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Funny Business
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The Latest on Virgil Hartman and
his Nostalgia Fuel Funny Cars
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By Brian Wood Photos by Brian Wood and Hartman Motorsports |
“First and foremost we need to lay out the facts of the story,” Hartman said. “I bought a car strictly on a whim after I walked into J Ed Horton’s fabrication shop one day and saw a ’71 Camaro funny car sitting there. It looked pretty neat, so I called Donnie Reeves in Atlanta and asked him if he could make me a ’71 Mustang body because I thought I’d like to build a car for myself. “It was just something to do – I already have a street rod, a Super Comp dragster and a bunch of other stuff, so this was just a hobby project – something to build for fun. I had no intention of doing anything more serious beyond maybe building a second car to do some match racing with and having some fun close to home.
“Later, Donnie asked me if I could help him organize some races and possibly get him a few dates. I said I would ask around, which is what I did, and I found out that J Ed was interested, as was Murf McKinney, who wanted to build four “spec” cars to sell. “I then talked to IHRA Vice President Aaron Polburn, and he said he’d love to have fuel funny cars for their Night of Fire programs. He also said that he would especially be interested in an eight-car show, and asked if I could possibly arrange such a thing.” Hartman was referring to the Night of Fire shows the IHRA presents at many of its member tracks throughout the racing season, and not ones that they put on in conjunction with national events, as he went on to explain: “The IHRA would like to put on a three-hour show with the gates opening at five, the first run at seven and the gates closed by ten. The show would include the fuel funny cars, jet cars and wheelstanders or whatever, but no bracket cars or anything else.”
“Anyway, after that I let it be known that we were looking into putting this program together, and it kind of snowballed from there. The word soon got back to me that I had bought three bodies and was going to devote my full time to this deal. I even heard that I was going to turn over the Top Fuel team in order to develop some kind of huge touring funny car series, which of course isn’t the case.” Not that Hartman wouldn’t consider backing away from his heavy full-time involvement with the daughter Rhonda Hartman-Smith and John “Bodie” Smith’s Top Fuel effort, especially since his recent major heart surgery, but the timing isn’t right at the present time for an obvious reason. “I’d actually really like to get more involved in something like the funny car deal, but the fact of the matter is that I have a two-car Top Fuel team that has fallen on seriously hard times lately, and we’re trying to find out why,” Hartman explained. “Everybody stayed after the last race in Topeka race to test, and we had Dick LaHaie, Larry Frazier, John Stewart and my son-in-law “Bodie” looking all over my daughter Rhonda’s car. We just can’t figure out what the problem is – somebody slipped us a ‘Mickey’ somewhere along the line and we can’t put a finger on it.
“I’m looking to hire some more people to help us get the program back on track, because everyone is real frustrated right now. We want to attack it and get it figured out and then I could step back and just manage the team instead of calling the tuning shots. That would leave me a little more time to spend on the funny car deal, but until then my hands are pretty well tied. “Getting back to the funny car story, there’s no doubt that there’s interest in the cars. There are 11 fuel cars entered for the U.S. Funny Car Nationals in St. Louis in September, along with 19 alcohol cars. On top of that, there are a number of new cars being built and I know of several guys that want to step up to fuel from alcohol and just need some guidance on how to do it. “As for as our immediate plans, we’re going ahead with the construction of two cars right now. The ’71 Mustang body that I have is going on a new chassis I just bought in Chicago, and the second car is a ’66 Mustang that’s being built for Steve Allred. He has four motors that I sold him seven years ago from a car I leased to Bruce Litton at one time, and he never used them. He had a new funny car chassis built, but it just sat in his shop until this deal came up, and he decided to finally get the car on the track.
“Steve and I are partners on the two Mustangs, and once they’re built, he’ll drive the ’66 most of the time. I’m not sure who’ll be behind the wheel of the ’71 at this time, but I can say that my son Richard will be testing both cars for us when the time comes. In any case, we’ll have two good cars, and that way if somebody calls and wants to book a match race I won’t have to try and track a second car down. “As far as anything beyond that, I have a friend who runs a nostalgia funny car series on the West Coast, and he’s been after me to get involved in this. I simply do not want to be a part of any kind of deal where you have to race with rules because it’s just too costly. By that I mean when you get into running with qualifying and eliminations, you get guys breaking to much stuff and getting hurt because they’re trying to run faster to make more money. “It’s just like with the front engine dragsters. It was started as a fun class, but now guys are breaking forged blocks and the cars are crashing because they’re going too fast on the tires they’re running on. If they put a bigger tire on, they’ll go faster and be even more dangerous. The way they have the driver positioned, sitting way up off the back of the chassis, puts him in a dangerous position.
“I’ve already had some old time racers come up and tell me all these ways to make the funny cars we’re building run faster, but that’s not what I want to do. What I want to do is just go out and say here are two funny cars that are going to run the same E.T. You can run whatever equipment you’ve got, make it look period correct, have some fun, don’t break stuff and pay everybody the same amount of money. “The next problem you run into is that the NHRA will not verify that there are any rules for this. The Goodguys Vintage Drag Racing Association (VRA) suggestions are not rules – all those guys are running illegally, and as soon as somebody crashes or gets hurt, they will be banned from NHRA tracks. In the NHRA rule book under ‘Specialty Vehicles’ it says to call the tech department for rules, but they have never returned the three calls that I made to them. I talked to Ray Alley, and his comment was ‘I’ll get back to you,’ which means ‘I don’t even want to talk about it.’
“I then talked to Graham Light, and told him all I wanted to do was take the engine out of my dragster, put a small pump on it, slow the blower down and go out and run 6.10 to 6.50. I also want to be able to go to an NHRA track and be sure that I have insurance and that I’m running within NHRA guidelines, and I want to be sure that the guys I’m running with can do the same thing. He said ‘a funny car is a funny car,’ and I said yeah, my guy has a funny car license, but for a guy who doesn’t have one to go and get it, it’ll cost him $30,000, which is more than he’s got in the car. The bottom line is he’s not going to get his license, so where’s the rules for this? “I’m supposed to get a call later this week, which I doubt I will, and I’ll talk to him again at the next national event in Columbus and see where it goes from there.
“So, regarding this whole deal – yeah, I want to do it, but do I want to commit to it? At this point I can’t do it with a clear conscious. I told Aaron Polburn that I’d do the two to four one-night deals for him because I have two cars. I can commit to that because I can get a couple of other cars that are good cars that I can depend on. Can I get eight or sixteen cars at this point? I don’t know. “I’m going to see just how many guys show up for the race inSt. Louis this fall and try to get a feeling for just what’s out there. The promoters tell me they have a data base of 75 to 80 cars, but I guarantee you if you put up the money today for a race you’d be lucky to get 20 cars to show up, and half of those would be alcohol cars. “That’s why I want to do a show with nitro cars only. And I want to be sure the cars we book in are the kind of cars that look good and run good so we have eight or sixteen cars running at the end of the event. They have to be clean, period-correct appearing cars with professional drivers and crews. We have to be able to successfully promote these cars to a wide audience in order to make the most money for the organizers and the drivers. In that respect I’m trying to come up with guidelines for the racers that say you can run your car cheaply and consistently, you can keep coming back and you’re going to get paid. In return, the promoter can bank on getting a quality show with quality cars. We have to be sure the money is there for the teams so they can afford to continue running.
“I’ll tell you this - when these guys go out with 80% nitro in the tank and put lots of smoke, cackle, nitro fumes and header flames into the air, a whole lot of people are going to get excited – real excited.” CompetitionPlus.com is going to follow the progress of this program,
as Virgil hasVirgil and his guys wasted no time in getting the new
chassis into the shop and dropping in one of the engine blocks.
The body was also mocked up with wheels, tires and an injector –
you can just smell the nitro, can’t you? invited us to visit
his shop as his two cars get built. We’ll bring you a series
of photo essays documenting just what goes into recreating what
are arguably the most popular hot rods of all time – the “Fuel
Floppers” from the golden age of drag racing.
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