If you don’t know the Furlows of Dallas, Texas, you’ve definitely been hanging with the wrong vintage racing crowd. Father John (age 79) and son John Jr. (age 58) have been racing sports cars since 1959 and 1977, respectively, and although Sr. gave up racing a couple of years back, Jr. is still competing with as much enthusiasm as ever. This month’s “Hidden Treasure” has in no way been hidden as the Furlows have been racing it for all to behold and enjoy. What has been hidden is the car’s early racing history and this knowledge gap has been eating away at father and son since they first brought the car home nearly two decades ago.
John Jr. is an Institutional Investment Professional specializing in the management of endowments and trusts, and his interest in automobiles goes back as far as he can recall. He said, “The car hobby choice was hardly mine…my father has been a car nut my whole life. I started attending races with my dad as a baby. He would pull up with me in the passenger seat, hand me to long-time SCCA matriarch Joyce McKinstry, and he would go race. When dad returned, Joyce put me back in the passenger seat and this sequence was repeated for years until I was old enough to get around the pit safely on my own. I attended my first autocross school before I was legal to drive on the street. In 1977, I attended my first SCCA driver’s school in a DSR at the Hallett Motor Racing Circuit, in Oklahoma. I remember it well. The track was brand-new, and we had to remove a bucket full of loose asphalt gravel from under my car after the race. In 1985, my father and I began running vintage races together. That began a string of 30 years of vintage racing with dad.”
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