By Susan Wade
NSSN Correspondent

Authorities seldom value rebels for their intelligence. Bill Kuhlmann, for example, is one of the underappreciated.
“I never looked at the rule book to see how I could follow those rules,” the motorsports trailblazer said. “I always looked at the rule book and asked, ‘What did they leave out that I can exploit?’”
Well, that makes sense. He’s a drag racer. And isn’t that the essence of drag racing, really?
Ruffians, scalawags and scofflaws who loved quick and fast hot rods were Wally Parks’s reclamation projects as he organized the sport in Southern California. Safe racing was Parks’s mantra as he corralled them and their hooliganlier-than-thou attitudes with the National Hot Rod Ass’n.
To independent thinkers such as Kuhlmann, Parks’s wildly successful achievement was a double-edged sword. “As it evolved,” he said, “NHRA made the sport more organized, more expensive and more cookie-cutter. It killed the spirit of the sport.”
So he, NOS guru Mike Thermos and Robby Vandergriff lobbied Ted Jones, who at the time owned the International Hot Rod Ass’n, to establish a class called Pro Modified.

TURBOCHARGED: Former Pro Street champion Annette Summer has worked for five years to perfect a turbocharged engine combination for Pro Mod competition. Once only found in the outlaw ranks, turbos are now legal in NHRA and IHRA. (Brian Wood Photo)

It grew out of the IHRA Top Sportsman class, inspired by the outlaw quick-8 races popularized throughout the Southeast. This wild new style of racing, once a trademark of outlaw drivers from Alabama through the Carolinas, spread like wildfire up the Eastern seaboard, with the self-described Wild Bunch of Camp Stanley, Tommy “The Who” Howes, Elmer Wachter, Nelson Grimes and company trying out their radical doorslammer rebuilds and set-ups and winning. 
At South Jersey’s Atco Raceway, Kuhlmann won the October 1989 Pro Modified inaugural, which was marred by “Denver Fever” Corvette driver Walter Henry’s death. The first official sanctioned Pro Mod race was the 1990 IHRA season opener at Darlington (S.C.) Int’l Dragway, and Ed Hoover was the winner. 
So what caught the country by storm?
“These cars were quicker and faster than anybody had ever seen, the quickest and fastest doorslammers in the world,” Kuhlmann said. “And the rules were pretty much wide open.”
Pro Modifieds are left-hand-steering, stock-appearing race cars with nearly unlimited cubic-inch displacement that can run on alcohol or gasoline. The engine combination is what separates these unpredictable 2,400-2,700-pound beasts from other drag-racing vehicles.
While Pro Stock cars have naturally aspirated engines under the hood, engines with carburetors and no other form of fuel or air induction, Pro Mods are completely different animals. Pro Mods feature 2,000-horsepower supercharged or nitrous oxide-powered motors capable of elapsed times in the low 5.9-second range in the quarter-mile at more than 240 miles per hour — a far cry from the low-to-mid-seven-second e.t.s at about 200 mph average speeds that were state-of-the-art technology almost two decades ago. IHRA has opened the field to turbocharged entries this year.
In IHRA competition, Pro Modified is one of the headliner professional categories, along with Top Fuel and Nitro Funny Car. This year, in an effort to give the fans a distinction between Pro Mod and Pro Stock cars, Pro Mod teams may not field a Chevy Cobalt or Cavalier or a Pontiac GTO, G6, GXP or Grand Am. Nor are they allowed to run a Dodge Stratus, Ford Mustang or ZX-2, Mercury Cougar or Toyota Solara. If it’s legal for Pro Stock, it’s not for Pro Mod.
That encourages such popular body styles as the first-generation Camaros, classic Corvettes from the 1960s glory days, the Willys coupes, ’53 Studebakers and the 1940s “lead sled” designs such as the Jimmy Dean Mercury or even the more recent Dodge Chargers and Challengers.
The American Drag Racing League, which presents eighth-mile action exclusively, is primarily Pro Mod racing with two major classes: Pro Extreme and Pro Nitrous.
The NHRA has yet to adopt Pro Modified as a professional class, but this season, the 8 year-old exhibition program is JEG’s Mail Order-branded, and that, according to company spokesman Scott Woodruff, means taking “everything to a new level through aggressive marketing, media campaigns and promotion.”
The 10-race JEG’s ProMod Challenge will start with the March 13-16 ACDelco Gatornationals at Gainesville, Fla.

CHARGED UP: Sam Andreacchi takes his 1969 Chevrolet Nova down the lane at Toronto, Ontario. (www.headsupracer.com Photo)

“I always get a kick out of seeing the reaction from drivers who race in different classes who crowd the starting line to watch us race whenever we’re out there,” JEG’s ProMod driver and series organizer Troy Coughlin said. “It seems everyone likes watching our races.”
In addition to feasting their eyes on such beauties as Bel Airs, Barracudas, Vipers and take-me-back Mustangs, fans see what six-time IHRA Pro Mod champion Scotty Cannon called “Pro Stock cars on steroids.”
What fans love about Pro Mods, traditionally, are the pomp and the preposterous names of the unsponsored cars. But no one, arguably, has had a more theatric starting-line shtick than Pro Modified’s “Tombstone Tommy” Gray with his Undertaker entourage. Spackled in Halloween-style makeup, they would roll a coffin out by the race car. The lid would open and out would climb the crew chief. And Gray would try to bury his rival.
More recently, John Russo, with wife Sue in medieval-era garb backing him up from his burnouts, has driven the Draggin’-Slayer. Three-time IHRA champion Shannon Jenkins was the nitrous-notorious “Death Dealer,” while two-time IHRA dominator Mike Janis drove “The Widowmaker.” Ed Burnley had the “Predator,” Johnny Rocca the “Iron Horse” and Thomas Patterson the “Headhunter.”
Mitch Stott, whose brother Quain Stott won the 2006 IHRA Pro Mod crown, doesn’t race anymore but said when Pro Mods first hit the NHRA scene that the intrigue for drivers and fans alike is the diversity.
“Every one’s different. We’re talking about the cars, the engines, what’s in them, the way you tune them, the way you run them,” Stott said. “They’re like the Fuel Altereds of the ’60s and ’70s. For someone who doesn’t know what the Fuel Altered cars were, they had blown fuel Funny Car/Top Fuel dragster motors and a very short wheelbase like the old ’23 Ford T-bucket-type body styles. They were very overpowering, ill-handling cars, guardrail-to-guardrail excitement. It wasn’t which one won or lost; it was which one got down the race track. The design and structure of these cars have come along way since those days. But these cars still display a degree of uncontrollability. I think that’s what people like — with the safety of the modern era.”