This Urban Legend Is The Real Deal

The Wards "Vette is Meaner Than the Jersey Devil!.

- Stephen Justice and Wayne Lederer

URBAN LEGENDS ARE THOSE UNBELIEVABLE STORIES THAT GET CIRCULATED THROUGH A TOWN OR CITY, BIG OR SMALL, AND CONTAIN JUST ENOUGH PLAUSIBILITY TO ENSURE THEIR SURVIVAL IN THE COMMUNITY’S FOLKLORE AND SOCIAL HISTORY. They can be scary, creepy, absurd or even funny, and the longer they endure, the more exaggerated they become. Our Urban Legend began in a most unlikely spot, Mesa, Arizona. There, in a garage next to an old house that bore striking similarities to the one used in the movie Psycho, Ron Ward found the treasure he’d been seeking. The year was 2005, the subject, a one-of-a-kind ’59 Corvette body.

Ward, whose passion for drag racing went back to his youth, always dreamed of building and racing a Funny Car. After years away from the sport, Ward attended a race at Sacramento Raceway in 1993. It was a nostalgia event, and the front-engine Dragsters, Altereds and era-correct Funny Cars rekindled memories of the race cars he so loved in the ’70s and early-’80s.

Why had he stopped going to the drags in 1987? “I did not care for the new style of race cars and all the electronics everyone had started using,” Ward told us. Fortunately, his renewed enthusiasm spurred him to attend Famoso Raceway’s March Meet, the premier nostalgia drag race on the West Coast (and arguably the nation). According to Ward, “In the 1970s, the Funny Cars were my favorites. They had cool names, colorful paint jobs and looked a lot like the cars we drove on the street, but much louder and faster! I graduated from high school in 1979. I lived in Portland, Oregon, and the drag strip in my area would host 32car and 64-car Funny Car events. That’s when I thought to myself, ‘I am going to own one of these someday.’” The hook was set.