Not unlike those swashbuckling “Top Gun” pilots Mav and Goose, Joel Ponty was feeling the “need for speed.”
The Madison, Wis., military vehicle lover wasn’t looking to break the sound barrier or do any high-speed tower buzzing, but he was hoping for something more exhilarating than the glacial pace he was used to in his favorite military rigs. He was dreaming of something painted olive drab that could both turn heads and keep up on the highway — and then some.
“My dad [Mike Ponty] and I restored three other World War II Jeeps: a ’42 Ford Script jeep, and that was from the ground up, every nut and bolt on it. That took us a quite a while,” says Ponty. “We did a ’43 Ford GPW, in the OD green, for my uncle’s 100th Infantry Division; then we did a ’44 GPW in the Desert Rat version — the 8th Army Desert Rats. We needed another project, and Dad said, ‘Well, what do you have in mind?’ And I had seen something similar on Facebook,
