Picture of the Week: Inspiration

Inspiration @ NHRA Museum

During the Grand National Roadster Show this past weekend, I made my way over to the permanent NHRA Museum just off the Pomona fairgrounds. They continually have rotating exhibits featuring all sorts of  hot rod history. Just opening was the Moon: Six Decades of a Hot Rodding Eye-con exhibit. I thoroughly enjoyed looking at and learning about some great hot rod history that lies behind my Studebaker’s beloved “Moon disc” hubcaps.

I chose this particular picture to share with you because they way it’s meaning affected me. I was nearly brought to tears upon reading the tender remarks written above. The picture isn’t acutally of Dean “Moon” who began the Mooneyes company, but of Fred Larsen, who worked there and was a major innovator of Moon’s racing equipment.

“Fred Larsen may have been the ultimate hot rodder. He used good old fashioned ingenuity and his skills as a machinist to build incredibly fast hot rods purely for the fun and satisfaction of it. In Fred’s two-car garage he and his long-time partner Don Cummins built the streamliner that has been called the most beautiful homebuilt race car ever constructed. He was instrumental in building the first Cobra and was a faithful Moon employee doing machine work, research and development, and engine building from his retirement from the Navy in 1961 until his passing in 2003.”

May those in our automotive community continue to aspire to the same greatness. Thank you Fred. 

If you want to check out the Mooneyes exhibit for yourself, it will be at the NHRA Museum for a limited time – visit their website for more info!