"When Bill Bader bought the IHRA six years ago," said Skooter Peaco, IHRA director of racing operations, "he came in with a philosophy of wanting to let EVERYBODY come in and race their car, whatever make, model, configuration was humanly possible. His philosophy has always been to widen, widen, widen, and that may sometimes be a bad thing, but the bottom line is, if you get another person to participate, then it can only be a good thing. That's the reason we still allow that, still have so many classes, and we are still 'wide' in Stock and Super Stock categories."

Meaning, says Mike Baker, IHRA tech director, that IHRA still allows old Stockers in competition. "We have '55 Chevrolets, '53 Oldsmobiles ... we've done away with a lot of the classes that they once raced in, and the indexes are a little tough for them, but they're still permitted to race. We go down to V/Stock Automatic. We have not done anything to limit them other than to restructure the classes that no one was participating in, and move them up. There's no year cutoff. All you have to have are the engine specs in order to be legal in Stock."

Now let's switch gears here. After reading Chris Martin's Dragracingonline.com February 9, 2004 tome on that big Funny Car race back east ("The Races We Wish We'd Seen"), backed up by Tim Marshall's great photos and that old poster of the F/C legends of old (there's that word again), I now am convinced that today's Funny Car can look like a REAL car and still be crowd-pleasing. Lew Arrington's "Brutus" LOOKED like a real GTO (just look at Marshall's photo), and so did some of "Jungle" Jim Liberman's Novas. Some others, like Dick Landy's and Sox and Martin's altered wheelbase cars, didn't. Hence, of course, the name "Funny Car."

But a Funny Car didn't have to look ugly. Remember how Jack Chrisman's Sachs & Sons white Comet, circa Indy '64, looked? It looked like a white '64 Comet with an injector hat sticking out of the hood. What about Dyno Don's first flip-top "Eliminator?" Maynard Rupp's "Che-Voom" Chevelle? Bobby Wood's second "Palomino" Chevelle? I could even stand some of the stretched Mustangs, like Hubert Platt's or Gas Ronda's, and so on. By the way, I, like Chris Martin, have seen them and a lot more in my younger days.

But about the Funny Cars of today. Jeff Burk, you are dead right. Burk, of course, is the editor of Dragracingonline.com, and in the February 18, 2004 issue of the magazine, he wrote: "Just Wondering ... If NHRA really wants the best of both worlds, really wants to get new fans and the factories involved, why don't they give the Fuel Flops a couple of years warning and then require Funny Car bodies that actually look like real cars? Am I the only one who wouldn't care if they didn't run 335 mph in 4.7 seconds as long as they actually looked like a car? Read my lips! It's either a dragster or a car. If I wanted to watch prototype sports cars, I'd go to LeMans."

These Funny Cars of today, even going back to 10, 15 years ago, are out of hand as "identifiables." They don't look like "real cars." It got out of hand about the time that Kenny Bernstein and Dale Armstrong put their heads together and came up with the "Batmobile" --- long on aerodynamics, short on looking like anything other than a homemade race car that stretched the body rules to the nth degree. Maybe like something that Jesse James and his "Monster Garage" pals might come up with.

My answer? I say get templates and template 'em. Template them in the pits before time trials on Friday. Template 'em on Thursday. Template them at Pomona and template them often afterwards. I don't care if each of the 16 or so Funny Cars that are left in the country today all run 426-based hemis, if it says "Mustang" on the windshield, I want to see a horse comin' at me at 300 mph LOOKING like a Mustang, not a Hot Wheels toy with a billiard table on the back. Save the radical drag cars for Top Fuel, and if the speeds and elapsed times drop back, so be it. The fact is, if you want noise and thunder, expand the Top Fuel field to 24 cars and bring on the Pro Mods --- on nitro!

Even the redneck, terbackkie-spittin' NASCAR cars look SOMEWHAT like a real car, except for the cut-out wheel wells. And sponsorship? Those guys have (or had, I really don't know 'cause I'm a diehard straightliner) Tide detergent, Kellogg's cereals, any number of non-automotive companies. Man, I sure wish they'd spread that around a bit to us. But then again, it's all about TV and $$, $$ and $$. We old guys are left out in the cold, old and in the way.