![]() To be honest I didn’t start to appreciate Altered Wheelbase (AWB) and Gasser builds until more recently: I always thought everything looked better slammed. The goal of all this work was to achieve a 45/55 weight distribution, placing as much mass as possible over those spin-happy rear tires. Ream’s Falcon has had the rear axle relocated 11″ forward while the front axle has been shoved another 5.5″ towards the grille. …because it was the next modification that put the “Funny” in Funny Car. The next step is where things really got interesting… First they lifted up the fronts of their cars, usually with a solid axle and parallel leaf springs, in an attempt to pre-load weight transfer for launch. The way Bob explains it, tire technology had not come very far by the mid ’60’s, so racers got creative in their pursuit of traction. Lucky for us, when Bob Ream was a boy he witnessed FX cars tearing up the track at Beeline Dragstrip and it left enough of an impression on him to build one of his own years later. I say brief because this format was really only used in serious competition for a few years, and influential because these were the pre-cursors to Funny Cars. What we have before us is an example of a brief yet influential slice of American drag race history. ![]() The letter A simply refers to the engine size there were also B/FX and C/FX classes. The FX stood for Factory Experimental, a class which allowed manufacturers to fit the largest engine available and alter (sometimes drastically) the body of a production vehicle. Back when the cliche “Win on Sunday, Sell on Monday” still held true, there existed OE-backed drag cars like this one – Bob Ream’s 1964 A/FX Ford Falcon. ![]()
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