For $3,500, you too can step back in drag racing time. Fuel racing maven Virgil Hartman has, and so has the Worsham family, father Chuck and son Del, and Gary Densham. Others as well, about 20 so far. Fuel Funny Car racer Ron Capps has taken laps in "vintage" nitro Funnies, and Gary Scelzi has expressed an interest.

Reeves builds Funny Car bodies. Not the latest "Bat-Mobile" designs, but cars that LOOK like cars. Taking a gander at one of Reeves’ Mustangs, or his latest edition of a mid-era Firebird, you can see that they’re "real" Fords or Pontiacs. Heck, one of his latest even has the General Electric sealed beam headlight inscription imprinted in the gel coat. Reeves has to take care to get rid of every misplaced line and flaw in the body "plug," else it will show up in the final product. "See that?" he asked me on a recent tour of his White, Georgia-based shop. "That’s where I wrote a measurement on the plug with a Sharpie, and you can see it if you look real close."

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Reeves, owner of his own Southeastern Motorsports company in White, has been on his own sprawling spread in this small, no-stoplight town in the rolling hills of north Georgia for about six years, owning some real estate holdings and sharing shop space with a variety of dogs, cattle and a braying mule he laughingly refers to as "Moses," so-named by his next-door neighbor, a retired preacher who once told Donnie that he’d better lock the animal up "’cause he’ll lead the rest of the critters up and out of bondage."

Reeves is himself a lay preacher and missionary, journeying as far as Mexico and Peru to minister to the needy, and holding regular Racers For Christ church services at the races. He holds a mechanical engineering degree from Southern Tech in Marietta, Georgia, and once owned a paint and body shop that claimed 10 employees and 60 finished cars per month out the door. "I sold and jumped out of it all," he says. His skills as an engineer and a paint and body man has for the past six years served him well in this new Funny Car body-building business.

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He began his racing career in 1968 in Stockers and Super Stockers, but as soon as the stretched, altered-wheelbase cars came out, he thought the whole movement was cool and vowed to have one himself one day. His heroes were "Dyno Don" Nicholson, Arnie "the Farmer" Beswick, Phil Bonner, Dick Brannan, Hubert and Houston Platt, Bobby Wood and others. Bonner’s Holdman & Moody Mustang inspired me," he says. "At Dallas (Southestern Dragway, near Atlanta), I was a kid, 14, and the nitro just set me off."

His first Funny came when he was 23, "when I could afford it," Reeves said. It was a replica of Hubert’s stretched-nose ’65 Mustang. Ironically, Reeves painted it exactly the same blue that Platt had painted his, and when he went over to Duluth to meet him, Hubert pulled out a picture of his old ‘Stang and both were shocked.

Reeves asked Platt if he minded if he had the replica lettered up exactly as it was when Hubert raced his. "He said ‘sure, go ahead.’ Now he’s signing autographs by my car. He even drove it once, at a Fun Ford Weekend at Atlanta Dragway in 1995. He made a little squirt, just for the crowd," Reeves said.

"I just wanted one, so I built my own," he says. Platt’s "Georgia Shaker" replica was sold two years ago to a guy with Tennessee Thunder Motorsports, an all-Ford collector of Thunderbolts, lightweight Galaxies and A/Factory Experimental Comets. The "Shaker" runs, and races.

Then Donnie bought one of Beswick’s Ponchos, the "Tameless Tiger" ’63 LeMans, in 1996. He restored it and raced it all over the country with a 440 engine and a supercharger, and 50-percent nitro in the tank. His main competitor was Rob Bruce and his "Zombie" ’65 GTO, and together, they hit nearly every Pontiac convention, nostalgia race and swap meet in between. Now the car sits in Floyd Garrett’s museum near Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.

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Another restoration followed, this one a ’68 Camaro called "Fascination," once owned by John Carter of Louisville, and this one sported a 482-inch big-block Chevy with blower and 35-percent nitro. That car is now associated with the General Motors Muscle Corp., a company that sells high-powered, special-edition Camaros to nationwide dealers.

By 2000, Reeves had his own body "plug" for the ’71 through ’73 Mustang, copied from a body that chassis man Don Hardy built and sold to a man in Michigan who had had it hanging from his shop rafters since 1972. It was based on a "Little John" Buttera chassis, and had never been down the track. That car today is called the "Southern Shaker," and it’s Reeves’ main drag car. It is powered by either a 500-inch Keith Black Chrysler or a 465-inch single overhead cam Ford engine, the legendary "cammer."

Funny thing, Reeves says. "Southern Shaker" got him really involved in building early Funny Car bodies for others. "We were at the first Funny Car Reunion at Englishtown in 2001, and a guy from Canada named Frank Jonkman crashed his ’72 Mustang, which was called the ‘Nitro Mare.’ He ended up buying the only other body I had, made from Dale Creasy’s old ‘Tyrant’ Funny Car. That was my only spare body, so I decided that maybe I’d better begin building more," Donnie said.

That’s where his past paint and body business really paid off. By 2001, Reeves had his Southeastern Motorsports going strong, building stretched-nosed Mustangs like Hubert Platt’s, plus mid-era Mustangs based on his "Southern Shaker" (a car, by the way, that was sprayed and lettered by Reeves himself), plus the ’77 Firebird. So far he has sold about 20 bodies, at a cost of about $3,500, with a one-month build time. Reeves works alone, and has his own fiberglass shop near his house and first shop in White, Georgia.

It’s hard work, Reeves admits, this building of vintage fuel coupe bodies. First he makes a plug of the car-to-be out of fiberglass, then makes a mold off that plug --- the plug usually being another full body. Reeves works the plug just as he works a finished body, so there are no imperfections in it, including written measurements on the plug made by a Sharpie pen. "The plug has to be perfect," he says. He thinks of the plug as the negative of a positive, the positive being the completed body.

Then he uses a special wax and smears the entire plug with it, then sprays on gel coat, followed by layers of fiberglass. If the plug has been waxed properly, the finished product can be loosened from the plug by a swat of a rubber hammer. Reeves builds his own reinforcing frame of two-by-four pieces of pine wood, to hold the body’s shape.

Oh yeah, Reeves also just completed several bodies based on the ’69 Mustang that came from the body of the "Whinemaker" Funny Car owned by Eddie Pauling of Phoenix, Arizona. One was sold to Virgil Hartman, another to a Californian named Rick Rogers, and a third to a northerner called simply "Funny Car Steve."

Except for its lengthened nose, it looks as "factory" as an original street car. That one is the one that carries the General Electric inscription in its headlights. Even the original factory side window scoops are in place.

"These cars look like old Funny Cars, but they’re brand-new," Reeves says. "They have the original lines of the Firebirds and the Mustangs back in the 1970s. If you measure the original steel street car doors, you’ll see that the dimensions of the door on the ’69 Mustang match exactly." A total of five ’77 Firebirds, three ’66 Mustangs and 12 ‘77s have been sold all across the country."

The making of vintage Funny Car bodies is nothing but a labor of love for Donnie Reeves, who estimates he’ll spend $2,500 for an original body, another $1,000 on materials, $6,000 in the body’s mold, and a month or so of hard work before one is done. Total cost for him --- about $12,000. "This ain’t no money-making proposition. I do it to keep the nostalgia Funny Cars going and growing. It’s my contribution to the vintage Funny car movement," he says.

Eventually, he’d like to do an early ‘70s Charger like the Hawaiian or Gene Snow’s "Snowman" Funny Car.

Racing a vintage Funny Car --- his "Southern Shaker," as well as others of its kind, has been NHRA-certified, and is 2005-legal --- is a heck of a lot more fun than its newer counterparts, even with 50 percent nitro in the fuel tank.

Call them Outlaw Classic Funny Cars, if you will. At a race, like the one that was washed out by the effects of Hurricane Dennis recently at Southeastern Dragway in Dallas, Georgia, every kind of powerplant will be there that one can think of --- 426- to 500-inch hemis, Keith Black and big-block Chevy motors, single overhead "cammers" to big-inch Fords, all on nitro, and many on mixtures of up to 85 percent. A few in the Dallas pits were spotted with dual magnetos, and superchargers from 6:71 to 14:71 in size were there. Injectors ran the gamut, as did transmissions and even rear ends, and fuel pumps went from big --- 20 gallons-per-minute jobs --- to bigger, as in 40 gpm capacity.

One of Reeves’ customers in California has hit the 6-teens on the quarter-mile, and is looking to break into the 5’s soon.