Garlits’ Ride on Wild Side : Miraculous Escape Persuades Big Daddy, 53, to Keep Racing

What goes through a man’s mind when he’s strapped inside the rollcage of a fragile, top-fuel drag-racing machine and it’s rolling out of control through a muddy field at 260 m.p.h.?

It happened to Don (Big Daddy) Garlits last Sunday afternoon, and his thoughts, before he stopped rolling, were: “Maybe the good Lord is trying to tell Big Daddy that a 53-year-old man shouldn’t be doing something like this.”

The accident occured when Garlits, who turned 53 on Jan. 14, was running his newest needle-nosed Swamp Rat dragster at Firebird Raceway, outside Phoenix, in a match race against former world champion Gary Beck of Hemet.

Garlits and his car, No. 30 in a long line of Swamp Rats, had just crossed the finish line after the quickest quarter-mile run of his 30-plus year career when the rear stabilizer wing collapsed.

Eyewitnesses said the car turned to the right, its rear end off the ground, and then veered sharply to the left, cutting across both lanes and into the dirt, where it rolled over three times before stopping in the mud--upside down.

Garlits, acknowledged as the greatest drag racer in history, was rushed to Desert Samaritan Hospital in Phoenix. One of his first visitors was Herb Parks, his long-time chief mechanic.

“How bad is my race car?” was Garlits first question.

“It’s bent up a bit, but it can be fixed,” Parks said.

Garlits sat up and asked what he’d run.

“You better lie down again, old man,” Parks said. “You ran 5.45 and 260.”

Tears filled Garlits’ eyes at the news. The 5.45 seconds in elapsed time is Garlits’ lowest ever, and the sport’s fifth-lowest ever.

“I worked 14 hours a day for 43 days on that car to get it ready for Pomona,” he said. “My wife (Pat) and I are going to have a prayer session tonight and ask the Lord if I ought to keep racing or not. Maybe he’ll give me a sign.”

When Garlits awoke Monday morning, there wasn’t a mark on him from the terrifying accident, and he said he didn’t have a single bruise on his body.

“You know what that means?” he said. “It means the Lord was sending me a message. He was saying, ‘OK, son, fix the car and go to Pomona.’ ”

It was the second serious incident for Garlits in two days. On Saturday, in the new car’s first run at Phoenix, his parachute failed to deploy after a 257-m.p.h. run and he had to go into a deliberate spin at the far end of the strip to get the car stopped.

Sunday’s accident was eerily similar to the one last June 29 in which Shirley Muldowney broke and battered both her legs and ankles at St. Pie, Canada. When her wheel locked up, because of a flailing innertube, Muldowney, too, veered to the left and was carried into an adjacent muddy field after running out of race track.

Don (Snake) Prudhomme, like Garlits a multiyear world drag-racing champion, had just completed a run of his own, and was watching Garlits.

“I was out by the finish line and when I saw him roll over, I started running,” Prudhomme said. “The closer I got, the slower I ran. When I saw him upside down in the mud, all I could think about was Shirley’s accident. I was almost afraid of what I might find . . . and then I saw the old man crawling out of the cage, out into the mud.

“I’ve been around racing for 20 years, and I’ve seen some terrible ones, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like what happened later. Never.”

Garlits, after being checked out at the hospital, returned to the track three hours after the crash to accept his trophy from Charlie Allen, former proprietor of Orange County Raceway who now runs Firebird.

“When I saw Garlits and his crew (Parks and Sonny Messner) walking toward the starting line, I thought I was seeing ghosts,” Prudhomme said. “There was no way he could be walking up there.”

The difference between Garlits’ crash and Muldowney’s was that Garlits rolled across a relatively flat park for all-terrain vehicles before he stopped, whereas Muldowney crashed into the side of a ditch, breaking her car in half.

“The good Lord sent rain on Saturday to make that field soft and muddy instead of hard,” Garlits said. “He was looking out for me.”

Garlits has always carried his religion with him onto the race track.

A crucifix, and the words, “God is Love,” are emblazoned on the hood of all of his black Swamp Rat dragsters.

“It doesn’t make me any quicker, or a better driver, but it makes me a better man,” he said of his lifelong testimony to his Christian beliefs. “And it reminds me of how good the Lord continues to be to me.”

Monday was another 14-hour day in the garage as he and Parks painstakingly took the car apart, piece by piece, and replaced the damaged ones. Some of the more exotic one-of-a-kind pieces they had to make on the spot.

“Fixing the car for Pomona is no problem--it’s getting the proper parts and pieces,” Garlits said. “Chief Auto Parts doesn’t carry this kind of stuff.”

Pomona means the 25th annual Winternationals, opening event of the National Hot Rod Assn. season, which starts today with time trials at the Los Angeles County Fairgrounds. Qualifying will continue Friday and Saturday, and eliminations are set for Sunday.

Garlits came out of three years of semi-retirement last summer and won the U. S. Nationals at Indianapolis for an unprecedented sixth time, then followed that with a win at the Winston World Finals in October at the same Pomona strip being used this week. Driving a 4-year-old car, Garlits had a run of 5.46 seconds and a top speed of 263.92 m.p.h., the best of his life--before Phoenix last Sunday, that is.

“Those were my greatest wins because of my age,” he said. “You’re not supposed to be drag racing when you’re as old as I am. Most guys my age are sitting at home in front of the TV set while I’m getting strapped into a 260 miles-per-hour dragster.”

Buoyed with his successes and new-found financial backing from Art Malone, a former Indy car and drag racing driver, Garlits went back home to Ocala, Fla., to build a new car.

The result was the one he drove at Phoenix last Sunday. It is conventional in appearance, narrower in the front, with small canard wings mounted on the top of the axles.

“It’s cleaner aerodynamically, and it has new parts,” said Garlits. “I’d gone about as far as I could in upgrading my old car. It ran good, and it was strong, but racing technology is moving ahead so fast that a car four years old shouldn’t really be competitive.

“I feel like I’m younger than I was 10 years ago, so I wanted a young car, too. Since I won at Indy and came back and beat all the young guys at Pomona, I feel filled with energy. I’m on a natural high.”

In an era where most of the quality cars and drivers are sponsored by beer, liquor or cigarette companies, Garlits has steadfastly rejected their financial offers.

“Kids look up to Big Daddy,” he said. “I’ve got an image to uphold and because of that, I’ve turned down offers from beer and tobacco companies because I couldn’t let the kids down. If they saw Big Daddy endorsing drinking or smoking, they might try it, and that would be terrible. It would be on my conscience. I’d rather have less money and do what’s right.”

His sponsors at Pomona are Super Shops and In and Out Burgers.

Garlits will be trying to win his fifth Winternationals this week. The race has a special meaning for him, since he won his first NHRA national championship event at Pomona in 1963. It was also at Pomona, in 1971, that he won his first race in a rear-engine car, one that revolutionized drag racing.

Although he lived in Seffner, Fla., until two years ago, when he moved 95 miles upstate to Ocala and built the Big Daddy Don Garlits Museum of Drag Racing, much of the Garlits legend was built in Southern California.

It was at Bakersfield, in the Smokers Meet of 1959, that he first crossed the country “to show those West Coast hot rodders” a thing of two about racing.

“Connie (Kalitta) and I drove out together from Detroit. Connie wasn’t more than 17 when we starting palling around together,” he said. “We hauled a ’57 Chevy hardtop all the way to Bakersfield. When Connie was in Florida, he’d always stay with me and Pat, and I’d stay at his place when I was in Michigan.”

The old friendship went full circle last summer when Garlits and Kalitta met in the final of the U.S. Nationals. When Garlits won his sixth, it prompted the 46-year-old Kalitta to remark:

“I wish he’d retire again, but there’s a certain thrill to racing him. When you run against Donald when he’s running good, you’re running against the best.”

Garlits, who at Great Meadows, N.J., in 1964 became the first drag racer to run 200 m.p.h., was also the first to exceed 250 when he won the 1975 Winston World Finals at Ontario Motor Speedway.

With all his records, his championships, his low ETs, however, he will be remembered most for revolutionizing his sport with an idea he had while recuperating in a Long Beach hospital in 1970.

On March 2 of that year, Garlits faced Richard Tharp in the final of an American Hot Rod Assn. meet at the old Lions Drag Strip in Wilmington.

“I remember it was 5:25 p.m.,” Garlits recalled. “I had looked up at the clock before our last run and I’ll never forget it. I had won the week before in Phoenix and I was confident we’d win easy, but when I saw the light go to green and I let the clutch out, everything went black.”

The transmission of his front engine dragster had exploded in his lap and the car broke in half.

“I don’t think I lost consciousness. It was just that I couldn’t see a thing. I was tumbling down the strip in what was left of my rollcage. I remember being scared it would hit something and I’d be killed. When it finally stopped, I was upside down and blood was pouring from what was left of my right foot. I was afraid my ankle was blown off.”

Mickey Thompson, the Lions track promoter, pulled Garlits from the wreckage and rushed him to the hospital. He lost a portion of his right foot--”Enough to keep me from water skiing on my lake back home”--and was hospitalized six weeks.

“All I could think about while I was lying there was that no one else should suffer like I had,” he said. “Racing was dangerous in those days. There were a lot of clutch explosions because we expected too much of the parts.

“I kept thinking about the rear-engine car Art Chrisman had built. It never caught on, but I kept thinking that was the way we had to go. I had been very fortunate not to get killed, and if I hadn’t perfected the rear-engine car, a lot of other guys might have been killed, too.

“You put one of those Keith Black engines we run today in one of those front-engine slingshots and you could start writing the obituaries. Now, when an engine goes, the driver’s around to tell about it.”