What a wreck.
I went to the Mopar Nationals in Vegas probably 15 years ago, and Bob was billing it as Hemi under Glass' last showing.
The oddities I noticed were the rear axle is reversed, so the pinion faces the rear. A gear box attaches to the pinion due to the engine being partly above the axle. The floorpan is a plastic sheet so when he is doing a pass he can see in front of the car.
When he got to the line to do a 1/4 mile pass he did a little show, probably to test the car. Crowd pleasing lift and maybe a 100 yard burnout. I believe the whole place was watching this "last pass" of HUG. Then, in what seemed like slow motion, he stood the car on the wheelie bars, it looked like he lifted the throttle, then he mashed the go pedal and the dang thing wheelied the whole 1/4 mile. What amazed me the most was that he had done the pass in under 11 seconds, I believe.
Luckily before the pass when I was looking over the car, I saw Bob was selling and autographing Mattel HUG toys, and I bought one.
Cool car and driver
Back up to our arriving at Las vegas motor speedway:
Dad went with me to the track and when we approached the drag strip he heard lots of popping sounds of the Vipers that were running the track, and dad asked why they had such poor tuning. They were still running the vipers when we got to the wall next to the track, and I explained that the popping was the drivers hitting the Rev limiters and not shifting fast enough to reduce the time the engine was running with not all cylinders firing. He used to drag race street cars back in the late 50's, so he had no idea what a rev limiter was.
Allen
