They stripped the car completely down and sand-blasted and bead-blasted every piece. The motor wasn’t in it, but Tony had all the parts. He sent the injectors back to Hilborn to be freshened up. “We bought the injectors for $300 from Honest Charlie’s in Chattanooga and gave $1,200 to have them refurbished. I sent the magneto back to Mallory to be redone, and it’s a rare piece, a magneto with dual points and the mag built in the bottom of it. The trans I had on the shelf, and it is an Art Carr three-speed ’64 style with a bolt-on yoke and the cable shift leading to a ’58 Imperial push-button shifter. The rear end is still the same that was in the Super Stocker, an 8-and-three-quarter with a 4.56 gear,” Tony said.
It took three years to restore it. Larry Abernathy of Abernathy Body Shop in Aragon, Georgia, painted the “Hurricane” a 2004 Viper Red, not too far off its original color of a Matador Red from a ’65 Dodge. Tommy Bollen of Rome did the “Hemi Hurricane” lettering all by hand with touches of gold leaf, and he is the same man who originally did it in the 1960s. “He didn’t even let me pay him. When we first built that car, he was just starting out in his business, and he said that signage helped his business so much back then that he would do it for free. That car was a real crowd-drawer,” the younger Bobo said.
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The last time the Willys was out was at a summers-end race at Southeastern Dragway at Dallas, Georgia, where Bunky guided it to a slow elapsed time and mph. The Bobos will show up at the 2006 NHRA Hot Rod Reunion at Bowling Green in June and maybe try a gasser reunion at Thompson Dragway in Ohio with the Midwestern Willys Club show and race a month earlier.
The “Hemi Hurricane” will stay as it is -- and was. “To make the car safe and up to the new standards, it takes it away from the originality. We’ll leave it as was in 1965, that time period. Every piece of it is original from that time. I haven’t bought any new parts,” Tony says.
And by the way, he is trying to track down the family’s Logghe Brothers/Barracuda Funny Car. So far, the trail has led to south Florida, but it has gone cold. The Bobos hope to meet up with the Logghe Brothers at Bowling Green and see what’s what. “We still have the original bill of sale for their chassis,” Tony says.
“We’re retired now. At the present time,” he says, “I’m working on a ’68 GTS Dart street car with 30,000 miles and an original 340 with all matching numbers, restoring it,” he says. And no, it won’t be a race car. The “Hurricane” and maybe the Funny Car are the only two the Bobos need now.
SOMETHING EXTRA: The Hurricane Vs. Jabbo
The late Jabbo Elam was another famous Georgia gasser racer who had a ’55 Chevy running G/Gas out of Atlanta. The Bobos went to Warner Robins Drag Strip once for a divisional points race. Bunky had made a qualifying run and went back and parked the car, and he and Tony walked up to Jabbo’s car, just looking to see who was there and what was what. Now, Elam had blocked the oil going to the heads so it wouldn’t pump all the oil up to the top of the engine and had placed some sponges in the rocker arms, to cut down the motor’s oil windage. Jabbo would oil the rockers every time he got ready to run.
Tony remembers that about that time, the track announcer came on and told Bunky’s elapsed time, and Jabbo’s wife was standing beside him, and she said, “Well, that’s the cheatin’-est blankety-blank-blank bunch of racers I’ve ever seen,” referring to the Bobos. Jabbo looked over at her and said, “Well, honey, if you feel that way, just turn around and tell them. They’re standing right behind you.” Tony recalls, “That poor woman got on her knees and was so embarrassed. Of course, me and daddy just laughed about it. Daddy told her, ‘That’s okay, we talk about y'all that way too.’
“We won that day too. Every time it came down to Jabbo and us, we’d beat him by 10 feet. It got to be a big joke that Jabbo would say, ‘I can see the end of the finish line and look back in the mirror and there is that Willys, and by the time I could look back around, all I could see was his parachute opening. There were several photo finishes, ‘cause both cars were dead on the record. That hemi, when it started breathing on the other end, it was over.” 
 wilson@dragracingonline.com |
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