The Hybrid Camaro (Last time I will talk about it)

There are times when a subject matter takes on a life of its own, and it just keeps moving along through time and space.

That is kinda the deal with the Victory Hybrid Camaro funny car body. Back at the Nitro Ignitor at Boise, I posted this photograph of two different 1969 Chevrolet Camaro funny car bodies that happened to be parked right next to one another on social media.

I wrote a something to the effect “Not trying to stir the pot, but both of these are both supposed to be 1969 Chevrolet Camaros, just saying.” My intension was not to invoke my opinion; my intension was to continue the discussion on the body rules in the Heritage Series. No one had ever posted images of the two bodies side-by-side, in order for many to see just how different they truly are.

However, some did not see it that way and were very vocal about what they thought my intent was. Now was my approach flawed? Maybe, but it did keep the discussion moving. Nevertheless, for those who thought my intentions were something else, I must apologize.

My stance on this Hybrid body from the very beginning has been that a racer’s job is to see just how far they can ‘push the envelope’ ‘bend the rules, without breaking them … whatever cliché you want to pin to it, but to see what they can get away with. It is the job of the sanctioning body to police the competitors and enforce their rules to the best of their ability.

My stance is that the six NHRA officials who make up the management team of the Heritage Series have left the barn door open. With that stated, I feel we are going to see a further influx of more radical designs of flopper bodies that will take from the intention of the Heritage Series, which was to run the cars the way they were back in the seventies.

This leads me to what transpired at the second stop of the series, up in Idaho. The weather was cool with very blustery conditions. The wind on both Friday and Saturday was blowing straight up the race track, at between fifteen and twenty knots. With gusts to twenty-five knots, it was apparent that the new bodies did have some effect on performance, as Ryan Hodgson was the only car over 250 miles per hour. Horan was also flirting with 250. To be open and honest another car that was flirting with 250 was Cory Lee in Don Nelson’s “California “ Trans Am.