Paul Lee has always honored his longtime friend and mentor Tom “The Mongoose” McEwen with signage on his NHRA Funny Car. At the upcoming NHRA U.S. Nationals, the successful businessman-turned-Funny Car driver plans to take that tribute to another level.
Lee will race Indy with a paint scheme originally designed in 1976 by legendary motorsports artist Kenny Youngblood for McEwen. It is a look Lee has wanted to put on one of his own Funny Cars for decades.
“There’s a lot of reasons why I did this,” Lee said. “I remember back in the day when Tom and I used to get together for lunches. I told him that that was my favorite car. I saw it at the ’76 Summer Nationals in Englishtown when I was in high school. I took pictures of that car, and that was always my favorite car. I told Tom someday I wanted to run a funny car with that wrap.
“He passed away a few years ago, but this is the year to do it. This is 2026, the 50th anniversary of that car in 1976. It’s also the 75th anniversary of NHRA, and it’s the 250th anniversary of the United States of America. So this year is the perfect time at the U.S. Nationals to run that 1976 Mongoose car with the stars and stripes.”
As Lee sees it, the timing couldn’t be more perfect and the historic relevance makes it even better.
The 2026 season marks the 50th anniversary of Youngblood’s original design, while the U.S. Nationals gives Lee the biggest stage in NHRA drag racing to honor a man who became considerably more than one of his racing heroes.
McEwen was family and more to Lee, and he’s not shy about discussing it.
“Tom was like a father to me,” Lee explained. “When I moved to California, he took me under his wing about 20 years ago. He was like a father figure. We used to have lunch every week, talk on the phone multiple times a week, and he would give me advice on racing, marketing, and all kinds of things. Anything to do with being a professional nitro Funny Car driver, Tom helped me out.”
McEwen also made sure Lee never became too impressed with himself. He had a reputation for delivering his opinion without much concern for how it landed, and Lee wasn’t immune to his trademark zingers.
“After every race, he’d call me on the phone, and he’d be honest,” Lee said. “If I had a good light, he’d compliment me, good job. And if I had a bad light, he’d say, ‘Hey, did you take a nap?’ Or ‘What was going on there?’ He would be honest one way or the other whether I did a good job or a bad job. He’d give it to me straight.”
That was McEwen’s way. He could promote with the best of them, needle somebody with even greater efficiency and still understand what it took to make a professional race team matter beyond the elapsed-time slip.
Kenny Youngblood saw plenty of that firsthand.
“I’ve been blessed to be old enough to have worked with the superstars of Funny Cars in the ’70s, Jungle Jim, Snake, Mongoose, the Ace, Black Magic… So many of them. And I loved working with Tom McEwen,” Youngblood said.
Youngblood created some of the most recognizable Funny Car artwork of the era, but working with McEwen came with one small catch. The Mongoose occasionally had his own ideas about exactly who was doing the designing.
“Sometimes he would come over, and I’d be at the drawing board, and he’d be standing over my shoulder telling me what to do, and I would just do it. I’d jokingly tell people, he’d say, ‘Oh yeah, Kenny, you design all these funny cars.’ I go, ‘Well, actually Tom McEwen does,’” Youngblood admitted.
That memory speaks multitudes about McEwen. He understood presentation before motorsports marketing became the industry it is today, and the 1976 Mongoose Funny Car was another example. The patriotic, bicentennial design was unmistakable, with stars, stripes, and graphics that gave McEwen exactly what he wanted: a race car people remembered.
Lee certainly did, and fifty years later he’s still fixated with it.
“It was just so cool with the stars shooting out the USA; it has stars on the flag,” Lee said. “It was one of those, sometimes you can’t explain why you like a paint scheme or a car. You just like it. And I always used to tell him that my all-time favorite Mongoose car was that 1976 car. So now finally, 2026, I get to run that car.”
Lee didn’t want anyone needing an explanation when the car rolled out of the trailer. Those who remembered McEwen’s 1976 Funny Car were supposed to know what they were looking at.
Lee went directly to the source to help him speak without uttering a word.
“Kenny Youngblood is the one who designed that car back in 1976, and I still keep in touch with Kenny Youngblood,” Lee said. “We contacted him earlier this year and told him what we wanted to do. So he took the modern body style of our body and replicated the paint scheme on our body.”
The project began taking shape earlier this season at Pomona when Lee approached Youngblood with the idea. Youngblood didn’t need much convincing.
“He goes, ‘Wow, that would be so cool,’” Lee said.
Youngblood’s reaction went beyond another opportunity to revisit an old drawing.
“I was thrilled to be asked to be involved or to create the scheme for the Dodge Funny Car body,” Youngblood said.
There was another McEwen connection working behind the scenes.
Steve Cole, Lee’s senior vice president of marketing and corporate partnerships and general manager, came into Lee’s world through McEwen. That made recreating the Mongoose car personal on his side of the operation, too.
“I’ve known Paul and Mongoose for a long time,” Cole said. “Mongoose put he and I together. This has a lot of deep meaning for both of us. But when you look at that paint scheme, the first thing that screams to you is you’ve got to find the guy who did it.”
They had the guy. The next job was making sure a 2026 Funny Car could carry a 1976 identity without losing what made the original special. The graphics were part of it, but Cole knew the sponsor presentation mattered as well.
“Luckily Kenny Youngblood is still around,” Cole said “Kenny and Paul have a relationship. It goes back to Paul’s first Nitro Funny Car design. So then you look at it and go, okay, well, let’s look at the sponsors on the car because Paul Lee Racing has sponsors and some can compete and some you may have to go get to keep the relevance of the livery on the car the same. So fans go, ‘I know that car. That car’s 50 years old; it raced in ’76.”
Youngblood will be in Indianapolis with Lee’s team, helping promote the tribute and signing his familiar cartoons for fans. It will put the man who created the original design alongside the modern version 50 years later.
“Kenny was so super proud,” Lee said. “He’s going to be coming to Indy with us to help promote the whole thing, sign his cartoons at the track. He was proud to do it back in 1976, and he’s proud to do it this year in 2026.”
Lee has spent years carrying McEwen’s memory on his race cars, but this time the tribute isn’t tucked into a logo or decal. The entire Funny Car becomes the message.
There is also something fitting about Youngblood being part of the project rather than somebody just copying his work from old photographs. The same artist who stood at the drawing board with McEwen looking over his shoulder is back at work, only this time McEwen’s influence doesn’t require instructions.
For Lee, the attachment to the scheme never faded. Long after he became a Funny Car driver himself, the 1976 Mongoose remained the one McEwen car he kept coming back to.
“This is something I’m super proud of,” Lee said. “I know all the Mongoose fans will be super proud of it. And I’ve been looking forward to running this car for 50 years,” Lee said.
