The July 25-26 weekend was one of great promise. The Open at Mission Raceway Park near British Columbia, Canada has always been a crowd pleaser, running a wide variety of classes, and it's the only race of the year where you will see a field of fuel cars. In the last couple of years the nostalgia scene and in particular funny cars, has been growing in popularity and MRP has been increasing its nostalgia content accordingly. Last year they put together a reasonable field of AA/FC's and with a successful race and the promise of more cars for this year, Mission decided to try and get back to the days of the 64 Funny Car events.

In the lead up to the race the entry list of nostalgia funny cars over three classes was looking like it would total around 34. The classes in the show would be the Nitro floppers, the Northwest BB Funny Car Assn. (6.90 index), and the Canadian series of the International Blown Alcohol Assn. (a 6.99 index). They ended up with a total of 28 cars (only eight of those in the nitro class), but still a great show was in store for the fans that saw a rash of five-second passes by some teams.

We had hoped to
see the other Hodgson
team car, that of Terry Capp,
but there is a rumored disagreement
within the team that kept him from showing
on this occasion.

Some people were also saying that they didn't feel good about this
new car having modern sponsorship; that it wasn't true to the nostalgia tradition. 
It's kind of like those side panel extensions down and around the exhaust headers;
some folks would rather they were not there as they are not very period correct.