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Thus when Connie Kalitta wrinkles one of the main struts supporting his wing in a qualifying run at 3 p.m. Friday, he takes only a moment to study the damage. He props a two-by-eight board under the wing, lifting the dragster a couple of inches off the ground. A crew member goes to work on the wrinkle with a welding torch.
"He ought to have another one of them struts in an outfit like this," says a puzzled fan a few feet from the action. "He's one of the top-by-George drivers. That wing goes, it'll pull him sideways."
Suddenly the dragster sags, except for the propped-up side of the wing; the wrinkled strut has heated up and stretched out. Kalitta jams another two- by-eight between the struts and throws his weight against this lever to fine tune the straightening. After considerable additional work, he steps back to examine the results, which aren't wholly successful. But then, a normal start tends to lift the opposite side of the car anyway. Maybe a crooked wing will counteract that. He raises his hands in a papal blessing and grins. "The torque'll lean it just right," he declares. He runs it again at 6:25. By 6:35, he is back in the pits with new problems to work on.
The top-by-George drivers all have a lot of what one fan calls "walkin'- around sense." They don't much care what the book says or how Detroit would do it. But homemade fixes abound. A visitor to the pits may notice a mechanic sprinkling baby powder on a manifold gasket to keep it from sticking next time the engine is taken apart. The makeshift caps some crews use to keep debris out of the headers may also look familiar: they're soda cans sawed in half. Finally, a newcomer will be appalled to see Garlits flip a lighted match into a pool of alcohol under his new dragster. It's a makeshift Sterno to heat up the oil pan so the engine doesn't have to start cold.
But high tech also gets mixed in. Many drivers now have onboard computers to record fuel pressure and other parameters. A few teams have even started to use wind-tunnel testing. "First thing you know," says Garlits, "a computer'll be telling us what to do."
In fact, Garlits has just such a computer already. He puts on a squeaky little computer voice: "It says, 'What is the observed altitude?' So I have an altimeter, right? I punch in the observed altitude. It says, 'What is the observed temperature in Fahrenheit?' I punch it all in, and the screen goes blank and thinks about it. It pops up then and says, 'The adjusted altitude is 1,800 ft.' " Garlits sets his fuel-air mixture accordingly. The computer knows things he can only guess at.