There’s some irony here. As you are reading this the guy you’ll see talking in this video, Ron Huegli is at Pomona for the NHRA Winternationals with the car on the right side of the screen. Ron is the curator at the World Of Speed USA museum in Oregon and he’s also a funny car driving maniac. Ron is at the Winters with the very car that Clare Snaders drove to the first Winternationals funny car win in 1969. The car on his left is a Nova that Jungle Jim himself drove and scored a race in at the New England Fall Funny Car Nationals in Epping, New Hampshire with. Two cars, two Novas, two wins, to coasts. Pretty awesome!
Ron isn’t just cackling the Clare Sanders winning car, either. He’s there with the machine he normally drives which is a green Monza known as the Tiki Warrior. That thing is the most awesome burnout machine in the nation and we have seen Heugli boil the tires until well past 1,000ft with smoke so thick there’s not a possible chance he can see anything. When Ron talks about these cars he’s talking about them as a racer, a museum curator, a fan, ad a guy who genuinely loves these machines.
We think you will dig this video and we think it is neat how it ties the whole Winternationals funny car (and whole season funny car) celebration up perfectly. Yes, Eddie Schartman was the first guy to get handed a trophy for winning the funny car class at the NHRA finals in 1966 but the first man to ever lead off a season with such an honor? That was Clare Sanders and he got a Wally for his hard work.
Just visited the musuem yesterday. A lot of very significant cars and a great mix of types of racing. It was a great experience and I encourage everyone to go check it out