Vintage Funny Car Body Found and Documented - Hot Rod Hoarders Ep. 10

On this episode of Hot Rod Hoarders, we find an old faded funny car body and track down its history from day one. Real quick before I get carried away I want to say thank you to all of the new subscribers and viewers who checked out my video about Jim Smith's dragster. The response has just been overwhelming and just wanted to say that I appreciate each and every one of you who has tuned in to check it out and just wanted to let you know that there'll be more of that type of content coming soon including this new video about an old funny car body that we found. So if you like this sort of thing hit the subscribe button and then hit the notifications bell and you'll get a notification each time we post a new video. I guess it was about a year ago my dad told me that on his way to go play music somewhere that he saw a bunch of old funny car bodies sitting in some guy's yard and it's just one of those things he didn't have time to stop and we always sort of made a plan to check it out and see if any of the stuff was for sale kind of figure out what this guy's story was. Well, my friend Mike Clayton posted some pictures on facebook of all those funny car bodies and said he stopped and talked to the guy and that kind of broke the ice a little bit as far as us wanting to go seek it out a little further. Well then I get a text from Michael Brandt who has a metal fabricating business in Chattanooga and he has a YouTube channel called garage bound so check it out. So Michael sent me a link to a Craigslist ad which had this funny car body was 1979 Dodge Challenger with old paint and old lettering and like exactly the type of stuff that I like. So the guys name is Craig Wagner and he's originally from the Chicago area recently moved to Tennessee he's built a bunch of fiberglass parts and funny car bodies. Now this car that he had listed for sale that's not a body he built but it's one that he had bought and it was just time to let it go and move on to new projects he wants to build a replica of his dad's fuel funny car that ran in the 60s so this was kind of freeing up some space and a few dollars to be able to move forward on that project. So Craig didn't really have any information on the body it was just one of those things that kind of got passed around a few times and he actually bought it from somebody in Georgia. I knew that with the old paint job and the lettering and all that stuff that I could find something on it so before we even got the thing home I was on Facebook searching the funny car groups and trying to figure out who might have owned this car back in the 80s which is when I was guessing it ran. What I found was this car in its current paint scheme was ran by Mike D'Andrea and he's out of Niles Ohio and he ran the car with the mid-america funny car circuit and he actually only ran it for just a year or so in this configuration he later actually updated it to Dodge Daytona body so after I found out this car was previously raced by Mike D'Andrea I found him on Facebook, sent him a message and sent a couple pictures of what the car looks like now. Since Mike basically knew all the history on the car I just kept quizzing him on where it came from and who had it and how he ended up with it and he was glad to tell me so I'm gonna rewind a little bit and go back to day one with his car which was 1978. That's when it was delivered to Tom Finlay and he was based out of Miami Florida he raced to the dragster and NHRA Division two and eventually built this car which had a Cox chassis and this brand new Iverson built body. As I was researching Tom Finlay's racing career I found that David Clark had a lot of information about Tom and his racing program so I found him on Facebook friended him, sent him a message about this car and he he gave me a lot of information on it. He told me that his cousin Gary who was basically like a brother to him they raced together in a dragster they actually competed against Tom and beat him on several occasions and ended up working for Tom with this funny car in 1981 and they won some races they won in Atlanta they went rounds in Gainesville and ended up finishing pretty well in the points that year so you know he knew the car inside and out he told me about the engine set up which was tuned by Tim Richards he told me a lot of details about the car which is really cool to find out and he also told me that when he and his cousin when they decided to kind of go their own way and let Tom handle the driving duties on the funny car that Tom actually performed really well in 82 season and took the points championship in Division two. The odd thing about all this is that Tom just went missing at the end of the 82 season so even though he had a really good successful season that was pretty much the end of this cars professional career and it was pretty much the end of Tom as far as we know it. Jerry and Darrell Gwynn actually bought the car from Tom's estate and they pretty much just parted it out. They took you know what they could use and then sold off the body and chassis. From there it was Bob and Kathy Floch from Ohio that ended up with the body and chassis and they only ran it for about a year because of the lay down style seating arrangement in this Cox chassis it just didn't fit him well and he didn't feel comfortable in it so he ended up selling car to Butch Osmond who was a pre recognized racer at the time he raced it about a year didn't like the lay down style seating situation and ended up selling the car. So around this time Mike d'andrea was racing a front-engine dragster and he always had a huge aspiration to drive a funny car. That's kind of when this car became available from Butch Osmond and he ended up buying it. Mike decided to take matters into his own hands and he modified the chassis himself completely reconfiguring the seating area so that it would have an upright position like a modern funny car would have. So you can see on the paint job that it pretty much stayed similar from those early days with Tom Finley all the way up through Mike D'Andrea's run with the car the black paint with sort of a typical late seventies early eighties stripe design and then obviously the lettering changed when Mike got his hands on it he had Ed Miller do the lettering. He's out Niles Ohio and he's still doing this stuff. You know he's mainly concentrated on dirt track and old track cars but he did let her some drag racing cars as well. Mike debuted the car in 1991 and was racing exclusively with the mid-america funny car circuit. When Mike first started racing he already had a wife and kid and he actually had more kids while he was on the road and racing you know just about every weekend and he said that was the best decade of his life because he could include his family you know he was having fun and he had a setup on the car that didn't require a tremendous amount of maintenance between rounds you know he wasn't going broke trying to just make rounds with the car. After running the car for a couple years Mike upgraded the body to a early 90s Dodge Daytona but he kept this body just as a backup. Mike ended up selling the body and it's just sort of bounced around to some different owners and really I guess it was just kind of yard art or souvenir because nobody ever actually used it nobody put it on a car nobody repainted it nobody ever put it back in the service. Since this body doesn't really have any sentimental value to me this is more than likely something that we will just clean up and probably sell in the next few months you know it's not something that we can make a tremendous amount of money on personally for me the value comes with being able to document it that's really more fun, more enjoyable than anything else for me so you know I've kind of accomplished that and will more than likely just move on and let somebody use it for a nostalgia funny car or just another conversation piece somewhere down the road. So I realize this funny car body isn't quite as juicy as some of the other cars that we've discovered and got back running or anything like that but the thing that gets me with this stuff is the history and the stories and the fact that this thing still had the old paint allowed me to dig that up and get the information from Mike D'Andrea, get it from David Clark and some other people along the way that played a part in this car's history so you know that's really pretty meaningful to me and I you know it kind of allows me to pass that along if we do end up selling the car we can pass along the history and the next person down the line will know a little bit more about it.

Channel: Hot Rod Hoarder

Views: 60,169

Rating: 4.9220781 out of 5

Keywords: vintage funny car, hot rod hoarders, hot rod, funny car, historic drag racing, old drag cars, old drag cars found, funny car videos, yard find, alcohol funny car, top alcohol funny car, tom finlay, mike d'andrea, david clark, nhra top alcohol funny car, nhra drag racing, drag racing, drag racing history, dream quest funny car, tommy lee byrd, blown64vette, craigslist find, craigslist score, nostalgia funny car, match race, mid america funny car circuit, barn find

Id: Pq3reFKCLiY

Length: 10min 21sec (621 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 18 2019