Funny Car
A Funny Car is a type of drag racing vehicle with a lightweight fiberglass body that looks like a regular car but sits on top of a custom-built racing chassis, designed to race in a straight line at extreme speeds over very short distances.
The name "Funny Car" comes from how strange these vehicles looked when they first appeared in the mid-1960s. Racing teams began taking regular car bodies and stretching or altering their wheelbases to fit more powerful engines, creating cars that looked "funny" compared to normal street vehicles. The term is credited to Fran Hernandez, who worked as Mercury's chief of racing at the time.
What makes a Funny Car unique is its one-piece body shell that tilts up like a giant clamshell to allow the driver to get in and out. This body is made from lightweight materials like fiberglass or carbon fiber and is designed to loosely resemble production cars you might see in a showroom, such as the Chevrolet Camaro, Dodge Charger, Ford Mustang, or Toyota Supra. However, underneath this shell is a purpose-built racing chassis that shares nothing with an actual street car.
Funny Cars compete in drag racing, where two vehicles race side-by-side down a straight track trying to cross the finish line first. Modern Funny Car races typically cover 1,000 feet in about four seconds, reaching speeds over 330 miles per hour. These vehicles are among the fastest accelerating machines on Earth.
The engine sits in front of the driver in a Funny Car, which distinguishes it from another drag racing class called Top Fuel dragsters, where the engine is behind the driver. Funny Cars use massive supercharged engines that run on nitromethane fuel, burning up to 15 gallons in a single run down the track. These engines produce incredible amounts of power but don't use a traditional transmission—instead, they transfer power through a multi-stage clutch system.
The shorter wheelbase of a Funny Car compared to a Top Fuel dragster makes them more compact and sometimes trickier to control, but modern Funny Cars can match or even exceed dragster performance. Racers sometimes call these vehicles "floppers" because of how the body flops open for access.
Organizations like the NHRA (National Hot Rod Association) maintain strict rules about how Funny Cars must be built, particularly regarding engine specifications and safety equipment. The class has evolved significantly since the 1960s, when early examples like the 1964 Dodge 330 Max Wedges first shocked audiences with their unusual appearance and incredible speed.