The Willys came along about the same time that Bunky got out of bootlegging. “We had to do something,” Tony says. The pair were in Lindale, another “suburb” of the area, and a fellow by the name of Frank Groves ran a service station there, and he had started on this Willys but ran out of money. Groves bought it from a state patrol instructor in Columbus, Georgia, as a running car, and he paid $300 for it, not a bad price even way back then. Groves had everything for the future gasser but the running gear, and he and Bunky made a deal -- if Mr. Bobo provided the running gear, Mr. Groves would provide the car. So a deal was struck. Bunky went up to Mr. Norm’s Grand Spaulding Dodge dealership in Chicago and bought a complete ’65 Coronet Super Stocker. He and Tony took the aluminum-headed hemi, the three-speed and the 8-and-3/4 rear out of it and bolted it all into the Willys and went racing, running in the A/Gas class.
Bunky lost the Coronet itself in a crap game to Randy Payne of Rome, Tony says. Payne’s name is a familiar one to those who follow southern Super Stock racing. He is a national and divisional Super Stock star who was once factory-backed, and races GT Super Stockers to this day. An aside here -- Payne now has a Platt and Payne new Mustang, a project/specialty high-performance car. Yes, the “Platt” is legendary Super Stock and Funny Car pioneer Hubert Platt, and the Mustang company they’re associated with now are producing 100 Platt and Payne Mustangs, twin-turbo-powered beasts with both men’s names engraved in the seats. They claim the car will run 160 mph down the interstate.
“Anyway,” Tony says, “Randy won the car with a pair of fours. He put a wedge in the car, and I believe the car won a national event later on, with a guy named William Parris driving, with a 426 wedge engine.”
Groves and Bunky ran the Willys for a little while as the team of Bobo and Groves and the “Hemi Hurricane,” the car’s only name. Bunky won the A/Gas class at the NASCAR Winternationals in Daytona in 1965 when they were teamed up. Bunky won the class but blew the motor up on the other end in the process and wasn’t able to come up for Competition Eliminator runoffs. After 1965, the Bobos and Groves split up, and Bunky and Tony got the car.
They built another engine for it -- two, actually, a gas engine and a fuel engine because the Funny Cars had just started to be popular then, and suddenly it was all run-whatcha-brung match racing. The Bobos couldn’t make any money in A/Gas, so they started match-racing. They won a good many of those races against some big names in similar cars. Tony says there was a three-track circuit around Georgia, Red’s Drag Strip/Southeastern, forever referred to by locals as just “Dallas,” plus Timms’s Paradise Drag Strip and Shirl Greer’s track in Ringgold. They had a deal where you ran for points for all three tracks and got paid at the end of the three-meet series. Bunky won the biggest part of those “until everybody started catching up,” Tony says.
They returned to Daytona and the NASCAR Winternationals in 1967 and, with a .030-over gas motor with standard pistons (“We were nothing but poor boys,” Tony says), Bunky won A/Gas plus Competition Eliminator. He beat an A/Dragster, piloted by someone whose name both Bobos can’t recall. (Dale’s note --- Could it have been Lewis Carden of Birmingham?)
“We didn’t make many more runs after that. It was a poor man’s game back then. Daddy bought a ’67 Logghe Brothers chassis and got a Barracuda body out of California, and we took all the running gear out of the Willys and put it in the Funny Car and raced it for two years. We went to Indianapolis with it (the NHRA U.S. Nationals) and got outrun in a close race against Joe Lunati in his ’69 Camaro Funny Car,” Tony says.
The Bobos then parked the Willys by the side of their home garage and let it sit. “Anybody could have come by and bought the car for $300, just so we could get some gas money to run. Nobody ever did say anything, and so daddy bought an old farm and made it into a salvage yard and quit racing. We pulled the old car into the barn and left it there for 30 years,” Tony says. Only recently did they begin to talk about resuscitating the “Hemi Hurricane.” They pulled it out about three years ago. “It was awful. It had 30 pounds of goat feed sitting on the left front fender. The car had a fiberglass front end, doors and deck lid, but it was all cracked and eaten up from the abuse the hemi engine gave it, and had to be re-done. The original Willys body, frame and front suspension were in good shape.
