THE BIRTH OF NITRO
FUNNY CARS, PART 5

END OF AN ERA

By Frank Oglesby
Photo by James Drew
11/8/05

am writing this the week before Pomona, but no matter who becomes the new NHRA Nitro Funny Car Champion we are witnessing the end of an era.

During the last twenty years, some of the best minds in the sport were in the Nitro classes working on innovative new solutions to going faster and quicker, because that’s what racers do, it’s in their DNA. The intellectual climate of drag racing since its infancy has favored the "innovative thinkers” who helped to bring to the sport billet blocks and heads, specialty superchargers, set-back manifolds, direct drive with the multi-stage clutches, multi-stage fuel systems and computer data acquisition, to name just a few things.

Hard work and applied intelligence is what produced the performance levels we have enjoyed in Nitro FC, pitting your knowledge and ideas against those of the other teams, and then actually racing. What a novel concept!

During the last few years of the “Let's slow them down” period, we have completely lost track of the fact that it is still about the “racing.” I am not suggesting we had not reached the safety limits of the then current tires, especially in TF. No, this is about the never ending rule changes, how they were implemented, and the results to the fan base.

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One of the dirty little secrets of rule changes, or rules themselves, is that the guys who can’t cut it find it easier to try and slow down the fast guys than it is to work toward being one of the fast guys. That takes both hard work and intellect.

Today everyone has caught up with the thinkers in Nitro FC and this group is not allowed to do anything they were not already doing about three years ago and ANY new idea is rejected. This has hurt the Funny Cars more than the TF cars, as they have to be finessed a lot more to avoid smoking the tires due to less traction.

The end of an era started with the move to 90 percent nitro, then to 85 percent and continued to where we now have governors on Nitro cars. About the only two things missing now are a “crate” motor rule and a choreographer. Oh come on, you say, they would never do that---Yeah and if I told you a few years ago we would have GOVERNORS on Nitro cars capable of being reprogrammed at NHRA’s discretion what would you have said?---I thought so.

How did we get from the most exciting racing on the planet to what we have now you say? I keep hearing how we need all this expertise from OUTSIDE the drag racing world to take us to the next step in growing drag racing’s popularity and I say BS.