The Birth Of The Flip Top

Written by on October 8, 2013 Contributors: Car Craft Archives, Ford Archives The modern Funny Car was not invented in Southern California, but rather by a cadre of Ford engineers and racers in Dearborn, Michigan
The Birth Of The Flip Top View All 14 Photos

In 1957, the Automobile Manufacturers Association decreed a ban on racing. It was the wrong message to the Eisenhower-era Wally-and-Beaver American public. All of the Detroit manufacturers—AMC, Chrysler, Ford, and GM—agreed to abide by it. They all lied.

Fuel injection, multiple carburetors, and superchargers were already on the scene in 1957, but small, lightweight, agile cars were not. In 1961, Chevrolet, Pontiac, Dodge, and Plymouth were producing big cars with big engines, multiple carburetion, and lightweight body parts for NASCAR homologation and drag racing. Ford struggled with an outclassed tri-power 390ci engine that produced 401 hp in a hugely heavy body-on-frame car. In five years, absolutely everything would be different.

Our story begins in Dearborn with the Ford racing guys trying to find an edge for their 1962 drag cars. Remember, there was no Mustang yet, and although the Fairlane was in production, it wasn't ready for combat. All they raced then were big Galaxie sedans with the 406 and, later, the 427 engines. The Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA), the governing body of international racing, had decreed an engine size limit of 7.0L or 427 ci, so that's all they had to work with.

Charlie Gray, a farm boy from Virginia with a background in dirt modified racing, attended what is now Virginia Tech to get his engineering degree, and then went to work for Ford Motor. He was the lead engineer in the special test division, designing head-on, side-impact, and roll-over crash tests long before there were any federal mandates.

Mercury Comet Air Lift Rattler 2/14 The beautifully simple paintjob on Eddie Schartman’s Mercury Comet Air Lift Rattler, shown here in action at the Super Stock Nationals at New York National Speedway in 1967, covered an extremely competitive car and driver. Schartman stuck with the Mercury Funny Car racing program right on through the switch to Cougar bodies, right up until the end of Ford racing in 1972, eventually adapting a blown Cammer motor as Chrisman and Nicholson had done.

Dave Evans, the man in charge of Ford's sub rosa racing efforts, picked Gray as the drag racing liaison engineer. Although the AMA racing ban was still in place, by 1962, Ford had already put together a racing group and racing plans.

John Cowley, Don Sullivan (the man who had perfected the flathead V8 for Henry Ford and later worked for Ford SVO), Evans, and Gray were the nucleus of the racing group, pursuing NASCAR, USAC, and drag racing. Gray was the designated engine guy, and Don Wahrman was the chassis guy. Six months into his new gig, Gray got another one. Even though he knew nothing about the sport, the dirt modified racer from Virginia was to become the drag racing guy at Ford.

Gray says, "Ford had a dealer council, with people like Paul Harvey, Bob Tasca, Charlie Wickersham, and Ed Martin, and it said we were not representing Ford very well at the drag races. So Dave Evans said, ‘You're it!' and I said, ‘OK!'"

Gray's first assignment was to take hundreds of pounds out of the Galaxie giants. Drag racer Dick Brannan was a Ford employee, working for Gray, and the team used six-cylinder frames, half-thickness glass and fiberglass hoods, fenders and doorskins, aluminum inner fender panels, and aluminum brackets and bumpers, to build 11 copies.

Brannan says, "They were neat, they were light, and we took close to 500 pounds out of them. I got the first one of those things and raced it for Romy Hammes Ford."

The other cars went to a galaxy of Ford stars, including Ed Martin, Tasca Ford, Jerry Harvey, Phil Bonner, Bob Ford, Jim Price, and Jerry Alderman. But the cars weren't ready until August, with only the NHRA Nationals left to run, in A/Factory Experimental. Brannan says that, since the frames were the same, most of the cars were just re-bodied with the '63 lightweight package to run the following season.

Ford Division boss Don Frey gave Gray a budget of $500 per car to do the lightening job, thus was born the "lightweight" '63 Ford at a porky 3,702 pounds with a 427 engine in a class structure where the lower weight limit was 3,205.

Fast Eddie Schartman Lincoln Mercury Division 3/14 Fast Eddie Schartman from Cleveland, Ohio, was a favorite at Lincoln-Mercury Division because he was willing to do the auto show circuit, the dealer show circuit, and anything else the factory asked of him in between racing his Comet A/FX cars, and Comet and Cougar Funny Cars between 1964 and 1972, when the factory pulled the plug on racing. He's the last surviving Comet F/C pilot and, today, owns several dealerships in the Cleveland metro area.

Gray says, "Everything was listed, and everything was registered with NHRA. We sold every one we could build. People wanted those things. They ran OK, but with a 500-pound deficit, running a wedge against a Hemi…they certainly didn't win any national meets."

Brannan says that his '631⁄2 Galaxie was the first Ford ever to hold the NHRA record in Super Stock (set at York, Pennsylvania). Ultimately, he says, the company built 212 of the lightweight package cars for sale to the public.

Gray says the dealer council got the message that Ford was trying. Don Frey then gave Evans and Gray the go-ahead to develop a competitive 3,200-pound race car.

"We knew it could be done, because it had been done once before in 1962. We had built a 3,200-pound Fairlane to run in NASCAR, a car that never got to the racetrack. So we employed Dearborn Steel Tubing to scallop the front spring towers and slide the 427 wedge engine in there. That was the Thunderbolt."

A total of 127 Thunderbolts were built, the first 12 of them assembled from complete cars by Dearborn Steel Tubing, and the balance was built from parts kits at DST. Brannan and chassis engineer Vern Tinsler worked on the first prototype, completing three weeks of strip runs to determine the final NHRA specifications before the first 10 maroon T-Bolts were built.

Gray says, "We were very proud of that car. We had to build 50 sticks and 50 automatics, and we won seven of the NHRA divisional titles with those cars, and won the overall championship for the year with Gas Ronda. I always said we chased Chrysler out of Stock Eliminator and into Factory Experimental because it knew we were coming and it knew that our automatic, with a 4,000-stall converter, was ready. The dealer council wanted us to let all those cars run, but they wanted us to switch to the Factory Experimental class for 1965."

Concurrently, the engine division had designed the single-overhead-cam (SOHC) 427—using the 427 wedge engine's side-oiler block and bottom end, new hemi-chamber heads, and a chain cam drive system—for use in NASCAR with a single four-barrel carburetor.

Ford Fairlane Thunderbolt Bob Ford 4/14 What if we took the Fairlane body and put the 427 eight-barrel engine in it? Would that work? In 1964, Ford created the Fairlane Thunderbolt specifically for drag racing dominance, 3 inches shorter and 700 pounds lighter than the Galaxie, and handed out about 100 of them over the next two years to some of its best racers. The cars were all built off-site at Dearborn Steel & Tube, aka DST or “The Tube” in Ford-speak. This car, raced by driver Kenny Vogt for local Dearborn dealer Bob Ford, is shown at the NHRA Indy Nationals in 1964 in C/Altered, because NHRA still hadn’t figured out where the factory supercars belonged.

Gray says the Cammer engine was a miracle of modern engineering, with Norm Faustyn's team taking it from first drawings to first dyno test in 90 days. "We could get the valve sizes we wanted, the valve angles we wanted, the volumetric efficiency we wanted. We were in tall cotton."

But the engines were specifically designed for NASCAR. "We did it exactly the way [NASCAR founder] Bill France told us to do it, but he said no. We'd spent all the money; we'd done everything he'd told us to do, including building Galaxies with the engine in them, right on the production line. I drove one for a long time." One of those cars won B/FX at the Winternationals.

"As head of the drag racing program, I couldn't wait to get my hands on that engine," Gray says. "Vern Tinsler helped me get that engine into a Mustang, because that's what we wanted to run, and that's what the dealers wanted us to run."

Tinsler and his crew had developed a quarter-elliptic spring front suspension about six years prior to this and Tinsler thought it would work under the front end of a Mustang to make room for the SOHC engine.

Gray recalls, "Brannan, Tinsler, and I looked over the plans for the front suspension. We didn't tell anybody what we were doing. They found the guys who had built the prototypes, and they built us some more. The Cammer engine just slid right in. We were really pushed for time. Brannan and I left with two cars for a two-week test session in California."

Ford Mustang Tasca Mystery 9 5/14 By the winter races of 1966, the Ford Mustangs on the factory team had abandoned all pretense of stock appearance. This is the beautiful Tasca Ford Mystery 9 altered-wheelbase Mustang A/FX car with a one-piece molded nose and Hilborn injectors running at the NHRA Winternationals at Pomona, one of just two cars built specifically for this program by NASCAR greats Holman & Moody in North Carolina. The second car went to Ford guy Dick Brannan.

In that first test of the Cammer-powered Mustangs, they found that the bumpsteer in the front suspension made the front wheels wobble under both acceleration and braking.

Gray says, "Brannan and the guys from Russ Davis Ford figured out what was wrong, and they fixed it. Phil Bonner came out, and we fixed his car. Tasca came out, and Gas Ronda was there with the Russ Davis car. Bob Ford came out with Len Richter. We got all the front ends set on the five cars. We had more cars, but that's all the overhead-cam engines we had!" The other cars ran with wedge engines, including those of Les Ritchey, Al Joniec, and Clester Andrews, but they were replaced with Cammers later on.

Gray recalls, "At the same time, we had talked to a fellow by the name of Connie Kalitta, and he decided that the overhead-cam engine was the cat's meow. Kalitta was one of the brightest men I have ever met in my life. He realized that if he had a Ford running against all those Chryslers, he'd make a fortune in match racing. He could write his own ticket. And he did. Some of the things he did with that supercharged Cammer engine would curl your hair!" Kalitta, of course, later won everything there was to win during the winter of 1967 with the Bounty Hunter T/F dragster. Before long, Pete Robinson, Lou Baney, Don Prudhomme, and Kenz & Leslie joined the Cammer fueler ranks.

At the 1965 NHRA Winternationals, the new Mustangs dominated A/Factory Experimental. Len Richter's car broke an axle, and Bill Lawton, in the Tasca Ford 427 Cammer Mustang, won the race. A Cammer Galaxie won B/FX. Mike Schmitt's 289 car took C/FX. Ford was looking good.

"We ran Chrysler out of Stock, and then we ran it out of FX, and then everybody started sliding the wheels forward, building the most hideous things I'd ever seen," Gray says. "Brannan and I decided to do something about it. We built a long-wheelbase Mustang, and I don't think he ever got beat in that car. Bonner wanted to build a Falcon. At Lions, Bonner and Brannan ran for the money, and Bonner [in a Falcon] did a Second-gear wheelstand and lost the race to Brannan."

Ford built two of the tube-framed, stretched-wheelbase Mustangs for Brannan and for Tasca Ford in North Carolina at the Holman & Moody NASCAR shop, using a long-wheelbase chassis with the front wheels moved far forward, a steel body shell, and fiberglass hood, doors, fenders, and decklid, along with a full rollcage and onboard fire system. They used a lightweight four-speed transmission and a Ford 9-inch rear with a 4:88:1 gearset.

Ford Fastbacks 289 Mustang 6/14 A group of young Ford engineers got together to drag race many different models of the company’s cars and called themselves The Fastbacks. Here, they are testing their 289 Mustang at the same August, 1965, Ford test-track session a few weeks before the NHRA Indy Nationals.

Gray says, "I couldn't tell my boss about this. He wanted us to go back to running stock Mustangs. So Brannan was gone, mysteriously, during a lot of the time that fall in Charlotte. He and John Wanderer built the two cars right under the nose of John Holman, who didn't know about the program, which had been cooked up by Ford with his partner, Ralph Moody.

"Holman called my boss, John Cowley, and told him about the two beautiful race cars he had seen in the shop. Cowley said, ‘What cars are you talking about?' I got fired three different times by my boss, but my super-boss [Jacque Passino] hired me back all three times. So Cowley told us to get the cars up to Dearborn right now. When he saw them, he ordered me to take them both to the crusher, but Passino said, ‘If those cars will hold paint, let's race them!"'

Ford cleaned up at the AHRA Winternationals at Irwindale Raceway. It had brought all of its best guys to California, rented Irwindale, and tested for three weeks before the event, changing weight classes, moving ballast around, and switching back and forth between race gas and alcohol.

At the event, Les Ritchey won Super Stock Eliminator with his Performance Associates Mustang. Dick Brannan's new Mustang won Unlimited Fuel Stock, and Bill Lawton's Tasca Mustang won Unlimited Gas Stock against Ronda in the final. Ronda, Lawton, and Brannan had switched over to Hilborn fuel injection, and Brannan ran on fuel with an automatic transmission to spread out the number of eliminator victories as far as possible within the AHRA class structure, which was far more liberal and less restrictive than the NHRA dominion.

Two weeks later, Lawton beat Bonner in the final round of heads-up eliminator at the NASCAR drags in Deland, Florida, and Tommy Grove beat them all with his 427 wedge Mustang. Jerry Harvey's Ford beat Mike Schmitt's Cammer-powered Galaxie to win Street Eliminator at the NHRA Winternationals at Pomona. By this time, Charlie Gray, who had engineered all of these cars, was told he was going to NASCAR, where he spent the rest of his career in Ford Racing and with great success.

But the real star of that Irwindale event was a 1966 Mercury Comet, with its tubular chrome-moly frame, one-piece fiberglass flip-top body, built on a stock 116-inch wheelbase with stock proportions, and a fuel-injected Cammer engine and a three-speed automatic mounted amidships.

In an ignominious debut, Dyno Don Nicholson, first on the list to get one of the revolutionary new cars called Eliminator I, blew the body off and into pieces its first time in competition. Regardless, this completely revolutionary approach to replacing the acid-dipped, fiberglass-draped, altered-wheelbase first-generation of factory and homebuilt Funny Cars was done under the supervision of the late racing legend Francisco "Fran" Hernandez, a man who Charlie Gray calls "one of the most wonderful innovators I ever knew, regardless whether it was drag racing, circle racing, whatever."

Hernandez had been around drag racing since at least 1949, when he won the very first drag race at Goleta in his 1932 Ford. He was rumored to have been one of the first racers to experiment with nitromethane, and he and his car had graced the Apr. 1949 issue of Hot Rod magazine.

After a stint in the Navy during World War II, he worked at Edelbrock, then Offenhauser, and then at Bill Stroppe's Ford racing shop. He joined the Autolite spark plug company in 1959 to look after racing, record runs, and special events like million-mile tours on the same set of spark plugs. Ford bought Autolite in 1961, and Hernandez immediately went to work on the Autolite racing and endurance factions. By 1964, he had switched to Lincoln-Mercury as head of racing and directed the construction of the famous lightweight 427 A/FX Comets for Dyno Don Nicholson, Ronnie Sox, and Jack Chrisman.

Eliminator Ii Engine Block 7/14 The second version of the 1966 Nicholson car and the 1967 Eliminator II, shown here in testing at the Ford Dearborn test track, both had deep front spoilers that kept the air from lifting the front end. The design was spectacularly successful when placed in the experienced hands of racers like Nicholson and his mechanic Earl Wade, Nicholson disciple Eddie Schartman, West Coast legend Jack Chrisman (who was the first to run his Comet with the blown Cammer engine), and the Denver team of Kenz & Leslie. Needless to say, these boys made a fortune match racing in between NHRA and AHRA events and were nearly unbeatable because the cars were so light and so sleek, and the engine/transmission combination was dependable.

It was Hernandez and a young racer from Ford's research activity named Al "Big Smoke" Turner who worked on the flip-top program, along with Ron and Gene Logghe, the drag racers who ran Logghe Stamping Company in suburban Detroit. Turner got that nickname from Connie Kalitta after Turner's dragster smoked its tires so hard at Detroit Dragway they had to stop the racing for a few minutes until the smoke cleared.

The Logghes had been making a dragster chassis as a side project to their Detroit stamping, welding, and assembly business ever since they had built Connie Kalitta's first front-engine fueler. They were strong, lightweight cars with some science in them, and they were the logical choice when Mercury went looking for Detroit co-conspirators in the project. At the time, Ford Division was utterly opposed to tube-framed, flip-top Funny Cars.

Al Turner, Jack Chrisman, and drag racer and supercharger manufacturer Gene Mooneyham sat in Chrisman's shop in California talking about racing, and Turner came up with the idea of a new form of Funny Car, based on Mooneyham's (and partner Al Sharp's) famous #554 1934 Ford coupe. That car ran a blown, fuel Hemi, set way back in the all-tube chassis, with the injectors at the base of the windshield, and had a centered driver position but on the outside; it looked like a stock 1934 Ford. The more Turner thought about it, he says, the more he thought it would work. It would have to work, because Lincoln-Mercury wanted nothing to do with altered-wheelbase cars; if it didn't look like a stock Merc, the company wasn't going to race it.

Hernandez had his hands full with the Comets for the East Africa Safari Rally with Bill Stroppe, a trio of Cape-Horn-To-Fairbanks Comets, the NASCAR Mercurys, and other programs, so he told Turner to look after drag racing while he was away.

Turner was made for the job, having built and raced gas diggers in Detroit since 1954. He took Top Eliminator on the opening day at Detroit Dragway, beating the legendary Setto Postoian with his 4-71 blown, carbureted Chevy small-block and had won the World Series of Drag Racing at Cordova, Illinois. He worked at Ford during the day and did crankshaft machining and balancing at a machine shop in the evenings to support his racing habit.

Fran Hernandez 1960s 8/14 A pensive Fran Hernandez is caught at the races, somewhere in the 1960s. His contribution to the entire Lincoln-Mercury racing program in NASCAR, FIA rallying, road racing, and drag racing cannot be overstated. He was a drag racer himself, in his youth in Southern California, but his workload was such that he turned drag racing over to Detroiter and gas dragster racer A Turner. Turner in collaboration with Chrisman, Mooneyham, Logghe, Bergler, and Larry Shinoda--racers all--parked the altered-wheelbase Comets and created the flip-top Funny Car-simple, beautiful, and very effective.

Turner had worked on the 427 wedge Comet race cars that Don Nicholson, Eddie Schartman, Sox & Martin, and Jack Chrisman raced, the 1964 versions having been built at Dearborn Steel and Tubing, and the 1965 cars having been updated at Holman & Moody. He devised a very stiff dual-shock-absorber rear suspension setup for the Comet fleet and included 50/50 front shocks to settle the cars down, and that worked. He went to Harvey Crane, who he had known for years, to get better camshafts, and he went to Carrillo to get better connecting rods.

Turner says, "The guys on the Ford Division racing programs were graduate engineers, but they never had any racing experience. I was a racer. I did what I would have done on my own cars. What they took six months to get done, I could get done in three weeks. Everybody would work with me because they wanted to get that Ford business. We did very well with Nicholson, Sox & Martin, Eddie Schartman, Chrisman, and the rest of our guys."

Turner says the tide shifted when Chrysler came out with the altered-wheelbase race cars. "Nicholson complained that he wasn't competitive anymore, so he modified his cars in 1965 with an altered-wheelbase chassis, an 18 percent engine setback, and when management saw it, they were ready to drop out of drag racing.

Turner pursued the idea of a stiff, lightweight chassis, the Ford 427 SOHC Cammer engine set well back and a one-piece fiberglass body as the new package. He built a balsa wood frame and a 1⁄25-scale 1966 Comet body to show the suits what the finished race car would look like. By building that model instead of writing a paper, he got the project approved and immediately thought of his longtime racing buddies, the Logghe brothers, to take on the new form.

Logghe Stamping assumed responsibility, promised utter secrecy, and agreed to not build customer cars for a year after the first ones were delivered, so that Lincoln-Mercury would have world-beaters for a whole season. They built the chassis in a separate room at Logghe Stamping.

Turner went to the Ford design studios, told the modelers what he needed, and they went to work smoothing out the clay buck of the 1966 Comet hardtop to a fine finish. Turner then had the clay model shipped to a fiberglass specialty company in Jackson, Michigan, that took the molds and laid up the first bodies.

Eliminator Ii Mercury Cyclone 9/14

Second-generation Logghe Stamping boss John Logghe says that the first bodies from the fiberglass supplier were way heavy and that they had to be redone. The original plan was to use a one-piece lift-off body that was bolted or pinned to the chassis, but his uncle Ron came up with the idea of hinging the body at the rear. Voilà! The flip-top Funny Car. The initial examples had magnesium bulkheads fore and aft and aluminum panels that formed the rest of the interior.

A Cammer engine with low-stack Hilborn injectors on it went to Logghe for fitting in the chassis, along with a three-speed manual transmission and a 4.44:1-geared 9-inch rearend. Turner, the Logghes, and the Horstman people, who made OEM hydraulic dampers for Ford at that time, dreamed up multi-adjustable shock absorbers that Turner says were the first coilovers ever used on a drag race car. Veteran race-car interior builder and longtime partner of the Logghe brothers, Al Bergler, shaped all of the aluminum for the floors, the firewalls, the wheelwells, and the interior panels.

Turner says, "We took the car to the dragstrip in West Palm Beach, Florida, and we used a bay at Wilson Lincoln-Mercury there to work on the car. In testing, Nicholson couldn't shift the transmission fast enough, and he kept missing shifts and over-revving the engine. So, we put a three-speed automatic in it with a 4,000-stall converter, and it went real well. But, Nicholson complained about the stock Mercury shift pattern, so I took the problem to Ron and Gene Logghe, and they invented the ratchet shifter for the Comets."

Turner recalls, "When we introduced those cars, the Ford Division guys were absolutely flabbergasted, screamin', and hollerin' about why didn't we share with them. Charlie Gray and John Cowley were supremely pissed off at me. So they went to Holman & Moody to get a bunch of cars built for Tasca and Hubert Platt and Al Joniec and Gas Ronda. They built fiberglass bodies and moved the engines back, and they ran pretty close to what we were running but not too close. At the Super Stock Nationals in 1966, we were a quarter of a second quicker and 25 miles an hour faster than they were."

Small Block Fairlane And Big Block Galaxie 10/14 It’s spring 1963 at Indianapolis Raceway Park, and Ford is racing a small-block Fairlane and a big-block Galaxie in the same class, D/Stock, with NHRA using advertised horsepower and shipping weight to determine which cars go where. The Detroit Three and the NHRA were equally confused about drag racing stock-bodied cars, but that changed very quickly.

The world premiere of the flip-top Funny took place at the AHRA Winternationals in January of 1966. It wasn't pretty. Despite all of the testing and preparation, the lightning-quick Nicholson Eliminator I lost its body on its maiden voyage. Turner and California Comet racer Hayden Proffitt loaded the broken thing onto Proffitt's flatbed, took it away, and burned it so no one would ever see its secrets. Turner later found out by watching a slow-motion movie of that run, which a spectator had given him, the grille portion of the body had succumbed to aero pressure and had sprung the body latch.

The next body in line, which was to have been Eddie Schartman's, was prepared for installation on Nicholson's Logghe chassis. The body latch was turned backward, so that air pressure wouldn't affect it. But there were other problems. Both Nicholson and Roy Leslie in the Kenz & Leslie car from Denver flipped their cars during the early part of 1966 season.

With assistance from the legendarily mischievous designer and drag racer Larry Shinoda, Turner put the new Nicholson body in the Ford wind tunnel and tested exhaustively. By the next outing, that car and all that followed had a chin spoiler that increased drag only slightly, pushed all the air around and over but not under the car, and eliminated 350 pounds of lift from the front end. They tried adding a bellypan, too, but the drag went so far up that they took it off. "We'd had accidents, and we didn't want to have anymore. We were talking about life and limb here." Turner says of the new Comets, "We won about 99.999 percent of all the races we ran. Nicholson won all but about two or three rounds [and] he raced all year long."

Eddie Schartman, the only surviving member of the original trio of drivers, was a 21-year-old Cleveland dealer mechanic racing a 1963 Chevy lightweight, when he was tapped by Dyno to build motors at his Atlanta shop. In 1964, when Nicholson got the Mercury factory deal and a new Comet, Schartman inherited Nicholson's Chevy for 50 percent of the match-racing take.

Ford Mustang Bob Ford Inc 11/14 By 1965, Ford Motor was racing smaller, lighter, more appealing Ford Mustangs and Mercury Comets with 427 wedge and 427 SOHC engines, again built in small batches to meet NHRA, AHRA, and NASCAR requirements. This photograph was shot at the Ford test track in Dearborn, Michigan, with lots of young, crewcut, short-sleeve-white-shirt, skinny-tie, pocket-protector engineers watching driver/engineer Len Richter put the Bob Ford Mustang through its paces. Note also that the NHRA had created a new home for these kinds of cars: A/Factory Experimental (or A/FX), with B/FX and C/FX reserved for smaller engines or heavier cars to accommodate whatever Detroit came up with.

"Mercury didn't want Nicholson's name on the Chevrolet, so we parked that car and I inherited The Ugly Duckling, the 1964 station wagon," Schartman says. "I finished racing that, and they gave Dyno a 1965 Comet coupe. After a while, I got tired of splitting the money with Dyno, so I told the factory to give me my own car or I would clear out. After a lot of meetings in Dearborn, Lincoln-Mercury allowed me to have my own car in 1965 with the Cleveland dealers sponsoring me with $5,000. That was a lot of money back then."

Schartman launched into a heavy schedule of match racing, until he got a call that December from Al Turner: "I've got a new car I want you to run next year. I'm not going to tell you anything about it. Just come on up [to Motor City Dragway], and bring your fire suit and helmet."

Schartman says, "When I saw that car for the first time, I just said ‘Oh, my God!' It scared the hell out of me right off the bat, because I'd been racing cars that went 125 miles an hour, and here was this dragster frame with a seat way in the back. You couldn't even get in it without help. They buttoned me up and said ‘OK! Go!'"

Schartman says this was his first run ever on alcohol and 60 percent nitro, and he simply stood on the pedal, shot down the dragstrip, and took out all the timing lights at the top end when the car drifted. He ran 166 on that cold track.

The factory teamed Schartman with fuel dragster veteran Roy Steffey for a time, which was an arrangement not to Schartman's liking, so he asked the factory to go it alone, and it agreed. Schartman beat mentor Nicholson in the final round at the NHRA World Finals in Tulsa, further widening the gap in their friendship.

Schartman booked match races two or three times a week all over the East Coast and Chicagoland. He spent the winter months living in California and taking a mute version of his race car around to the fall and winter auto shows.

Eliminator I Mercury Comet Flip Top Funny Car 12/14 Here is a rare shot of the car that changed drag racing forever, the Eliminator I Mercury Comet flip-top Funny Car. It was designed by Lincoln-Mercury racing manager Al Turner, with the tubular chassis built by Logghe Stamping Company and aluminum and magnesium panel interior by metalsmith Al Bergler under a one-piece fiberglass body from Ford Design. The first car caught too much air at the AHRA Winternationals, the body was ripped off the frame on its maiden run, and it was subsequently destroyed. Aerodynamicists went back to the drawing board.

He also experimented with a combination of alcohol, nitromethane, and hydrazine. "We didn't quite know what we were doing, but it made the car a little quicker," he says. "It was probably more dangerous than we knew."

In 1967, Schartman took his rig to California for the winter tour, moved in with Jack Chrisman, hired legendary wrench Amos Satterlee, and put a blower on the Cammer engine, using a Ford-developed supercharger manifold. "Amos made that car into a rocket ship," he says. All good things must come to an end, and Lincoln-Mercury decided to get out of Funny Car racing. Schartman got a $200,000 settlement that enabled him to run independently for one more season in order to satisfy sponsor contracts. Schartman, inducted into the NHRA (1998) and Don Garlits' International Hall of Fame (2011), finished his career in Pro Stock and retired from drag racing in 1974.

The Kendall GT-1 car of Jack Chrisman, the Eliminator I and Eliminator II of Don Nicholson, and the Air Lift Rattler of Eddie Schartman, all built by Ford, Logghe, Bergler, and Plastigage Custom Fabricating, together changed the face of fuel coupe drag racing forever. They all got Cougar bodies in 1967, and the original Comet bodies went to other racers like Michigan's Pete Gates, who put a new Logghe chassis under the former Nicholson body. Within months, every chassis shop from New Jersey to California was busy building Funny Car rails, and a whole new industry in one-piece fiberglass bodies grew up overnight.

In 1967, the Ford and Lincoln-Mercury racing groups were merged. The petty jealousies subsided over time. By decree in 1970, Ford got out of racing once again and didn't start up again for 10 years.

All of the engineers and racers involved in the Ford and Lincoln-Mercury Funny Car racing programs had long and glorious careers, including Charlie Gray, Dick Brannan, Fran Hernandez, and Al Turner. The Logghes and Bergler have been building and rebuilding dragsters and Funny Cars ever since. Hernandez, Chrisman, Nicholson, Shinoda, and several of the others involved have all gone to the Big Dragstrip in the Sky, leaving behind one of the greatest legacies in the history of the sport.

Dyno Don 1968 13/14 Here's the legendary Dyno Don in a 1968 publicity shot; he was the former Chevrolet dealership mechanic who parlayed a hot 409 into a factory Comet deal into a two-car team with Schartman and into the first ride in a factory-backed flip-top Funny Car. He match-raced and crashed, and rebuilt and raced some more, and eventually parlayed that into a very successful run in NHRA Pro Stock Mustangs.

The Cammer
The Ford Single Overhead Cam (SOHC) 427 V8 engine, familiarly known as the Cammer, was released in 1964 for NASCAR stock car racing competition as a rebuttal to the Chrysler 426 race Hemi that powered Dodge and Plymouth. NASCAR refused it immediately, and the engine was converted for drag racing use.

It was based on the high-performance 427 side-oiler block, so the cylinder case and bottom end were largely unchanged. The design was aimed at continuous operation at very high rpm. Because of the elaborate gear-and-chain nature of the single-overhead-cam drive system, the 427 cam bore in the block accommodated a short idler gearshaft. The idler shaft in the block was driven by the timing chain and, in turn, drove the distributor and the oil pump. An additional sprocket on the shaft drove the timing chain, a mere 6 feet long, which empowered both overhead camshafts and caused severe valve timing problems at high rpm. This was solved by using offset keys in the cam drive and advancing the left-bank camshaft 10 degrees, a solution credited to Don Nicholson.

The cast-iron cylinder heads had fully machined combustion chambers. A single camshaft operated shaft-mounted roller rocker arms, and the valvetrain consisted of stainless steel intake valves and sodium-filled exhaust valves (to prevent the valve heads from burning) and was fitted with inner and outer springs.

With a single four-barrel carburetor, it was rated at 616 hp at 7,000 rpm and 515 lb-ft of torque at 3,800 rpm; with dual four-barrel carburetors, output jumped to 657 hp at 7,500 rpm and 575 lb-ft of torque at 4,200 rpm. The engine used a dual-point distributor with a transistorized ignition system. Gradually, the carburetors gave way to Hilborn fuel injection, the factory ignition was replaced by Mallory magnetos, and the racers switched from gasoline to alcohol and nitromethane.

While the stock-bodied cars duked it out, Connie Kalitta, Pete Robinson, Lou Baney, and Kenz & Leslie used the Cammer in blown nitro form in fuel dragsters with amazing success starting in 1967. As a side note, perennial innovator Mickey Thompson eschewed the factory SOHC engine in favor of a Ford 427 block with his own hemi heads and pushrods, run in a Fairlane body and a fuel dragster. The Cammer engines that are still running are highly prized, and we know of one drag racing and hot rodding great, Art Chrisman, who runs one in his street-driven Ranchero.

427 Mercury Comet Ford Coupe 14/14 The 1965 drag racing season saw a great deal of splintering in the ranks of the Ford and Lincoln-Mercury factory racing teams. A number of the teams made illegal modifications to their cars for match racing, and when they showed up at major events, the sanctioning bodies had no choice but to put the factory superstars in more appropriate classes. In this shot from the Indy nationals in 1965, Eddie Schartman’s 427 Comet has its hoodscoops taped over and is running in A/Gas against the legendary S&S Speed Shop Anglia of Gene Altizer.

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