by David Finlay (17 Mar 03)

To celebrate its fiftieth anniversary a couple of years ago, the National Hot Rod Association created a list of the top 50 drag racers of all time. There was never much doubt that the name at the top of that list would be that of Don Garlits, known throughout the sport as Big Daddy.

Garlits himself is physically not all that big, but his influence on the sport has been immense. He began racing in the 1950s, at a time when most of the really quick racers came from California. Thousands of miles away in Florida, Garlits developed his driving and car-building skills to the point where he could beat the best of them.

As the performance of nitromethane-fuelled dragsters became ever more alarming - times over the standing quarter mile dropped from ten seconds to nine, eight, seven, and terminal speeds climbed to 150mph, then 200, then 250 - Garlits kept on winning, not least because his cars (invariably named Swamp Rat after a dismissive nickname which he adopted with some pride) were the test beds for ideas which seemed crazy when they were first suggested but later became standard thinking once Garlits had shown they worked.

The most obvious of these came in 1970. Nearly all dragsters up till then had been front-engined, though for purposes of weight distribution the engines were mounted very close to the rear wheels. This did not leave much room for the driver, who would sit over the axle. It was a risky layout. Garlits had already become fed up with engines blowing up and setting fire to him, and in March 1970 he decided to adopt a different design when a clutch exploded and blew his car to bits, one of which had until recently been part of his right foot.

The next car he built was rear-engined, though some dragster folk referred to it as a "front-driver". It was the laughing stock of the paddock when it first appeared, but in February 1971 it won its first NHRA event, and every important Top Fuel dragster since then has followed the same basic design.

From then on Garlits continued to rack up an astonishing number of race and championship victories, even though his career was punctuated by several retirements and comebacks. His most recent comeback is happening right now. Through a deal with Summit Racing Equipment, he is taking part in four NHRA events this year, the first of which was the Mac Tools Gatornationals event at Gainesville in Florida this past weekend.

Gainesville is a historic track. It was here, in 1992, that Kenny Bernstein made history by becoming the first racer ever to cross the finish line at over 300mph. Nowadays you're unlikely to qualify as one of the sixteen drivers to take part in the main competition if you can't beat that, and Garlits certainly showed that he still knows how to reach awesome speeds. On his best qualifying run he wound Swamp Rat 34 up to 323.04mph, the fourth best number of the weekend.

Unfortunately, top speed isn't what drag racing is all about. So, although it took Garlits just 4.761s to cover the standing quarter on that run, he missed the qualifying cut by seven thousands of a second. But the Gainesville crowd loved seeing the legend in action, and if Garlits can actually raise his game in any of his remaining three events and make it into the elimination rounds, it will be of the top drag racing stories of the year.

Of course, he is operating at a major disadvantage, since he is competing against people who are doing the whole championship and have made hundreds of runs since he last sat in a dragster. What doesn't appear to be making any real difference is that he is 71 years old. Despite all the hype about young drivers, the most significant issue about age in motorsport is whether you still want to do it when your contemporaries are relaxing in front of the TV.

Not that Garlits is the oldest driver in the sport. Chris Karamesines, a Garlits rival from decades back, was also competing at Gainesville, and he's 72. He didn't qualify either, but that was because his car was behaving badly, and "The Greek" spent most of one run driving a 6000bhp machine sideways and trying to prevent it from hitting the wall. Gulp.

So drag racing is a sport for old men, then? Hardly. Gainesville also marked the Top Fuel debut of Josh Starcher, who is 18 years old and still at school. The organisers arranged for Starcher and Garlits to line up side-by-side for their first qualifying runs, an event which - to judge by his comments afterwards - may have meant more to Starcher than anything else that has ever happened to him.

Nor is drag racing specifically a man's sport. Melanie Troxel, who is very quick but very underfunded, wasn't competing at Gainesville, but Rhonda Hartman-Smith was, and she qualified easily. (Hartman-Smith's young daughter wears a T-shirt with "My Mom's faster than your Dad" printed on it). And another woman, Shirley Muldowney, was also competing in what she insists will be the last season of a quite extraordinary career. She was Garlits's main rival in the 1970s, battling against him in crowd-pleasing match races across America, and although there was inevitably a lot of animosity between the two fiercely competitive teams there was always respect for each other's abilities too.

Muldowney was awarded fifth position in the NHRA's Top 50 list. Muldowney's fans may have had something to say about the final order, but there was no doubt that these two great drivers had been correctly recognised as being giants of their sport.

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