Funny Car: The Penthouse Pontiac
The thing about speed is that we’re all dreamers. There aren’t many guys with high-performance production cars who don’t think their cars are rockets. They come to this dubious conclusion when they consistently leave everyone behind as the light turns green on Main Street. From the corner of Main and First to Main and Second they’re champions, but on the strip they’d just be chumps. The problem is that a drag strip is a lot longer than a city block.
If our street demons took their cars to a real track and were forced to go full throttle for 1.320 feet — well, they’d slam into the wall of drag-racing reality. That reality is that the fastest production cars currently turned out in America can only cover that 13.5 seconds, with a “blistering” speed a bit shy of 110 m.p.h.
When driver’ Frank Pedregon stomps the pedal of the Penthouse Pontiac, things move faster. Much faster. For starters, by the time Frank has made it halfway to the finish line he’s already moving at 250 miles per hour. At the finish line his vehicle will be pushing aside the air at 310 miles per hour. He did this in about nine fewer seconds than you took in your modern American muscle car because the Penthouse Pontiac usually covers the quarter mile in a little less than five seconds.
Now let’s try an experiment. The next time you’re out hunting with the guys or doing a little skeet shooting, have one of your trusted friends ( a really trusted friend) bring his 12- gauge a little closer than normal. Nope, that’s not close enough.
When we say close, we mean really close. Okay, now take off those protective earmuffs. With the barrel pointing away from you, have your friend rip off a couple of rounds. Kinda hurts the old eardrums, doesn’t it?
Let’s go back to the track and see how much noise you can handle when a race car starts up. All you’ve got to do is multiply that shotgun’s blast by a factor of eight, because each of the four exhaust headers on a Funny Car engine is maybe twice as big as a 12-gauge-shotgun barrel. And with a supercharged, nitro-methane, fuel-burning engine pumping a few thousand r.p.m.’s at idle, the noise isn’t just deafening, it’s potentially damaging to your hearing.
When the engine starts up, vast clouds of yellow smoke erupt and everyone in the pit puts on a gas mask. The acrid yellow smoke from toasted nitro-methane is not something you want to be toking on a regular basis. Once the car is on the starting line, however, the breeze dissipates the fumes. The occasional whiff that remains is catnip for the serious drag racing fan.
A couple of years ago I wrote a Penthouse article called, “Riding the Rocket” about what it was like to drive a Funny Car, and that’s really what it feels like to drivers like Frank Pedregon, pilot of the Penthouse Pontiac. The G loading is best described as a heavy weight being quickly socked down onto your chest. The feeling has to be experienced to be truly understood. The exact opposite happens at the finish line when the dual parachutes are popped. No matter how tight you think you’ve pulled the five-point safety harness, you feel like you’re going to go squirting out through the windshield when the chutes hit.
But car and driver are only what’s up front and personal at the strip. Getting them there is a whole other story. Racing, no matter what the format, requires a team to succeed. Penthouse has one of the best in Jim Dunn Racing, from Long Beach, California. If Robert Duvall played the role of crusty team manager to perfection in Days of Thunder with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, Jim Dunn is that character personified in real-life drag racing. A retired Los Angeles County fireman, Dunn has been drag racing almost since the first tires were turned in anger on a racetrack. His two sons, Mike and Jon, are also involved in the sport, with Mike, the driver of the Mopar Parts Top Fuel dragster, the winner of this past February’s season-opening Winternationals in Pomona, California. Jon is the lead mechanic on the Penthouse race car as well as part owner of Crow Enterprizes, a growing Southern California safety-equipment manufacturer.
The senior Dunn scored some successes during his driving days, but he was as well known for his innovative approach to the sport as for his performances. A series of “Fireman’s Quickie” Funny Car entries gave the part-time competitor an opportunity to try his skills against the best the sport had to offer, and while he rarely won, he made an impact. His most infamous ride may have been the rear-engine Funny Car he introduced more than 20 years ago. With his flame-masked face pressed almost against the inside of the car’s windshield and the engine sitting literally inches behind him, Dunn had his hands full trying to keep the outrageous machine pointed in the right direction, which made him a fan favorite despite his failure to capture the big races.
Since retiring, Dunn has been in high demand as a tuner, team manager, and mentor. In the early nineties he took an untried young Japanese driver named Kenji Okazaki, who brought sponsorship money with him, and turned him into a national-event winner. When the backing disappeared, Okazaki returned to Japan. Dunn was left without the funding to pursue a championship with another driver. Digging deep into his wallet, Dunn hooked up last season with rookie Frank Pedregon to field a car on his own. While they were only able to compete during the first half of the schedule, Dunn and Pedregon closed out their season with two straight victories.
Pedregon. Yeah, that name does have a familiar ring, doesn’t it? If it can be said that some people’s successes, in whatever field, can be traced to their genes, then such is the case with Frank Pedregon. The son of a legendary drag racer from the sport’s earliest days, a fellow who earned a name for himself by spinning his car’s rear slicks fast enough to set them afire, Frank has joined his brothers, Tony and Cruz, in the Funny Car wars after a stellar career in United States Auto Club midgets and sprint cars.
The oldest of the three Pedregon brothers, Frank was the last to get his chance in drag racing. Cruz won the National Hot Rod Association’s Winston Championship in 1992. Tony, who finished second to eight-time Funny Car Champion John Force last year and won this year’s Winternationals, drives Force’s second car.
Frank had already been committed to driving a dragster in the sportsman ranks, but jumped at the opportunity to do double duty at the Winternationals. He flew to Phoenix to begin shaking the car down. The testing went well, and hopes were moderately high. “Even though Frankie and I worked together last year,” Dunn said as the Winternationals opened, “people shouldn’t be expecting too much in our first race. We’ve got to get used to one another’s ways again, and that’s not an easy process when you’re talking about 300 mile-an-hour race cars. I know Frank can drive the wheels off the car — he proved that last year. But the aerodynamics of this car are completely different. And we’re using a different and more powerful engine combination, so we’ve got to walk a little before we can run with the big dogs.”
For Dunn, merely having the car qualify at the season opener would have been a victory of sorts, but Pedregon would have none of it. “We didn’t have anyone helping us pay the bills last year: Frank said, “but with Penthouse on board we’ve got all the tools we need to win. If everyone does his job, we’ll be fine. I think we can win races, and if things go our way, we could seriously challenge for the top spot this year.”
The track at Pomona was tricky during the Winternationals. Cold temperatures and occasional rain left every competitor searching for that elusive combination of pushing out enough power while still keeping the tires hooked to the track. Only four drivers cracked the four-second barrier during qualifying trials. None of the Pedregons were among them. Cruz, who finished seventh in last year’s points chase, didn’t make the cut at all. Dunn wasn’t discouraged by his young team’s effort. “You can’t win it if you’re not in it,” he cliched while turning wrenches late Saturday evening.
Sunday dawned cold but sunny. In the first round Frank and the Penthouse gang faced off against six-time International Hot Rod Association Pro Modified World Champion Scotty Cannon, who was making his N.H.R.A. Funny Car debut in a car sponsored by Oakley eyewear. Pedregon, with a low five-second elapsed time and speed of 303.03 miles per hour, his fastest of the weekend, rudely sent the rookie home. “Maybe we’re on a roll,” Frank said with a grin back in the pits, but it was not to be. In the second round John Force ended Pedregon’s day with a blistering run of almost 317 miles per hour.
Far from being discouraged, Dunn was rather pleased. “I think we surprised some people,” he would say in the days following the event. “Frankie did a first-class job, and everything good is still in front of us.”
“We’ve got about 6,000 horsepower under the hood,” he added with a smile. “If we can keep the reins on ’em all, we’re gonna take Penthouse to, well, to the top floor of drag racing.”
