Jim Dunn has been drag racing so long that his career predates Funny Cars, the NHRA national-event structure most fans recognize and, remarkably, NHRA itself.
At 92, he still hasn’t found a good reason to quit.
Dunn, one of Southern California’s genuine drag racing originals, has been named to the West Coast Stock Car/Motorsports Hall of Fame’s 2026 Pioneers of Speed class. The induction adds another honor to a career that began when Dunn was 15 and has stretched across more than seven decades of American drag racing.
For Dunn, however, this isn’t a retirement tribute. His race team is still out there fighting the considerably better-funded operations of modern NHRA Funny Car racing, with veteran Jeff Arend driving Dunn’s 12,000-horsepower entry.
“I’m honored to be inducted into the West Coast Stock Car/Motorsports Hall of Fame’s 2026 Pioneers of Speed along with many other motorsports legends,” Dunn said. “I fell in love with drag racing very young, and I never wanted to do anything else.
“I started drag racing when I was 15 years old, and I have loved every day at the track and in the shop since. I’m 92 now, and I will keep going as long as the good Lord lets me.”
The last sentence probably explains Dunn better than any list of accomplishments ever could.
Dunn came out of the Southern California drag racing culture that helped build the sport, establishing himself behind the wheel of one of the West Coast’s more feared machines during the 1960s. He wasn’t merely around while Funny Car racing evolved from its wild experimental beginnings; he was part of the experimentation.
Nothing illustrates that better than 1972.
Dunn won Funny Car at the NHRA World Finals driving the sport’s first — and ultimately only successful — rear-engine Funny Car. In an era when racers weren’t afraid to build something completely different just to see whether it would work, Dunn took the concept all the way to the winner’s circle.
The hardware eventually changed. Dunn’s place in the sport didn’t.
He transitioned from driver to team owner and tuner, keeping Jim Dunn Racing alive through an era when independent Funny Car operations became increasingly difficult to sustain. Along the way, his cars provided seats for numerous drivers while Dunn remained the constant — usually somewhere nearby figuring out how to make a nitro-burning Funny Car behave.
The West Coast honor follows Dunn receiving NHRA’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2024. This time, he joins a Pioneers of Speed class that includes Clint Brawner, Jimmy Bryan, Al Dean, Bill Deschamps, Vic Edelbrock Sr., Joe and Walt James, the Morales Brothers, Ed Pink and George and Harold “Hal” Robson.
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