Chris Cline didn’t have to watch the Stephen King thriller Christine to understand what an ornery, possessed 1958 Plymouth Fury was capable of. For more than a decade, he’s wrestled with one that has carved out its own place in drag racing folklore.
If Cline’s Christine-themed Pro Boost entry looks familiar, it should. Beneath the updated body is a direct connection to one of Pro Modified’s most recognizable cars, the same machine Paul Strommen drove during the category’s inaugural season in 1990.
In a class dominated by Camaros and Corvettes, Cline has never seen much value in blending into the crowd. Racing something different has always mattered as much as racing something fast.
“We’re trying to keep it alive,” Cline said. “I’ll tell you, we’re on a little bit of a struggle bus right now, but we’ve made some good runs in testing before we got here. We’re in the little conditions that we’re struggling with right now.”
The current growing pains don’t change the mission. Cline isn’t chasing nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake; he’s trying to prove an icon can still run with modern Pro Modified technology.
“I’ve never been your ordinary Camaro, Corvette guy,” Cline said. “I had a ’38 Chevrolet back in the 1990s, did drive a Camaro in early 2000s, but I’ve always wanted to have something a little different.”
That mindset made partnering with Dave Heitz an easy decision.
“So when I got this opportunity with Dave Heitz to do this deal together, I wanted to try to rebrand it and get it back to the top,” Cline said.
The original Christine remained competitive for years through constant updates, but eventually modern Pro Boost racing demanded more than a late-1980s chassis could deliver.
Rather than retire one of the sport’s most recognizable identities, Cline and Heitz started over.
“I obviously had to build a new car,” Cline said. “We ran the old car until 2021 with a bunch of updates, but this new version has got pretty much all the bells and whistles and new tricks that we need. Now, we just got to get it figured out.”
History only gets a race car so far. If Christine was going to survive in today’s Pro Boost ranks, sentiment had to give way to engineering.
“So this car here is actually narrowed, six inches narrow and five inches channeled, versus the original body,” Cline said. “That got us down a lot of size dimension down, and that helps on the weight situation where you don’t have as much tubing, but we’re still proportioned more than a Camaro.”
Body dimensions influence far more than appearance in Pro Modified.
“And all that stuff makes a difference in the car and how they perform,” Cline said. “And once you got to set them up, you can see a Camaro takes a different setup than a Corvette just because how the car is proportioned out.”
That leaves Cline and his team doing much of the development on their own.
“So it’s a little bit different situation here,” Cline said. “We don’t have many people to lean on, so we try to work it, do everything ourself, in-house.”
Even though nearly every component has evolved, Christine never completely left the original behind.
The molds used for today’s body began with the first car before they were reshaped into the slimmer version now competing in Pro Boost.
“So the body molds and everything was made off the original car, and then we made a part out of the original car and then cut everything down and made new plugs and new molds with everything,” Cline said.
Pieces of the original still occupy a corner of his shop.
“I still got the roof and quarters and the original chassis center section, I still got all that sitting in the shop in Waynesville,” Cline said.
The history doesn’t end there. The center section that survives today once belonged to the same car Paul Strommen drove during Pro Modified’s first season, giving the latest Christine more than a symbolic connection to drag racing history.
“Yeah, the center section of the car is the same car that Paul Strommen drove,” Cline said. “The front clip’s been changed and the rear clip had been changed, but it was the still center section.”
Like the movie that inspired its appearance, Christine has refused to stay dead. The original race car survived a trailer fire before returning to competition, adding another chapter to a history already filled with rebuilds and reinventions.
“It had a couple resurrections to it there,” Cline said. “It had to get brought back, it burnt up in the trailer and had to be fixed.”
By 2009, however, the writing was on the wall. The original car had been built in 1988, long before today’s roots-blown Hemi combinations produced the kind of power common in modern Pro Modified competition.
“And the thing was built in 1988, and it just wasn’t built for a roots blower on Hemi and a clutch, and everything with the power we had,” Cline said.
After that season, Cline and Heitz made the decision that ultimately preserved the car’s future instead of its past.
“So after 2009, me and Dave Heitz sit down and talked about what we were going to do next year and race,” Cline said. “I said, if we’re going to race together next year and we’ll do something different with the cars. We had to change narrow, cut, narrowed channeled up, got a smaller front clip, rear clip, and that was the start of the new version of the Christine. That was 2011 we come out with a new version.”
Despite all the engineering changes, Cline still smiles when someone asks how much of the original remains. His answer is surprisingly simple.
“Just part of the roof and quarters.”
For historians of the class, that’s enough to keep the lineage intact. For fans, it’s proof that one of Pro Modified’s most memorable cars never really disappeared.
Of course, owning a race car named Christine invites certain questions.
When asked whether the car ever repaired itself like the possessed Plymouth in the movie, Cline couldn’t resist playing along.
“This thing, sometimes I think it’s haunted, but it never fixes itself.”
Then came one final question about whether the radio had ever mysteriously turned itself on.
Cline laughed.
“In my head sometimes, this thing’s trying to kill me!”
