HAVE A WHEELIE GOOD DAY
Swamp Rat I at Bakersfield in 1959 Steve Gibbs Photo
Through 1959 Don toured with the car basically unchanged from when he set the records in November 1957 and attended races from one coast to the other. Here the Don's Speed Shop Special pictured behind Isky's shop with Setto Postoian's car behind. This was the week before the first Smokers March Meet at Bakersfield. This was also the last week that the motor cover would fit on the car. After the March Meet where Don wasn't able to equal the performance of the supercharged Nitro burners he installed a blower and was loaded for Bear at Kingdon Dragstrip, where he cleaned up on the field.
Here are two very rare shots of Don at Kindon, CA in 1959.
On his way back to Florida from California, Garlits stopped off at Chandler AFB and had some fun with the Arizona boys and a few Californians. Here you can see that Don simply slipped a blower under his eight-carburetor set-up. That worked okay and Don was one of the last to stick with them, but they were not as precise in fuel metering as the more commonly used Hilborn fuel injection. Also, the numerous fuel delivery and overflow return lines that were necessary with the Stromberg carburetors was daunting to say the least. Dave Beck Photo
The Five Second Club.
Scott Kalitta
Scott Kalitta was an American drag racer who competed in the Top Fuel and Funny Car classes in the National Hot Rod Association. He died in June of 2008 after his car’s engine set on fire and exploded while traveling at 300MPH. The fire damaged the vehicle’s safety parachutes which were unable to prevent Kalitta from hitting a wall.
The NHRA made this statement regarding Kalitta’s death: "Scott shared the same passion for drag racing as his legendary father, Connie. He also shared the same desire to win, becoming a two-time series world champion. He left the sport for a very long period of time, to devote more time to his family, only to be driven to return to the drag strip to regain his championship form."
The Definition of Acceleration
Read this thru slowly and try to comprehend the amount of force produced in just under 4 seconds! There are no rockets or airplanes built by any government in the world that can accelerate from a standing start as fast as a Top Fuel Dragster or Funny Car!
DEFINITION OF ACCELERATION
One top fuel dragster 500 cubic-inch Hemi engine makes more horsepower than the first 4 rows of stock cars at the Daytona 500.
It takes just 15/100ths of a second for all 6,000+ horsepower of an NHRA Top Fuel dragster engine to reach the rear wheels.
Under full throttle, a dragster engine consumes 1-1/2 gallons of nitro methane per second; a fully-loaded 747 consumes jet fuel at the same rate with 25% less energy being produced.
A stock, Dodge Hemi, V8 engine cannot produce enough power to drive the dragster's supercharger.
With 3,000 CFM of air being rammed in by the supercharger on overdrive, the fuel mixture is compressed into a near-solid form before ignition.
Cylinders run on the verge of hydraulic lock at full throttle.
At the stoichiometric (stoichiometry: methodology and technology by which quantities of reactants and products in chemical reactions are determined) 1.7:1 air/fuel mixture of nitro methane, the flame front temperature measures 7,050 deg. F.
Nitro methane burns yellow... The spectacular white flame seen above the stacks at night is raw burning hydrogen, dissociated from atmospheric water vapor by the searing exhaust gases.
Dual magnetos supply 44 amps to each spark plug. This is the output of an arc welder in each cylinder.
Spark plug electrodes are totally consumed during a pass. After halfway, the engine is dieseling from compression, plus the glow of exhaust valves at 1,400 deg F. The engine can only be shut down by cutting the fuel flow.
If spark momentarily fails early in the run, unburned nitro builds up in the affected cylinders and then explodes with sufficient force to blow cylinder heads off the block in pieces or split the block in half.
In order to exceed 300 mph in 4.5 seconds, dragsters must accelerate an average of over 4G's. In order to reach 200 mph (well before half-track), the launch acceleration approaches 8G's.
Dragsters reach over 300 miles per hour before you have completed reading this sentence.
Top fuel engines turn approximately 540 revolutions from light to light! Including the burnout, the engine must only survive 900 revolutions under load.
The redline is actually quite high at 9,500 rpm.
Assuming all the equipment is paid for, the crew worked for free, and for once NOTHING BLOWS UP, each run costs an estimate $1,000.00 per second.
The current top fuel dragster elapsed time record is 4.428 seconds for the quarter mile (11/12/06, Tony Schumacher, at Pomona, CA). The top speed record is 336.15 mph as measured over the last 66' of the run
Putting all of this into perspective:
You are driving the average $140,000 Lingenfelter, 'twin-turbo' powered, Corvette Z06. Over a mile up the road, a top fuel dragster is staged and ready to launch down a quarter mile strip as you pass. You have the advantage of a flying start. You run the 'Vette hard up through the gears and blast across the starting line and pass the dragster at an honest 200 mph. The 'tree' goes green for both of you at that moment.
The dragster launches and starts after you. You keep your foot down hard, but you hear an incredibly brutal whine that sears your eardrums and within 3 seconds, the dragster catches and passes you. He beats you to the finish line, a quarter mile away from where you just passed him.
Think about it, from a standing start, the dragster had spotted you 200 mph and not only caught, but nearly blasted you off the road when he passed you within a mere 1,320 foot long race course.
...... and that my friend, is ACCELERATION!
The story of Swamp Rat 17: Don Garlits' most misunderstood Top Fueler (part 1)
Don Garlits’ Swamp Rat 17, the Wynn’s Liner, had a very short life in 1973 and is roundly considered to be among the few disappointments of the more than 40 Swamp Rats he campaigned. Here's the story behind this most misunderstood car.
09 Apr 2021 Phil Burgess, NHRA National Dragster Editor
Earlier this year, I wrote a column about racecar experiments that didn’t come to fruition and cited, chief among them, Don Garlits’ Swamp Rat 17, the Wynn’s Liner, which had a very short and disappointingly unsuccessful life in 1973.
I think the reason that car always leaps to the top of my “Well, that sure didn’t work” list is because it was a rare dead end for “Big Daddy,” one of the sport’s greatest innovators and chance takers. Although there are only 38 official Swamp Rats, there were some A and B versions, and the actual number well exceeds 40, according to “Big.” So, he had a pretty great batting average, yet strikeouts are going to happen, but better to go down swinging, right? Or, as hockey great Wayne Gretzky once said, “You miss 100% of the shots that you don’t take.”
[Coming later in this column: Garlits rates his five favorite Swamp Rats and five least favorite. Stay tuned for that.]
Anyway, after heaping criticism upon the car back in February, I thought it only fair to allow The Man Himself to provide the context that defines this car’s place in the sport’s history. Not sure if he’d want to discuss one of his missteps, I reached out to the sport’s most storied driver and received an enthusiastic “I’D LOVE TO!” response to my query and away we went.
Before we get to that discussion, let me provide a little more context. The other thing that always intrigued me about Garlits’ decision to build Swamp Rat 17 was that he had blown away the sport with Swamp Rat 14 (the first rear-engined winner, 1971 Winternationals) and its evolutionary successor, Swamp Rat 16, which won the 1972 Gatornationals. (Swamp Rat 15 was a front-engined car built just in case SR14 was a flop; it never ran.) After all this success, why take this detour, especially when no one else was experimenting with aerodynamics?
Turns out that while the ‘Liner didn’t make its debut until mid-1973, the idea was conceived in mid-1971, not long after Garlits had proven that the rear-engined design worked. It was at that point that Garlits’ old buddy, Jocko Johnson, whose similarly shaped entry had made huge waves in 1959 with “Jazzy” Jim Nelson at the wheel, suggested that maybe it was time to resurrect his design and have “Big Daddy” put it on one of his chassis.
“I always liked streamlining, and Jocko had never given up on the idea, but he needed a success rear-engined car to try it again,” Garlits explained.
The only rub was that Johnson needed a shorter car, a 180-inch wheelbase chassis, to fit under the body, Swamp Rat 14 and 16 were 215 inches.
I've never seen any detailed shots of the car without the body, but did stumble across this image, a 1/16th scale version that Johnson had built to show Garlits his idea. Very cool!
Johnson, a laid-back Californian, began work on the body mold in 1971 but didn’t finish it until 1972, then came to Garlits' Seffner, Fla., base to build the body, which would not be completed and the car not race-ready until Garlits was already on Swamp Rat 19 in mid-1973.
The slow pace for the Liner’s body construction was frustrating for Garlits, who was well-known for being able to build a complete car in just a few days, and in his great book, Don Garlits and His Cars, “Big” pulled no punches about the reason for the delay.
"Jocko by now was growing his 'weed' next door and stayed 'high' most of the time! On several occasions, I went next door, pulled up the plants, and burned them. Jocko just planted more and stayed high."
In anticipation of the Wynn’s Liner’s someday completion, Garlits built Swamp Rat 18, the car dubbed “Shorty,” with a 180-inch wheelbase so he could get a feel for the three-foot-shorter configuration and ran it at several AHRA events in 1972 but never felt comfortable in the car, but he felt sure that the Liner’s body would give the car stability and faster speed, just as adding the rear wing to Swamp Rat 14 had improved top-end speeds.
“18 just wanted to do funny things going down the course," he remembered. “You had to be really careful with it. I had to really slow down the steering to even make it work at all.”
The ‘Liner was finally ready early in 1973, and Garlits towed it and “Shorty” out to California to run the AHRA Grand American event at Orange County Int’l Raceway. Veteran Funny Car racer Butch Maas, finally recovered from serious burns he had suffered in the Hawaiian Funny Car the year before, was itching to drive the car, so Garlits let him and set about getting “Shorty” also qualified for the race.
There had been so much hype built about the ‘Liner, which had been featured on the cover of Car Craft magazine back in July 1972 with the cover blurb “Garlits Aims for 275 mph.” The feature had been shot and originally the blurb had targeted 250 mph (Garlits has a copy of the original mockup with 250 on it in the museum display, and kindly shot a photo for me), but the editors decided to raise more eyebrows. Although the official national record at the time was 234.37 (set by Gaines Markley in April in Seattle), Garlits had run 243.90 mph in the final round of the Gatornationals but didn't get the chance to back it up, so maybe 250 wasn't far enough "out there" for the publication.
“By the time we got the car read, [the editors] told me that 250 wasn’t enough, that they wanted to put 275 on it,” Garlits recalled. “We thought the car might go 255 or 260, but I agreed with them that 275 sounded better and more exciting.” [For the record, we wouldn’t see 275 for another 15 years, when Darrell Gwynn ran 278 in Dallas in late 1986.]
Just as had been the case when he debuted the famous rear-engined Swamp Rat 14 in 1971, Garlits’ fellow racers scoffed at Garlits’ latest project, mostly, he thinks, because if it had been successful it would have created a major sea change in the class just as Swamp Rat 14 had done. That wasn’t to be.
Maas made several attempts in the car but was spooked by its handling and ran a best speed of 180 mph. You can see by the photo here that the car didn’t yet have the bubble canopy on it, and Garlits is not sure it ever did in the car’s short lifespan (although it's visible in the Car Craft cover, Garlits says they didn't have a working cockpit hinge yet). You can also see "Big" in the background holding the bleach bottle. Although Maas couldn’t qualify the ‘Liner, Garlits was able to put "Shorty” into the show but lost in round one to Herm Petersen. “The whole trip was a disaster,” Garlits summed up in his book.
Still determined to make it work, Garlits put Don Cook in the car for the IHRA event at Lakeland Dragway in Florida. Cook had driven the short-wheelbase, rear-engined Piranha in late 1966, so Garlits figured he could get the job done, but he also was forced to lift a half-track on several passes. "They both said it was doing something funny, so I got in the car myself for a ride,” said Garlits.
“It took off kinda slow because it was so heavy, but then it was cruising along pretty well and making a decent run when all of the sudden the motor revved up. I quickly lifted and then felt a bump, like I had hit a bump in the track or something.
“We brought it back to the pit and tore it apart, but there was nothing broken in the driveline, and that’s when we figured out that the whole car had gone airborne and when lifted it came back down, and that was the bump I felt.
“Jocko thought I had sabotaged him, so he wouldn’t get any credit for the design, which is pretty ridiculous. He went to his grave never believing that the car was doing the things I said it did.”
Garlits also had concerns about the amount of nitro fumes being trapped under the body and the fact that the car was not easy to get out of. “I knew that someday it would catch fire, and that would be a helluva deal for the driver, so I just gave up on the project,” he said.
Garlits sold the car to rocket-car racers Russell Mendez and Ramon Alvarez, who envisioned turning it into a hydrogen peroxide-powered rocket car, but Mendez was killed in an exhibition pass in their Free Spirit rocket dragster at the 1975 Gatornationals, and Alvarez, a plumber by trade (who actually had done the plumbing for Garlits' house) needed cash and sold it back to "Big." Given the 'Liners inherent instability at less than 200 mph, one can only imagine what it would have done at rocket-car speed. (“It would probably have flown right up into the sky,” Garlits marveled.)
So, I asked Garlits the million-dollar question: "Is he glad he built the car, or was it just a waste of time and money?"
“It was definitely a waste of time and money, but I’m glad we did it. I enjoyed all of the projects I did, even the ones that didn’t work out, like the Sidewinder and the turbine [-powered] car. Everyone raved about the turbine engines and how powerful they could be, and that car didn't work out but it was fun to figure it out. I always loved experimenting. That’s what made it so fun. When you’re involved with projects like those, your mind is going 24x7, trying to think of all of the scenarios to make it work.
“Plus if I hadn’t gotten together with Jocko, I wouldn’t have his original streamliner in my museum or the body from the Mooneyham-Ferguson-Jackson-Faust car. That all came together because of my relationship with Jocko."
Drag Racers of the 1970's
Richard Tharp, Jim Nicoll , Bob Murray , Don Garlits , Chris Karamesines, John Wiebe , Don Cook , Jimmy King all not necessarily standing in that order. Photo by Jim Kelly
The drag race at the end of the 1973 film "American Graffiti".