"The Father of Pro Mod"

Charles Carpenter has been named by many as the "Father of the Pro Mod" class, but he never set out to start the popular form of drag racing.

“The ‘Father of the Pro Mod’ really was an accidental thing,” explained Carpenter. “When I started racing the ’55 Chevys, they were still popular in class racing. We ran in many different types of class competition and the car was still an accepted body style (used by other competitors). Then in the mid to late ‘70s more aerodynamic and smaller cars started appearing on the race tracks – the Vega’s, the Monza’s – cars like that. The Vega was a very popular car in its time for racing. There were also Camaros, of course.

“The class – and kind of the beauty of drag racing – allowed us to keep using the ’55 Chevy if we wanted to. While the other cars were getting smaller, I stayed with my big ‘Winnebago’ ’55 Chevy. So by staying with that it separated me from the crowd, so to speak.

“Finally, it got to a point that my car was almost not competitive and then they allowed us nitrous oxide. That was in the early ‘80s and when we started using the nitrous it suddenly caught me up with these smaller, more aerodynamic cars. Then the media picked up on it and they loved it. They liked that a ‘shoebox’ as they say – a big, boxy car – was out here racing with these little sleek, aerodynamic cars and that started the Pro Modified drive.

“The old gasser-type nostalgia thing – what the fans seem to like – the media picked up on it and it built from there. A guy named Dave Bishop was the first person ever to say “This has got to be the world’s fastest ’55 Chevy,’ and then an IHRA announcer, Brett Kepner, started the same thing on the IHRA scene and his wording was ‘The most popular sportsman car ever created.’

“And so, it kind of took off from there. As the Pro Mod thing evolved out of a class called Top Sportsman in 1990, I was there in the late stages of Top Sportsman racing the ’55 Chevy and that’s when it took off and became a professional class. Today, the media goes back and says that I was a founding member of the Pro Mod class because of my sticking with that car. But like I said, it was not intentional, it just happened.”