“I had been at several meetings at Coke with about 10 years previously, and one of the guys I had met had climbed the corporate ladder and was about four rungs above John's boss, so I played on that fact for a second meeting to flesh out the marketing plan for a formal presentation. “Thirty minutes later, we went to meet John (whose last name escapes me), the brand-new Mello Yello brand manager, who liked my message but had never heard of a nitro Funny Car or NHRA for that matter. Murphy was not thrilled with the unexpected call but gave Oglesby this requested three minutes to convince him otherwise. “As this was 50 miles from my house, I decided that a walk-in cold call was the best plan, so that's what I did.” “Martin Murphy was an account executive at McDonald & Little, at the time the hottest ad agency in the Southeast, and all of the Coca-Cola advertising was handled out of New York, so this obviously was a brand-new and completely different deal. “The father of a kid who worked for me came by one day and told me he had talked to guy while waiting on the dentist who told him Coke was about to introduce a new soft drink, and he handed me a business card,” he remembered. Then a chance conversation with one of young crewmember forever changed his life. “I was able to put together several small/regional deals to match race my Quarterhorse car but never had the national sponsorship needed to run national events,” he told me. Oglesby, who was a part of Nicholson’s Mercury teams in the 1960s, earned enough friends in Dearborn, Mich., to end up with his own Ford deal to field a Mustang Funny Car dubbed Quarterhorse. Oglesby, whose roots in the class go back to the very beginning and his association with pioneers like Don Nicholson, Don Gay, and Arnie Beswick, flew the Mello Yello colors on his Mustang Funny Car for two seasons - 19 - at national events and match races alike to help introduce the then-new soft drink to the world. I did an interview with Oglesby on the subject several years ago, right after Mello Yello replaced Full Throttle as the series sponsor, but for some reason I never published the story, and in the wake of the Worsham Indy effort, this seems like a good time for it to resurface. The last time fans saw a Mello Yello-branded flopper at a national event was 1979, when Frank Oglesby was sponsored by the brand on his Mustang entry. Reigning world champ Del Worsham flew the MY colors on his DHL Toyota and took the car all the way to the final before falling to Matt Hagan. Nationals got to witness a special moment that hasn’t been seen on the dragstrip for almost 30 years: a Funny Car flying the colors of Mello Yello soft drink, the title sponsor of NHRA’s biggest and richest series. Fans at the recent Chevrolet Performance U.S.
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