Where It All Began
With the passing of driver Pat Minick of the popular “Chi-Town Hustler” team of Farkonas, Coil, and Minick, we’re reminded of everything that made Funny Cars so exciting wrapped up in one single car. In the 1960s and 1970s, a small crew like Chi-Town could make a living barnstorming from match race to match race with appearance money and winnings from several races a week. The downside was those dragstrips were mostly light years from the conditions found at facilities hosting national events, so crap tracks with dark, short shutdowns, dips, and sketchy surfaces were Chi-Town’s bread and butter. Minick did yeoman’s work by deftly hammering the wild Charger to a 90-percent win rate. The car was built by John Farkonas and featured a unique left-hand seating position, with the engine offset to the right at a time when the prototypical chassis was the Logghe Bros. style of center seat and engine. Austin Coil, the wizard behind John Force’s later Funny Car domination, fine-tuned the Charger to victory. Besides their match-race mastery, there are two hallmarks attributed to the Chi-Town: Minick’s long, smoky, bat-outta-hell burnouts and the now-standard between-rounds engine teardown. The first was for show, while the frantic teardowns were a result of Minick’s pushing the engine to its limits—and sometimes a little more. This shot was taken at Orange County International Raceway in Irvine, California, for their year-end, wildly successful 1969 Manufacturers Funny Car Championships, one of those 64 Funny Car deals that also helped propel the Funny Car onslaught.
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