Don Garlits fueled an explosion in drag racing design

Just before 5:30 p.m. on March 8, 1970, Don Garlits edged his top-fuel dragster to the starting line at the old Lions Drag Strip in Wilmington, the car’s 2,000-horsepower engine belching directly in front of the drag-racing legend from Florida everyone called “Big Daddy.”

When the green light flashed and Garlits stepped on the throttle pedal with his right foot, the dragster’s transmission, which sat between Garlits’ legs, exploded from the enormous power unleashed from the engine. The blast ripped the car in two, instantly severed half of Garlits’ right foot and broke his left foot in five places.

In the six weeks he spent recovering at a Long Beach hospital, Garlits vowed to build a dragster that would put the engine, and its ever-present threat of calamity, behind him, and he began sketching such a car in his hospital bed.

The result was a rear-engine vehicle — No. 14 in his series of “Swamp Rat” dragsters, as Garlits named them — that Garlits introduced a year later. There previously had been a few, mostly unsuccessful efforts at rear-engine cars, but Garlits’ model revolutionized top-fuel drag racing.

As the National Hot Rod Assn.’s premier Full Throttle Series opens its drag-racing season Thursday through Sunday with the Winternationals in Pomona, it marks the 40th anniversary of Garlits’ new car and how it was immediately validated as he drove Swamp Rat 14 to victory in the 1971 Winternationals.

The new design “was a gigantic change in the sport [because it] was just a much safer and faster race car,” said Kenny Bernstein, a two-time NHRA top-fuel champion and now team owner. “The rest of us owe Don a great debt of gratitude.”

Indeed, within a year of Garlits’ 1971 victory at the Winternationals, most of his rivals had switched to rear-engine dragsters as well, not only for safety reasons, but because Garlits’ car was faster than theirs. That was especially true after Garlits added a rear wing above the engine that added speed.

“They wouldn’t have changed if it wasn’t faster,” Garlits, 79, recalled in an interview from his home in Ocala, Fla.

“When I built it, it was for safety,” he said. “I was just hoping I’d have a competitive car and could still race for a couple of more years. I never dreamed the car would be so much faster. It was unbelievable.”

Having the engine closer to the rear wheels improved the traction and weight distribution of top-fuel dragsters with their long, thin bodies, leading to higher speeds.

“The whole design was just better,” he said.

Garlits’ rear-engine concept is still used in the NHRA even though the technological guts of top-fuel dragsters, and their all-important giant rear tires, have marched ahead over the decades. The cars have 8,000-horsepower engines and routinely reach speeds topping 300 mph.

When he arrived in Pomona with his rear-engine car in 1971, Garlits was 39 and among drag racing’s top drivers and innovators. He had been the first driver to hit 200 mph (in 1964) on the quarter-mile drag strips and the first to reach 240 mph (in 1968).

But the rear-engine design extended his career by another two decades and brought him his three NHRA top-fuel championships, in 1975, 1985 and 1986. He also was the first to reach 250 mph (1975) and 270 mph (1986). A later version of his rear-engine Swamp Rat dragster sits in the Smithsonian Institution.

One might ask why NHRA funny cars, which also reach speeds of 300 mph, still have the engine in front of the driver. The answer, Bernstein said, is that funny cars are more rigid and substantially shorter in length than the 25-foot-long top-fuel dragsters, so moving the engine to the rear wheels of a funny car wouldn’t work as well.

Garlits said that in looking back at the rear-engine design for top-fuel dragsters, his biggest satisfaction was the car’s safety record. There have been two fatalities in the NHRA’s premier top-fuel ranks since 1971, the last being Darrell Russell in 2004, who died of injuries suffered when a rear tire exploded.

“No one will ever know how many lives were saved, possibly even my own” with the rear-engine car, Garlits said, “and look how much faster they go.”

james.peltz@latimes.com