Matthew Herrick, Modern Racing get Cory Reed and Manny Buginga’ s‘ Freddy’ back on track in 14-hour thrash By Nate Van Wagnen

Herrick, one of Modern Racing’ s up-andcoming lead fabricators, was in the lanes with customer Danny Garbarino’ s nitrous car when Justin Elkes, Modern Racing’ s owner and tuner, got the news that Cory Reed had crashed Buginga’ s car. Reed, an NHRA Pro Stock driver, was piloting“ Freddy” in the outlaw event promoted by Justin Swanstrom.

“ We went over and looked at the car and the front end on it was just mangled,” Herrick recalls.“ There was half of it you could use and half you couldn’ t.”

By the time they located a truck and trailer and loaded the wounded car, it was 2 a. m. The

crew pointed north toward Modern Racing’ s shop in Mooresville, about two-and-a-half hours away.

Inside the company’ s jam-packed fabrication bay, Herrick unloaded“ Freddy” and went to work.“ I already kind of had a plan of what I wanted to do with the nose,” he says. Modern Racing keeps a“ front-end graveyard” of damaged bodywork from various doorslammers – useful for patch jobs like this.

The problem: nearly all of those spares were’ 69 Camaro noses.“ There was no Mustang anything

,” Herrick says.“ We had just the front grill of Erica Enders’ Pro Mod from when she set the NHRA Pro Mod mile-per-hour record and that car caught on fire after. I didn’ t plan a whole lot, I just started cutting.”

He trimmed the destroyed portion of Buginga’ s Mustang nose and began grafting in pieces from Enders’ Camaro,“ just cutting until things kind of fit together.” The process was brutal and messy.“ It really did not fit at first – it was terrible,” he laughs.

Herrick worked outside under lights, grinding

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MATTHEW HERRICK AND KAITLYN WARD