In 1976, Steve Gold and Jerry Boldenow introduced the "Moby Dick" Corvette and with a 6.15 qualifier at the U.S. Nationals put the 'Vette in as a competitive body style. Shortly after that, Tom McEwen's English Leather Corvette came out and won the 1978 U.S. Nationals, kicking off a reasonably sized exodus to the Corvette body style. It was right around that same time that a young California driver named John Force began scaring the hell out of his fans with massive fireballs from his Leo's Stereo "Brute Force" 'Vettes.

I won't go through the history of the Corvette Funny Cars, but suffice to say, there aren't any, certainly not many, any more. Realistically, the only place on the drag racing map for the plastic fantastics is Pro Modified. I love the class. Five-second runs, 230-mph

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charges, neat stuff. The problem is that unless you're a really savvy drag race fan, the Corvette PMs don't have the fan recognition of the NHRA Pro cars.

The off-the-radar IHRA gave birth to the class and highlight it, but with the more publicity-conscious "White House," (NHRA) they have a sort of step-child status; their antics always reported in the Sportsman issues of the paper. In the NHRA records page, their performances are represented, but elsewhere you've got maybe a dozen other records out of a whole page of one-point typed standards. It's kind of under-whelming.

The performance record of the Corvette puts me at the intersection of Headscratcher and Chinstroke Boulevard. In this country, a giant premium is placed on appearances. I'm one of those oddballs who place content well ahead of form. And I guess it's with that prejudice, that I find the Corvette's position in drag racing somewhat perplexing.

I realize beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but the Corvette was one of the country's best looking cars of the past 50 years .. certainly in the top half dozen. You would think in a glamorous rush-of-a-sport like drag racing in a country where the most-touted songstresses look like they belong on the runway, that the Corvettes would be somewhere in the pantheons of performance. Somewhere prominent in the racing eye.

They most definitely are not. Well, save for Pro Modified in NHRA and more profusely in IHRA. Maybe the eye is opening a little, but at present, the Pro Mods are still an afterthought in NHRA competition and for me that keeps the Corvette in a sort of drag racing limbo. A place where they've always been. Maybe they'll break out (I'd rather see blown Corvettes than the cookie cutter Pro Stocks), but who knows.

In so many words, Vettie Interesting.