![]() 1 in sales in the USA, I guess - and it just sounded awful catchy, and I adopted it,” he explained. “We heard in late 1965 that Chevrolet was going to use USA-1 as an advertising slogan - meaning No. The injected, 454-powered Chevelle, which debuted on alcohol but was quickly switched to nitro, was also the first red, white, and blue car that carried what became Larson’s trademark USA-1 name. (Fearful of fire, Larson wanted something with a door for easy emergency egress, and his first two flip-tops also had working side doors!) There’s always been some confusion about what constitutes a Funny Car with everyone from Jimmy Nix and Jim Johnson to Dick Landy having altered wheelbased, blown nitro-burning door cars that are considered the godfathers to what we know as Funny Cars today, but even though it wasn’t a flip-top body, Larson’s was the first that was all fiberglass. “After about a year, Greg Sutliff, the dealership owner, came to me and said, ‘Don't you think we ought to be racing a Chevrolet?’ and when he said ‘we,’ I said ‘Yeah,’ so in late 1965, we built a 1966 Chevelle that was the first all-fiberglass Funny Car.” Larson and the Cobra were a perfect match as he won AA/SP class at the 1965 NHRA Winternationals, Springnationals, and Nationals and set both ends of the national record with the car. Even though it was a Ford, Larson dynoed it for him at the Chevy dealership, and after Costilow proved not to be much of a drag race driver, Larson climbed into the seat. Ironically, it was while he was working at Sutliff that he met Jim Costilow, who had a hot little 289-powered Cobra that he'd been racing in hill-climb and road-racing events and wanted to further explore drag racing. Larson later raced a ’54 Olds and a ’32 Chevy A/Gasser (that he also still owns), and as Larson’s mechanical skills and reputation continued to grow, it led to a job as a dyno operator/tuner for a local Ford dealership, which led to he and the owner’s son racing a lightweight Ford Galaxie for a time until the Sutliff Chevrolet dealership in Harrisburg, Pa., wooed him away for their own dyno ambitions and began Larson’s long, long association with the brand. ![]() I played around with it for a little bit in the fields before I tore it apart, chopped it, and did all the necessary stuff.” “A friend of mine who was two years older than me had a real nice ‘41 Ford with a cam and heads and manifold, and I'd ride with him when he was street racing, and that got me hooked,” he remembers. Larson was just 16 and driving a chopped and fenderless ’32 Ford five-window coupe he’d built (and still owns and drives daily). The Pennsylvania Pro began racing at the famed airport dragstrip in Linden, N.J., in 1954 at what was just the fifth stop of the historic NHRA Drag Safari’s inaugural cross-country trek. When I tracked down Larson earlier this week, he was already aware of his place in NHRA trivia, and we spent a pleasant hour or so looking back over his amazing career. It's been more than three decades since this hot rod hat trick was first accomplished in 1992 by the subject of today’s column, drag racing legend Bruce Larson, who competed in Funny Car from 1966 through 1990 and Top Fuel from 1992-94, with a brief foray into Pro Stock in the early 1970s. When Alex Laughlin, the new driver of Jim Dunn’s Funny Car, takes the green light for his class debut in qualifying at the Amalie Motor Oil NHRA Gatornationals, he’ll become just the second driver in NHRA history to have competed in Top Fuel, Funny Car, and Pro Stock at an NHRA national event, according to NHRA historian Bob Frey,
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