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For this page thought I would take a look at the Frontline Top Fuel and Funny Car team that I was involved with in the 1980s.  I had many pictures to choose from and this is a selection of the artwork and photos.  Interspersed are some other random images with a story to tell.

At the 1987 Santa Pod World Finals event it was always good to see some of the foreign visitors with cars of character.
A typical example was this clean Volvo P1800 of Nils Nilsson from Sweden (running I think in the Modified class) against Ron Kiddell’s Firenza on an evening qualifier.

One of my favourite Funny Cars was the Time and Motion Mustang of Paul Manders from Blackpool.
Metalflake and other lurid paint techniques were applied to the body.  It mostly seemed to run sevens but I always rooted for the car on the track.  This shot was taken in the pits at Easter in 1980 and it ran initially with a Garlits 426 iron Hemi and later an alloy Keith Black.

Around the middle of the 1984 season, I began an adventure by becoming part of the Frontline Top Fuel dragster team.  The main men were crewchief  Steve Clark and driver Andy Craddock.
It started when I wrote to them as a fan and enclosed an early pencil sketch of the car.  Valerie, who was Steve Clark’s partner at the time, invited me to meet up with them and since the team needed a new hand to accompany Mark Norton on crew duties, they asked me to join.  In August I was in for a shock as they were about to fire up the car before a run.  “Get in.” said Andy, motioning to the cockpit, “I want to hear how the engine sounds from the outside.”  In the picture I’m smiling but apprehensively hanging onto the roll cage.  Sensing my nervousness, Andy told me to not touch anything and I’d be fine.  I asked him which lever was the handbrake and Andy said “Don’t worry about that, by the time you get to think about using it you’ll be stuffed into the fence!”  Then the starter motor whirred into life…gulp!

I did this pencil drawing sometime in 1984 depicting Craddock and Clark in the pits at Avon Park firing up the car.  It’s very rare I draw people since I’m better at engines etc.

The car was extensively rebuilt for the 1985 season and this artwork was prepared for its debut at Easter in that year.  It was supposed to reflect sponsorship from Radio Caroline, which never materialised in the end.  I’d always expressed an interest in signwriting a race car and they said that I could paint the fuel dragster in return for buying me the requisite opaque paints and brushes.  I was unemployed at the time so had little money, a situation that continued during my tenure with the team.

On the Friday before the inaugural meeting at North Weald in August 1985, Andy Craddock was photographed stripping down the Milodon Hemi on the grass before an engine change.  An unusual situation!

At the World Finals in 1986 I gave the car a spruce up and added some more colour to the lettering.  Other items I painted were Andy’s helmet and the Autoconnection logo under the headers, complete with Formula 1 car.  I had to do this twice because errant con rods put holes in the panel earlier on!

Andy Craddock is pictured pulling on his gloves before a run in the Frontline Funny Car at the Cannonball meeting in July 1986.  At the time Andy had a plain white Simpson helmet so I got my brushes out and gave it some character with stripes and the Frontline logo.

Sometime in 1985 I did some black and white press photos of the team’s two cars to generate some publicity.
These were taken on a grassy area in Colney Heath in Herfordshire.  I set the camera up and gave it to my girlfriend Caroline to take the shot.  From left to right is myself, Steve, Andy and Mark Norton.

This was the debut of the Frontline Funny Car at the Cannonball in 1985.  I designed the paint scheme and the car was previously the Grasscutter, Satans Sledge and originally Gene Snow’s Arrow. The blue and white base paint was sprayed by L&G Auto Services and I literally brush painted everything else on the body.

One of Andy Craddock’s excellent burnouts in the Frontline Top Fuel machine at the World Finals in 1986.  I think this was when Andy got to the semis against Tom Hoover and broke on the line.

In 1993 I drew this Santa Pod T shirt and to give it an identity I came up with a ‘phantom’ Frontline Top Fuel car, bringing the whole thing up to date.  The old T/F 51 race number was on there, together with the Craddock and Clark names.

I’ve been model making for over 40 years but up till recently had never finished a 1/16th scale dragster.  I made this model Logghe Funny Car chassis from donated scrap bits from my old pal photographer Roger Gorringe. He gave me a box of broken ancient built-up Revell models he’d accumulated.  I’d done some writing for him and in return I could have the damaged parts which I was very pleased with.  He didn’t believe I could do anything with them ……  But I was happy to prove him wrong by making this fully detailed chassis and adding over 250 components to it.

This 1/16th nitro 426 Hemi was also made from the broken parts and super detailed.  The idea was to make every control and fluid system on the engine plus all linkages and unions.  I manufactured all the fuel and oil fittings from scratch using solder for flexible lines and nickel plated copper telephone wire for the hard lines.

I was going to make a model of the Da Revell Fast Guys dragster of Kuhl and Olson.  I owned the kit for years and needed to get it done.  But studying the Donovan engine revealed that it was inaccurate so I did some research.  A trip to Roy Wilding’s workshop revealed both Donovan and 392 Hemi blocks so I took pics of these and armed with other reference, spent a couple of hundred hours producing early Hemi and Donovan scratch-built master patterns.  These included blocks, heads and manifolds in two scales which would be cast in resin.  I entered into some worthwhile correspondence about these with Phil Burgess of the NHRA and Carl Olson himself, who took a great interest since I will be producing an ultra-detailed model of his car in future.

This engine drawing outline was done by hand with technical pen and ink using my own photo of Monica Oberg’s nitro engine as reference.  This shows some of the work that goes into an illustration.

On the last page I showed some examples of artwork I did for the Lowes Brothers, Stuart and Craig. I’d mislaid this illustration but was keen to show the Top Alcohol Dragster in its final form with Rug Doctor sponsorship and its Ford Cargo transporter.  The design also had to incorporate other sponsors Hertfordshire BTR and Daytronic.

I had been exploring traditional oil painting on canvas techniques.  Painting in this way is the same as in the days of the old masters except paint and canvas do not have to be configured from scratch but can be sourced from Windsor & Newton etc.  Oh, and the subject matter has changed!  This is a still incomplete painting of Don Prudhomme’s 1974 Vega in burnout mode.

I have always liked the shape of the Firefly dragster since I first saw it in 1972.  Over 10 years ago I was sketching out some slingshot bodywork ideas using the Firefly as inspiration for this nitro slingshot proposal.  It was part prompted by a comment from the late fabricator/Funny Car pilot Pat Foster who noted that a lot of the current slingshots were ungainly, so I sought to correct this.

This is the design I did for John Spuffard’s Showdown Challenger Funny Car.  I did the artwork in 1986 and decided to send a copy to Street Machine magazine. Nowadays you would just scan a copy and email it, but back then I did another complete rendition in pencil and sent it off.  The body sides were originally to be yellow as can be seen on the artwork, rather than the gold tinged with green hue that it was actually sprayed in, but the car still looked good.

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(First Posted on  17 November 2016)
 

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