The beautiful Greer Black & Prudhomme A/FD was the most successful dragster of its era and probably of all time! GMP has given us this car again, and this time in red-orange, just as it rolled off the trailer for the first time on June 17, 1962 at the Pomona Raceway on the L.A. County Fairgrounds in Pomona, California. The GB&P race car started life when chassis builder Kent Fuller cut a deal with racer Rod Stuckey to build two fuel dragster chassis…..one for himself and one for Stuckey…. if Stuckey would pay for the steel tubing for both. Once the deal was set, Fuller built the two 112” chassis with Stuckey’s becoming the Cash Auto Parts car and Fuller’s becoming the Zeuschel-Prudhomme-Fuller car. Stuckey ended up selling his car to Louie Senter of Ansen Automotive to settle a debt but still piloted it to Top Eliminator at the ’62 AHRA Winternationals at Fontana (CA) Drag City. And shortly thereafter, the Z-P-F car won Top Eliminator at the ‘62 March Smokers’ Meet at Bakersfield with Prudhomme aboard.

When Louie Senter’s wife found out he now owned Stuckey’s car, she made him sell it. It ended-up being sold to Tom Greer a successful machinist and big-time boat racer. He persuaded Keith Black, who’d established a successful business building racing engines for boats, to build him a blown fuel 392” Chrysler Hemi for his new car. He also commissioned Wayne Ewing, who shared a shop with Fuller and primarily made aluminum bodies for USAC cars, to build a swoopy full-body for the car. By now, the mercurial Dave Zeuschel had left the Z-P-F team and had taken his engine with him. This left Prudhomme looking for a ride and, with Fuller’s help, Prudhomme signed on to the Greer & Black team as “head shoe”. When the car first debuted at Pomona, it featured a red-orange Prudhomme paint job with black lettering, and utilized a polished Hilborn four-port scoop. It won Top Eliminator of the meet with an 8.73 sec. e.t. / 179.63 m.p.h. pass. Shortly thereafter, the car was repainted a bright yellow so that it would photograph better and Ewing completed the famous scoop that was patterned after the front of a Ferrari F-1 car. Over the next two years the car was virtually unstoppable winning 95+% of its races and trailering the likes of Don Garlits, Chris Karamesines and “Sneaky Pete” Robinson as well as most of the local Southern California teams.

As time passed, the car was lengthened to 136” and painted a metalflake tangerine. The signature scoop was replaced with a Hilborn four-hole “Bug Catcher” injector and a small airfoil was added to the front axle to compensate for the ever-increasing horsepower.

The crew at GMP has, once again, really done a magnificent job putting this car together. The body is formed aluminum, just like the actual car, with lots of gorgeous compound curves. Both the top section of the nose and the portion of the body covering the driver’s cockpit are removable to see the beautiful detail of the fuel tank and lines and the place Prudhomme worked his magic during the 7-second runs. The body is low in the front and swoops up to enclose the driver and provide a shroud for the drag chute. The chute pack is nylon and looks very real. The release cable snakes from the cockpit around to the release pin on the chute. Two scoops aft of the roll bar make sure the canopy is inflated. The Tony Nancy upholstery is nicely replicated and the cockpit also features Stuckey’s “butterfly” steering wheel that Prudhomme liked so much (the same can’t be said for Fuller!). The car rides on M+H Racemaster Dragster slicks mounted on beautifully polished American Torque Thrust five-spoke mags in the rear and Borrani-mounted motorcycle tires in the front. The photo-etched spokes look drop-dead perfect! The Hemi Chrysler looks oh so real! Small details like the oil pressure gauge by the mag and the linkage on the injector have been quite realistically created. There’s even a miniscule sticker on the chrome valve cover that was 3.5” x 1” on the real car. With a magnifying glass you can read: “Keith Black Racing Engines South Gate, Calif.”……. amazing!

The fit and finish of this car is excellent, particularly for stamped aluminum parts, and I think it’s neat they chose to do the body in formed aluminum instead of the traditional diecast because it makes the car just a little more original. The glossy red-orange paint duplicates the original car perfectly. Once again, the guys at GMP have created a perfect representation of this beautiful dragster that was so historically important and kick-started the drag racing careers of both Keith Black and Don Prudhomme!

If you’ve got the yellow GB&P car, don’t say “I have one, what do I need another for?” This car is probably the single most revered car in drag racing! To have it in the original form just expands the experience! What more can I say, this is definitely a “gotta have” kind of car!