Behold the best great attempt at what has become the archetype for Top Fuel dragsters: the rear-engine race car. HOT ROD related Tom McEwen’s catastrophic Lions crash in a rear-engine Barracuda a few years back; it flew, you know, like an airplane. But that didn’t stop racers from continuing to tickle the rear-engine Funny Car paradigm. “Big” Jim Dunn and Joe Reath had Woody Gilmore construct this ’Cuda Funny Car in late-1971. Dunn was well aware of the idiosyncrasies, shall we say, of rear-engine floppers having crewed on Doug Thorley’s Javelin I, witnessing driver Bob Hightower flip over backward launching at Irwindale in 1969. Gilmore built that car, too, so everyone involved knew the spookiness factor to what they were doing. Still, it met with great success in Top Fuel, while keeping the driver out of harms way to boot. So why shouldn’t it work in Funny Car?
Over the course of its two-year run, the ’Cuda sported different-length spoilers both front and rear, as well as several air-intake methods, including different roof-mounted scoops and later through both sides of the windshield. Gilmore and Dunn also experimented with adding weight to the front to keep it from experiencing the same fate as Thorley’s Javelin. At Lions Drag Strip’s Grand Premiere in 1972, it won best engineered, but almost flipped over in the lights. A couple of runner-up wins at regional tracks and an NHRA Division 7 win at Bonneville Raceway led to its triumphant Funny Car win at Ontario’s 1972 NHRA SuperNationals. Running a 392 Hemi, Dunn switched between a direct-drive with a reverser and a two-speed, due more to the match-race need for a reverser versus the performance of direct-drive. Its best time was a 6.44 e.t. It would go on to win a number of races in 1973, before Dunn reverted back to a conventional Funny Car layout for 1974.
Speaking about the car to National Dragster’s Phil Burgess, he said, “You had to be a real chicken. The car would go straight as an arrow four runs in a row, and then on the fifth run, that son of a bitch would turn left—four runs, and it would turn right. It was like a go-kart; my feet were on the front axle. It was scary. It did things for no reason with no warning.”
Featured prominently in the movie Funny Car Summer, there has never been another rear-engine Funny Car national event winner before or since.
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