The Birth of Nitro Funny Cars

Steve Bovan’s ’65 Nova Funny Car running both as a C/FD, and against one, at the 1965 NHRA Nationals.

By Frank Oglesby
7/8/05

here have been numerous stories written about the birth of Nitro Funny cars over the years. Most of what you have read about the early days is probably wrong unless it was first written during the 64/66 time period and even that is suspect. There are a couple of reasons for this neither one concerning conspiracies/foul play or anything like that.

The racers making the news were racing and quite frankly paid little or no attention to what was being written (huge mistake) unless it directly concerned them, so a lot of misinformation in early reporting was not questioned at the time. A lot of this misinformation has been reprinted a hundred times over the last forty years. In fact when you are discussing this subject with a reader/collector of old magazines, even if you were involved with the incident in question and in fact were there when it happened, they will still tell you they have read differently in ten different magazines so you must be wrong. Actually what they have read is one writer’s mistake repeated by ten other writers over a long period of time and in several different publications.

The second reason for the most of the misconceptions of early Nitro Funny Car history concerns the NHRA and, no, I am not blaming NHRA. I am merely explaining how the early history was derived.

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There was no NHRA Nitro Funny Car class until 1969, so in NHRA’s eyes the cars never existed until then and as the winners write the history books and sell the videos, most young writers (that would be under 65) who are writing from research only cannot believe anything existed before NHRA blessed it. If they dig a little deeper all they find is words like---Outlawed—Non Certified and other nonsense like that. Nothing could be farther from the truth, as Nitro Funny Cars existed for about four years before NHRA started a class for them.

The third and probably the most important reason for the inaccuracies were the factories' involvement and the power of both their press releases and advertising budget. The independent racers were their own worst enemy, as they were just match racing and whatever coverage they received was solely from the track reporters, while the factory cars had a huge promotional staff behind them.

The factory unblown cars got 95 percent of the magazine coverage but the simple fact is until the Mercury/Logghe cars arrived in 1966, the factory unblown cars were lightyears slower than the supercharged independents which got little or no ink.

This story will be a little different as it is being written by someone who not only was there when it happened, but also was either working on or driving some of the first Nitro Funny Cars.

So let’s start at the beginning. Jack Chrisman’s 1964 Comet was directly responsible for the class Nitro Funny Cars. His Supercharged Nitro motored stock appearing Comet smoking the tires the length of the track at Indy in 1964 and the crowd’s reaction is what started it all.