Old Funny Car Shopping? This Mustang Body And Chassis Weren’t Born Together But The Have History


Old Funny Car Shopping? This Mustang Body And Chassis Weren’t Born Together But The Have History

Another week, another awesome old race car resurfacing after years of hiding. This time we are talking about a Mustang funny car and like lots of old drag race cars, the body and the chassis have interesting history and each led different lives before coming together decades ago. While we are not sure about the Hancock part of the team we can sadly report that Bobby Martindale died at age 65 after suffering a wreck at Atlanta Dragway in his modern alcohol funny car during the 2008 season. This Mustang was a piece he ran for years and the eBay listing reports that it was actually used right up into the 1980s!

The origins of the body are cool because the seller claims that the first owner of the Mustang facsimile was Tommy Grove who was a well known funny car racer during the glory days of the match racing era. The seller claims that this is the last known piece of the car Grove raced in 1969 and 1970. Kind of. It went into the low 7s and was among the first to clip 200mph according to Danny White’s awesome 1960s funny car page. There were rumors that the car was tasting some hydrazine at the time it went the 200. Woah! Back to the “kind of” part. At some point, according to the seller, Grove blew the roof off the body and went to Ron Pelligrini to have it fixed. In a pinch for time, Grove took a different body and this one was eventually repaired and sold to Bobby Martindale who it resided with for the rest of its racing days. Was this a 200mph body or did that happen after? Who knows. Grove has since verified this body as once belonging to him, again, according to the seller.

Martindale ran the car with an injected hemi and did so for a number of years. He was based out of Virginia and was a regular at places like Suffolk and others. The chassis is a Logghe Brothers Stamping piece that has been spruced up some and still has some distance to go before it is complete. There are lots of new and retro parts on there and it looks like a great starting point for a vintage funny car resto.

The history of these old cars can always be debated and argued over. Who owned what and when is the type of conversation that’ll entertain historical drag racing nuts forever. Bottom line? This thing is cool and hopefully someone grabs it for the darned cheap asking price and makes something cool of it!

SCROLL DOWN TO SEE PHOTOS AND THEN HIT THE LINK TO SEE THE EBAY AD FOR THIS LOGGHE CHASSIS AND MUSTANG BODY –

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CLICK HERE TO SEE THE EBAY LISTING FOR THE MARTINDALE AND HANCOCK TONKA MUSTANG


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