That car in actuality was a 7.90-indexed Super Eliminator car that ran a best of 7.30s. It was fun, he says. And it evolved in 1989 and 1990 into what is now rightfully called a Nostalgia Top Fuel car, hitting high 6s at 225 mph. Murry was then 23 years old, too young to remember the golden FED days of the 1960s. “I was born in 1961, so a lot of guys I hooked up with over the years seem to think I’m a lot older than I am. They’ll be standing next to me talking about something that happened at Lions Drag Strip in 1965, and they’ll nudge me and say, ‘Remember that?’, and I’ll just nod and smile. I came just a little bit too late,” he says.

Murry quickly made up for lost time.

That Shoemaker vintage race car had a bit of history behind it. He bought it and put it into a storage shed for a year, where it sat. It didn’t have a motor, but the chassis was a real front-engine dragster, and Murry wasn’t going to give up on the idea of racing a vintage-type FED. He laughingly now admits that he probably paid as much for storage as he did for the car. Finally, with a blown big-block Chevy for power, it ran 8.50s at 160 mph first time out. “I ran across an engine from a guy who had a Camaro with a broken rear end. I paid $3,500 for a complete, blown Camaro. I took the engine out, put in a stock motor and fixed the rear end and sold the car for $3,500, and so I got a blown engine for free. And nobody took me by the hand and said, ‘You want to do this, this, this.’ We’d race brackets and have a good time. Then we put on a set of injectors with alcohol and it ran in the 7s right away,” he says.

AA/Fuel Dragster beckoned.

His second car was a reincarnation of the first Shoemaker. Since then, Murry has had over 25 other race cars, mostly FEDs, with an altered and a Funny Car thrown in. Funny Cars, he found out, were not his forte. “These guys showed up at the track with a brand-new Funny Car but without a driver, and they asked me to drive it. I said heck yeah, I’ll drive it. I was 24 and I’d drive anything,” he says. His first time down the track, the Funny Car caught on fire and burned to the ground. “It was a brand-new car, and that was pretty much the end of my Funny Car career,” he says.

Murry’s latest ride is a 2001 Stirling chassied- (Salinas, CA) FED that is 200 inches, a bit shorter than most other vintage FEDs, and it is classed as a legal AA/Fuel Dragster. It is powered by a big-block Chevy --- another rarity in this age of big hemis, vintage or not --- that measures but 400 inches, to take advantage of the Vintage Racing Association/Goodguys Association weight breaks. It boasts a New Century Performance aluminum block, Alan Johnson heads, Arias pistons, Brooks rods, Titan Engineering oil pump, Waterman fuel pump, Billet Fabrication oil pan, NGK plugs, a Blower Shop 6:71 blower and RCD drive, an Enderle bug-catcher injector, MSD 44-amp magneto and an East-West Engineering clutch. The motor makes about 2,800 hp and has taken Murry to 5.87 elapsed times at 243 mph. His “Running Wild” front digger was the last car admitted to both vintage FED 5-second clubs, the last one in the Goodguys Rod & Custom Association 5-Second club and the 13th in the Nitronic Research 5-Second Club.

He and girlfriend Karen and a whole host of volunteer crew members will go to 15 or 16 races and a couple of car shows per year, including vintage events at Indy, Bowling Green, Bakersfield (three times), Sacramento (three or four times), plus the Firebird Raceway/Boise, Idaho Nightfire Nats in August (one of my favorite race tracks and races).

At the recently-completed NHRA/Holley Hot Rod Reunion at Bowling Green, Murry’s “Running Wild” beat favored Jack “the Sheriff” Harris in the semis of AA/Fuel Dragster (“Unheard of,” Murry says), but hurt his big-block Chevy in the process. “Here we are going into the finals, and everybody who wasn’t racing their car was working on our car --- probably 40 people in the pits. We changed the motor in two hours and 10 minutes and made the finals. I was totally relaxed. I raced Sean Bellemeur of southern California in his Plaza Hotel car out of Las Vegas in the final (the 2004 Hot Rod Reunion champ). I left on him and at half-track, my car got loose and spun the tires and got up on two wheels and I had to click it off,” he says. Sean got the win light.

Still, Murry claims the quickest Chevrolet-powered vintage hot rod of the meet, and indeed, of the whole circuit.