Maybe the only thing better than seeing great Funny Cars of the '70s resurrected by today's drivers is seeing them brought back to life by the original drivers themselves, drivers like Roger Garten and Dale Pulde.
    
Pulde, one of just a handful of fuel racers to have won multiple NHRA national events in the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, has driven countless Funny Cars over the past 40 years, but there were just two options when it came time to choose which one to recreate: the "War Eagle" Trans Am that he and partner Mike Hamby match raced from coast to coast in the late '70s and early '80s, or the unforgettable "Miller Warrior" Buick Regal that they campaigned in 1985.
    
"I might have picked the Regal – a lot of people really liked that car – but it wasn't old enough, and John Powers already had a new Trans Am body for me," Pulde says. "I never would have gotten into this if it wasn't for Powers. He's the one who said, 'I think you need to be out here,' and he's the one who said he'd supply the stuff. His body is the one that caused all the controversy when it came out – it's a little too spaceship-looking for some people, I guess. I we knew when I brought it out that it was overkill. But if you think about it, Powers' cars back in the '70s were pretty zoomy, too."

Maybe the only thing better than seeing great Funny Cars of the '70s resurrected by today's drivers is seeing them brought back to life by the original drivers themselves, drivers like Roger Garten and Dale Pulde.
    
Pulde, one of just a handful of fuel racers to have won multiple NHRA national events in the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, has driven countless Funny Cars over the past 40 years, but there were just two options when it came time to choose which one to recreate: the "War Eagle" Trans Am that he and partner Mike Hamby match raced from coast to coast in the late '70s and early '80s, or the unforgettable "Miller Warrior" Buick Regal that they campaigned in 1985.
    
"I might have picked the Regal – a lot of people really liked that car – but it wasn't old enough, and John Powers already had a new Trans Am body for me," Pulde says. "I never would have gotten into this if it wasn't for Powers. He's the one who said, 'I think you need to be out here,' and he's the one who said he'd supply the stuff. His body is the one that caused all the controversy when it came out – it's a little too spaceship-looking for some people, I guess. I we knew when I brought it out that it was overkill. But if you think about it, Powers' cars back in the '70s were pretty zoomy, too."
    
The chassis isn't some used pipe just a few years removed from the Big Show with a retro body mounted on it; it actually has original Pulde blood coursing through its veins. It was built almost a quarter-century ago and never used; Hamby ordered a new chassis after he and Pulde decided to part ways in 1986 but never finished it.

"It had no roll cage on it and no steering, but it was a twin to the Regal we were running at the time," says Pulde, who won IHRA championships with the War Eagle in 1977 and 1982 and with the Regal in 1985. "If I had my choice, the Regal might have been the car I chose, just because it was so different from everything else, but it didn't fit the rules."

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Rules are one of Pulde's biggest beefs with nostalgia racing. "NHRA has all these things they won't let you do, but then they let guys have computers," he says. "Well, the two best-running cars out here are Steve Plueger's, and neither one of them has a computer on it. I don't have one, either – don't want one. You don't need one – just consider the run and look at the parts that came out of the car. As soon as MSD ignitions were allowed in this deal, you knew guys were going to want to burn more fuel. And as soon as they figured out how to do that, they were going to want even bigger fuel pumps. But these things aren’t just like they were way back when. The cylinder heads are a lot better than anything we had 30 years ago. Alan Johnson was smart. He made a head just for nostalgia cars that has more port velocity, and it's exactly what these engines need. The blowers are better now, too – way better."
    
Pulde and Hamby ran 5.90s and 6.0s with similar parts back in the day, and Pulde certainly hasn't forgotten what made those old cars run. But it's not as simple as racking his brain to remember what the compression was or exactly where he had the cam because so many other things have changed, especially the tracks and the tires.
    
"The tires aren't the same as what we used to have," says Pulde, who set the NHRA national record at 247 mph with a stock-stroke 426 in 1977. (He runs a de-stroked 396 now.) "The tires don't adhere to the track the way they used to. You can't fill up the inside of the car with smoke on a burnout like you used to, either. Somebody asked me, 'Hey Pulde, you forget how to do a burnout?' Sure didn't. I doubt that it's anything that people pay that much attention to, but the resins and compounds in the old tires that made all that smoke aren't there anymore. These tires may have the same designation on them, but they don’t have the same structure or the same compound. You can tell when you're doing a burnout; it doesn't smell the same."

 

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The tracks typically are better than the surfaces Pulde raced on a generation ago – but not all of them. "You still have to shift, work the brake handle a little sometimes, pedal it sometimes," he says. "And when these cars shake, they shake. They really hammer you, just like the pro cars do today. They don't tremble a little like when they used to shake, and it isn't something you can drive through. Back then, the cars were a little more forgiving in a lot of ways. But one thing hasn't changed: you still have to be ready for the unexpected. When you're in your 20s and 30s, you're probably on top of everything a little more. It's a little harder now that I'm 60, but I still like driving the car."

Pulde, who test drove for top teams as recently as five years ago, has no intention of ever returning to the NHRA Full Throttle Drag Racing Series tour, though clearly he would be able to if he ever decided to. "Jumping back in one of those things and hauling ass to the finish line isn't in my future," says Pulde, who has been driving nitro-burners since 1967, when he was "17 years old and too stupid to be scared."
    
So is nostalgia racing Funny Cars today just like competing at national events and match races was with the cars of yesteryear? "Yeah," says Pulde, always one of fuel racing's most outspoken drivers. "It's the same crap we had in the '60s, '70s, and '80s, just a new bunch of dummies out here putting up with it. Nobody wants to pay you to race. Tracks don't want to spend any money to advertise because they don't think they're going to draw that great of a crowd. They don't advertise, so they don't get a crowd, so they don't want to pay you anything. We used to run the car and pay all of our bills just off of what the car made. Well, you haven't been able to do that for 30 years, but you've got guys out here who'll race for nothing. I never expected to make money doing this – I just don't want to lose a bunch of money. If I never ran it again, it wouldn't faze me one bit. This doesn't pay enough to make it worth spending all the money it takes to do it. But it's still fun. As long as I'm still OK at driving and I still have these same guys going with me, I'll probably be out here."

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