Greetings, friends:
I'm Jim Donnelly, senior editor at Hemmings Motor News in Bennington, Vermont, which publishes Hemmings Muscle Machines. I'm posting this at the request of my friend Don Miller, of Mooresville, North Carolina, the co-founder of Penske Racing South with Roger Penske and Rusty Wallace. Before Don joined Penske in the 1970s, he was a UDRA circuit director out of Chicago and raced a killer UDRA Gasser, the Big Noise II, based on a 1963 Chevy II Nova hardtop. The team was Warren & Miller. Don is urgently looking for this car. He says:
"I raced this car in the Midwest in the mid-to-late 1960s, and lost track of it after I sold it in 1969. The engine eventually went to Dickie Harrell, who had it in his match-race car when he was killed in Canada in 1971. After that, I believe that Harry Kalwei bought the engine.
"When I sold it, the car had a Dana 60 rear axle assembly from a Hemi Barracuda. The rear suspension was all hand fabricated by Don Warren and me, and it is an exact 31-inch square tube duplicate of the Ford Thunderbolts from the mid-60s.
"The last known sighting of the car was by Steve Klosterhof at a nostalgia drag race at Mid-America Raceway in Wentzville, Missouri in either 1999 or 2000."
A website, http://www.findbignoise.com, has been created for any information on BN II's current whereabouts. There's a bounty for finding the car, including tix to your favorite NHRA Full Throttle event and a copy of Don's memoirs, "Miller's Time," co-authored by yours truly.
You can also e-mail me, the addy is jdonnelly@hemmings.com. Thanks, everyone.