Larry Jeffers Race Cars has put the finishing touches on Manny Buginga’s all-new 2022 Ford Mustang NHRA Pro Modified entry, and it sports a couple of rather unique touches the veteran chassis builder and small-tire-turned-big-tire racer collaborated on.

Borrowing on a concept first mandated in the NASCAR Cup Series in 1994, Jeffers outfitted the new machine with flaps both on the roof and in the rear spoiler to help prevent the car from taking flight in the event that it would spin around and take flight. Jeffers says he has for more than five years wanted to try the air flap concept on a Pro Modified-type car, and his idea was only further motivated through his friendship with local legend, NASCAR icon, Ken Schrader, who witnessed the incidents that led to and ultimately the creation of the roof flaps in top-level stock car racing. Buginga obliged, and Jeffers got to work.

Jeffers says he got his hands on a number of unused roof flaps originally fabricated for Cup cars, and outfitted the roof of Buginga’s car was one of said flaps, measuring rough 22 inches by 8 inches. Additionally, Jeffers and his team fabricated a one-off rear wing that features two similar flaps across its deck, that allow to pass directly back through and inhibit lift at the rear of the car. The flaps are designed to catch air when traveling into the wind in the opposite-from-intended direction and keep the car on the ground. There are, of course, countless examples throughout drag racing history where such flaps could have prevented worse outcomes than ultimately occurred.

“I’ve wanted to do this for a long time, but nobody wanted to be the first to try it. But when you see a car go backwards and the air lift up the spoiler and flip over, you start to think, ‘this might work.’ If you take what’s already out there and working for them, well why not bring it over to our sport? The NASCAR stuff has two flaps have two in the roof, and one is at an angle…it’s kinda’ like a boomerang. I got ahold of some, and they’re really hard to get. Schrader and I are good friends and he got a bunch of them for me off an old Cup car. The ones in the wing are a great idea, because the air under the spoiler lifts these cars up. If it saves a car from going over on its lid, then we did a good thing.”

Buginga had his own ideas, as well.

Still in recent times but certainly moreso in the years preceding the proliferation of air-launched parachutes, racers would install purpose-made nets over the wheelie bars to help keep the parachutes from becoming entangled in the bars should they fall out and fail to catch air and blossom as intended. Buginga borrowed on that concept but went a step further, requesting Jeffers construct a one-of-kind net that protrudes from and spans the full width of the tail of the car, supported by the bumper, wing struts, and parachute mounts. The net, while much more visually intrusive than the wheelie bar nets, almost assures the parachutes fall out aft of the trailing edge of the bars.

“That was Manny’s idea. I give him a little bit of a hard time about it, but if it does save someone from getting the parachutes tangled up in their wheelie bar or rearend housing, then it’s a good thing,” Jeffers adds.

The Mustang will now head off to be painted, plumbed, wired, and tuned, for what could be a debut as soon as Brainerd or Indianapolis.