Pro Modified…door cars that are absolutely ballistic machines that are running numbers that far eclipse anything any real production car can or should be able to do. Today, we see them as aero-tricked bodies, tube-frame machines that breathe through turbochargers, inhale nitrous by the mother bottle-load, or have a screw blower the size of a Volkswagen VR6 sticking out of the hood. That’s today…thirty-odd years ago, the cars that started the Pro Modified movement were either Modified Eliminator machines that had swallowed mountain motors and Lencos, or were Pro Stockers who decided to bottle-feed their race cars. What both sides had in common was the desire to get away from class rules and to go for broke, to see what they could actually do heads-up. Match races started forming. Small tracks saw the potential for these machines, as they drew the crowds with speeds that kept getting faster and faster. Quick Eight shootouts? That might as well be the OK Corral shootout without a gun around…things will be loud, fast, and over in a hurry.

Pro Modified is a product of the 1980s, a time when huge displacement engines still met up with screaming small blocks, when engineering was still being done not so much to eek out every last thousandth of a second, but to just make a new combination work. You can go back years before this footage if you really want to argue about where Pro Modified’s roots actually start, with cars like the 1964 Dodge “Chargers” that were little more than Dodge 330s that were packed full of Top Gas engine, the Bill Stroppe-built 1964 Mercury Comet with a blown 427, or even the “Wild Bunch” racers from the East Coast, filled with guys like Camp Stanley, Danny Brightwell, Tommy Howes and other mental patients who had wild door cars (blown Ford Taurus wagon, anybody?) and not one ounce of caring for the strict NHRA rules and classes.

Or maybe you consider Bill Kuhlmann’s third-gen Camaro, that ran a Sonny Leonard mill on enough spray to numb the state of Missouri, and his March 1987 blast to a 200+ MPH trap speed at Darlington, as the moment Pro Modified became a thing. You had diversity with the cars: Corvettes of just about every generation, late-model Camaros and Firebirds, 1970 Chevelles, Probes, Berettas and Luminas, and even a 1964 Comet for a recently un-retired Ronnie Sox. The rules were simple: approved wing or spoiler, 710ci limit for nitrous, 526ci limit for supercharged alcohol engines, no more than a 10% engine setback. The rest of the rules might have fit on a notecard.

It’s one of our favorite classes in drag racing, and for good reason. Competition Plus’s Bobby Bennett just dropped this video history of Pro Modified, and you’ll see the likes of Scotty Cannon, Tim McAmis, “Animal Jim” Feurer, Fred Hahn driving Jim Oddy-built cars, and more. Pull up a chair, you’ll dig this one.