Whiskey and One Bad Willys
Words and photos by Dale Wilson
3/8/06
fter more than 30 years of sitting outside and then in a barn, the “Hemi Hurricane” Willys coupe is back, looking as bright and as shiny as the day that Lamar “Bunky” Bobo debuted it in the A/Gas class. He and son Tony took a full three years to restore it, sandblasting the frame, re-fiberglassing where the original stuff cracked and split, and even sending off the injectors and three-speed Torqueflite to be redone and rebuilt.
The “Hurricane” now looks as new as it did in 1965, when Bunky would take it to Red’s Drag Strip in Dallas, Georgia (the now-defunct Southeastern International Drag Strip), or to Otto Timms’ Paradise Drag Strip in Calhoun, or to Shirl Greer’s Ringgold Drag Strip in north Georgia, and run against all the other hot dog gassers of that era. “Hurricane” looks so good that it won the “Best-of-the-best-in-Memory-Lane” trophy at the 2005 NHRA Hot Rod Reunion at Beech Bend Raceway Park in Bowling Green, Kentucky. The bright red coupe now sits on loan in the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in Talladega, Alabama, awaiting the Bobos' return to the show-and-go circuit for 2006. To get a drag car into the Hall of Fame is in itself an accomplishment, considering there are only one or two other such machines in the place, which is packed full of NASCAR stuff.
The Bobos used to run a salvage yard called Advance Used Auto Parts of Silver Creek, but they’ve closed it down. They are now restoring old hot rods and antique cars. For about 20 years they dealt almost exclusively in Chrysler parts. They still have a lot of those parts left, and Tony will sell a lot of “A” and “B” body parts on eBay. “We have a lot of race parts, but not a lot of that is for sale. We rat-hole all that,” Tony says.
You might say that bootleg whiskey led Bunky Bobo, 71, and son Tony, 50, both of Silver Creek, Georgia, to the “Hemi Hurricane.”
Now, Silver Creek is not exactly a metropolis. The nearest “big” town is Rome, which isn’t very big, but ironically it is the home of some “big” bracket racers, including the Newberry family, of which Kenny is the best-known. He got runner-up at one of race promoter George Howard’s Million Dollar Drag Races awhile back. There are other racers who hail from there as well. “Yeah, we’re not that big,” Tony Bobo says. “We haven’t got a red stop light yet.”
In the late 1950s and early 1960s Bunky Bobo made his living hauling moonshine, using one of his ’56 or ’57 Chevys both as a ‘shine hauler and a drag car. “We would drive to the track with the slicks in the trunk and put them on and then uncap the headers and go race. That's what you did back then. He was a moonshiner. He made the No. 1 most-wanted list in the State of Georgia, and that’s why he quit,” Tony says. “I went on a few liquor runs with him, but mostly I just washed the fruit jars. He hauled most of his liquor off of Burnt Mountain near Ellijay.”