In Florida: Old-Fashioned Ingenuity on Wheels

By RICHARD CONNIFF

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.

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.

Still, that Sunday at the Gatornationals, the contest comes down to wrenches and walkin'-around sense. Garlits is paired in the finals against Dick LaHaie, an independent driver from Michigan whose crew chief is his 25- year-old daughter Kim. The LaHaies don't have a sponsor; they make their living and cover their considerable expenses from prize money. They are of necessity consistent, a word intoned with a certain wonder in a sport where less conservative drivers push their engines to the raggedy edge and still lose. Lately the LaHaies have been working on a new clutch; the dragster has done wheel stands at the starting line, it has gone out of control and hit a wall, and it has shaken so badly that LaHaie's head got volleyed back and forth against the roll bars. But they've managed to calm it down without losing horsepower.

In the pits before the finals, both sides patch the routine destruction of the day's preliminary rounds. LaHaie, working underneath his engine, smokes and chews gum at the same time. Garlits' crew chief fiddles with his fuel-air mixture right up to the starting line, making it richer, then a little richer still, then a shade leaner.

The starting light flashes, and they roar away. About midway, the machine belts fly off Garlits' tricycle wheels and the aerodynamic front end rips apart. LaHaie's supercharger simultaneously explodes. They cross the finish six-hundredths of a second apart.

Afterward, a reporter asks Garlits' crew chief why he kept fiddling with the fuel-air mixture. Didn't the computer tell him how to set it? "Oh," he says, "we left the computer home."

Big Daddy wins it anyway.