoughts on the World of Pro Modifieds

By Rob Kozak
2/13/03

he other day I was on the crapper (Did you know that the guy who invented the first flushable toilet's name was John D. Crapper? What a legacy to leave behind!). Anyway, I was thumbing through some old racing magazines and I started to read an article by Geoff Stunkard in the Sept. 1996 issue of Super Stock/Drag Racing Monthly on Funny Cars from the 1970's. The similarities between that era of Funny Cars and today's Pro Mods really hit me hard.

In the early 70's Funny Car's were at their height of popularity, with personalities like Don "the Snake" Prudhomme, Tom "the Mongoose" McEwen, "Jungle" Jim Lieberman, Gene "the Snowman" Snow, Ed "the Ace" McCullough, Don "the Shoe" Schumacher and several others. Cars still had wild names like Tom Hoover's "Showtime," Lew Arrington's "Brutus," Shirley Muldowney's "Bounty Huntress," Roger Lindamood's "Color Me Gone," Kenny Bernstein in the "LA Hooker," and many, many more.

Body styles were also a big thing then. Just one look at "Veney's Vega," the original Wonder Bread-sponsored Vega panel wagons, and Mickey Thompson's "Revelleader" Grand Am (which earned the nickname "the Tucker Torpedo") and the originality abounds. Kinda like a class I know of today.

Also, in the early '70's Funny Car racers had their choice of running NHRA, IHRA, or AHRA, much like today's Pro Mods with the IHRA and NHRA. Around that time the NHRA adopted a season long points system, the AHRA fell out of favor, and match racing was starting to slow down. Sound familiar? Also around the same time you saw the birth of multi-car teams. Do you believe that Don Schumacher had a stable of FIVE cars back then? Looks like the four-car team he has now can grow a bit.

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One of the most obvious similarities is when the NHRA made the use of nitrous oxide legal in 1973. You had teams running their regular blown nitro set-up and other teams running nitrous with the blown nitro set-ups with yet other teams testing turbochargers. See anything familiar yet?

Sponsors were slowly seeing the benefit of what became known as "motorsports marketing" and the NHRA started to be the sanctioning body of choice. The IHRA would hold on to Funny Cars for a while and the AHRA has since become a thing of the past. At first it seemed corporations liked the "outlaw" aspect of drag racing and marketed it well with Revell sponsoring several cars and selling models of those cars. Original names combined with sponsor names to make up such cars as the Wonder Bread "Wonder Wagons" and the "Pabst Blue Ribbon Charger" to name a few. Now it's the Oakley car or the Skoal "blue" car or the CSK "red" car.

I'm not saying originality has left Pro Mod yet, but once it becomes a Pro class with the NHRA it will fade in originality. I know the IHRA haters will adopt the new pro class and think it's great, corporate sponsors will get on board, your die hard Pro Mod fans will follow, but, just like the Goodguys, they will long for what once was.

We all know that cubic inches don't win races; cubic dollars do. With the escalating cost of running a Pro Mod, sponsorship dollars are needed more and more. And for any of you who know a racer personally you know that they would sell their soul to keep racing. They don't care much about the names, the personalities, and some of them don't even care how their car looks. They just want to race.

With the NHRA's corporate attitude and the possibility of Pro Mods becoming a professional class in the NHRA soon, I once again refer to Geoff Stunkard's article "GENTLEMAN, GET YOUR SPONSORS (You're going to need them...)."

What do you think? Send your email to response@racingnetsource.com.

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