One day back around Christmas, Drag Racer Don Garlits called a major tire company to ask if it could make him a tricycle-size front tire capable of running the quarter mile in 5.4 sec. at a top speed of, oh, 275 m.p.h. The tire company said it would have to get back to him. In July, maybe.
This is the reason Garlits, also known as Big Daddy, showed up recently at the National Hot Rod Association Gatornationals in Gainesville, Fla., in a new $100,000 dragster with no front tires at all. What he had instead, under an aerodynamic wraparound front end of his own design, was a couple of machine belts barely thick enough to keep the thing from running on its wheel rims.
The cognoscenti gawked. Enclosing the front end and getting it low enough to lick the racetrack just might be the way of the future. But the other drivers said they'd like to see Big Daddy work out the fussy details first. For instance: Would it stay on the ground, and could he steer it?
Answering questions like those--usually by strapping themselves into the cockpit and mashing the accelerator--is what the sport is all about for drag racers. Garlits, 54, is still miffed about a trick transmission he built that blew off half his right foot on just such a run in 1970. But it doesn't discourage him when misguided people tell him some new idea is crazy.
In the stands at Gainesville was a fan, Bob Post, who has lately described Big Daddy in print as a "crafty empiric." (It was empiricism when Garlits, recovering in the hospital from his transmission troubles, concluded that drag racing would be safer, and also faster, if the engine were behind the driver rather than in front--a crazy idea that is now standard.) Post edits Technology and Culture and is also a curator at the Smithsonian Institution. The fine points of dragster design have moved him to write: "I have found no human artifact that pleases me more than an earthshaking, fire-breathing 'digger,' blown and on fuel . . ." What counts in drag racing, he says, is individual ingenuity. The people who have it aren't just hot rodders but a variety of that American hero, the seat-of-the-pants technological innovator.
Garlits and his competitors build and drive a class of dragster known as the top fueler--rail thin, about 20 ft. long, with big, sticky rear wheels and a high wing in back. Behind the driver, the engine throws flame from its exhaust headers and makes a noise that starts like a garbage truck under heavy gunfire and increases rapidly to an apocalyptic roar. "It'll blow your nose for you," one fan declares.
The engines put out 3,000 h.p., as much as a diesel locomotive, except that a locomotive may weigh 300,000 lbs., while a top fueler weighs under 2,000 lbs., driver and decals included. (The decals are everywhere. Mostly they advertise sponsors, but they also serve to cover holes where exploding engine parts have perforated the body metal and to announce matters of personal philosophy. A stylized fish on his windshield declares Garlits a member of RACERS FOR CHRIST.)
All that power puts intense strain on the hardware. (One crew sells souvenirs: "Burnt pistons, $10.") Surviving the succession of runs needed to win a four-day event requires ingenuity on the fly. Driver and crew get as little as 75 min. between races to strip down a devastated dragster and make it run faster than it did before.