When Manny Buginga’s red Mustang “Freddy” slammed the wall during SwanFest at Rockingham Dragway, it looked like the weekend was over. Instead, Matthew Herrick of Modern Racing turned a mangled front end into a working race car in less than 14 hours – then drove back to Rockingham to watch it go back down the track.
Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in DI #197, the 30 Under 30 Issue, in November/December 2025.
Herrick, one of Modern Racing’s up-and-coming 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, 30, 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 at first – it was terrible,” he laughs.
Herrick worked outside under lights, grinding through layers of fiberglass and paint to reach bare carbon. “That took four hours just to get everything prepped,” he says. By 7 or 8 a.m., he had the two pieces bonded together with carbon fiber, still curing, flimsy but functional. “It takes 10 hours to harden, but I had to put it on the car,” he says.
As the Mooresville sun rose and the rest of the Modern Racing staff began filing in for Friday morning work, Herrick’s long night was catching up to him. “I’d been up all night long. I was wore out,” he admits. He called a coworker at six. “I said, ‘Hey, I need help now.’ He was like, ‘I’ll be right there.’ That was really cool that the team had my back.”
With reinforcements in place, they tackled the front tree, the structural tubing that supports the nose. Because the ProCharger inlet occupies the center of the front clip, they also fabricated aluminum plates to mount the massive intake correctly.
By 3 p.m. Friday, less than 14 hours after the crash, the car was buttoned up and loaded back into a trailer for the return trip to Rockingham. Despite being awake for more than a day, Herrick drove back to the track that afternoon. “I had been up for well past 24 hours at this point,” he says. “But I had to see it run down the track.”
Eliminations didn’t begin until after 11 p.m., which stretched Herrick’s waking hours close to 40 straight by the time he finally returned home. But the repaired Mustang made multiple runs without issue. “If it blew off the car the first run, I probably wouldn’t have been very surprised,” he admits. “But it held on. So for me, that was kind of a big enough win.”
Herrick notes that the thrash he described is just an extreme example of what he and the team at Modern Racing do on a weekly basis. The Mooresville shop handles chassis work, fabrication, wiring, and more for customers across Pro Mod, Pro Stock, drag radial, and no-time classes. “We like to take a situation that seems impossible and go the next step further,” Herrick says. “It’s really cool, all the support we get from our customers to do these things.”
He’s quick to credit his coworkers as much as himself. “It’s not just me. It is a team effort,” he says, specifically shouting out Kate Seward and Jachob Egelston. “As soon as everyone got there, they were like, ‘Where can I help? What can I do?’ They really saved the day.”
The post Saving The Day: How Matthew Herrick, Modern Racing Got Manny Buginga’s ‘Freddy’ Back on Track first appeared on Drag Illustrated.
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