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Chrisman vs. Cook
DRO file photo
11/8/05
 ost
fans know that the first blown and injected, nitro-burning
Funny Car was the Sachs & Sons-sponsored ’64 “Super
Cyclone” Mercury Comet driven by Jack Chrisman. The
car made its official debut at the ’64 NHRA Nationals
where it was limited to single runs, wowing the crowd nonetheless
with 150-mph top end charges.
It made a limited tour of the Midwest and East Coast states,
again forced to run singles because of the extreme experimental
nature of the beast. In October, Chrisman returned to his
Southern California base and booked into a “A Day of
the Cyclone Racer” feature at Lions Dragstrip, whereupon
his act nosedived into a popping and banging, misfiring mess.
Valve problems kept Chrisman’s Comet from running anywhere
near its potential as it shut off early on both exhibition
runs.
A
week later, Chrisman installed Donovan Engineering nitro valves
in the 2,812-pound, 112-inch long, 427-cid powered power hog
and saw his performance improve with respective 150- and 156-mph
passes at Lions and Carlsbad Raceway. Interestingly enough,
that same day at Carlsbad, the fabled “World’s
Fastest Street Machine”, and to some, the “kings”
of A/Gas Supercharged, the Stone-Woods-Cook ’41 Willys
team was making singles and ran an incredible 9.57 elapsed
time.
It did not take long for talk to develop, touting a match
race between these two outlandish machines. A Funny Car racing
anything in late 1963 or 1964 was just about as rare as a
compassionate conservative. Arnie “the Farmer”
Beswick’s Pontiac had run “Ohio George”
Montgomery once or twice, but basically the hot rod associations
didn’t know what to do about these critters, and left
them to play by themselves. It remained for bold track bosses,
like Lions’ C.J. “Pappy” Hart, to find them
work and a Chrisman-Cook match was soon signed without much
delay. The date was Saturday night, November 21, and if, nothing
else, it would be a match of historic proportions: This match
would be the first time the Comet, which NHRA eventually classed
as a C/Fuel Dragster, ran alongside anything but a digger.
Chrisman’s Comet was probably the key point of interest
in this match,. It was the center fold in the first issue
of Super Stock and Drag Illustrated magazine and had been
featured in all the hot rod enthusiast publications. Of course,
Chrisman wasn’t just any drag racer. Among other things,
he won Top Eliminator at the first NHRA Winternationals in
1961, and followed up with the Top Eliminator title at the
1962 NHRA Nationals. He was good at his chosen profession.
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