To the non-drag-racing enthusiast, "Big Daddy" Don Garlits is a guy who won a lot of races during a very long career, a guy whose name hangs in the motorsports-crazy memory-fog of the mid-20th century alongside American heavyweights like Breedlove, Gurney, and Foyt. Within the sport, however, Garlits isn't just the guy who won 17 national championships split among the NHRA, AHRA, and IHRA, or was the first man through the 1320 at 200 mph. He's also known as a relentless tinkerer and innovator.
Faced with a blown transmission in his flathead-powered digger during an event at MacDill AFB, Don figured he'd run his Hemi-powered '39 Ford tow vehicle down the track as a lark. It turned out to be faster than the dragster. In short order, the motor was between the framerails of the racecar. It wound up codified (in much-modified form) as the engine in the nitromethane-fueled classes of the sport.
In 1970, a clutch explosion in his Swamp Rat XIII front-engined Fueler resulted in the loss of a portion of Big Daddy's right foot. The less dedicated may have walked away at that point. Garlits decided to make the rear-engined configuration work. He wasn't the first to try it—Pat Foster had experimented with a rear-engined car, suffering a near-calamitous result. A year after his accident, Swamp Rat XIV rolled into the staging lights at the now-defunct Lions Drag Strip in Long Beach, California, and ripped off a 6.66 at 225.00 mph, taking second place in the event. The writing was on the wall for the front-engined cars.
Now 82 years old, Garlits has his eye set on another new thing. He wants to be the first man to hit 200 mph on a drag strip in an electric car. That dragster, Swamp Rat 37, has been in the works for more than a year. It's powered by four lithium-polymer battery packs—a favorite of R/C plane enthusiasts for their power density—arranged in a saddle configuration with two packs on each side of the car behind the driver. According to this Wired report, utilizing 1200 cells, producing a maximum 420V, and offering 3600 amps of current, the batteries mete out juice to six motors (take that, Tommy Ivo). The whole setup cranks out 1500 kW. That's 2012 hp.
After coming back from a mild stroke in 2012, Garlits lost his wife of 60 years earlier this year. That alone is enough to knock a man made of fairly stern stuff into despondency. But Garlits? He's still out there fiddling on the bleeding edge, gunning for at least one more record, one more first at an age where most anybody could be forgiven for wanting to spend one's dotage on the couch. Makes what you're doing seem a mite piddly, doesn't it?
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Last week, Garlits and the team behind the SR-37 hit Bradenton Motorsports Park in Florida to try to hit the magic 200-mph mark, but they fell short, the time slip reading 7.258 seconds at 184.01 mph. (They also went long, ending up in the sand runoff after the chute malfunctioned; Garlits was unharmed and the dragster suffered only minor scars.) Yes, 184 mph is a new EV drag-racing record, but the team plans to try again for 200 next month—this is Big Daddy we're talking about, after all.
from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/nSHy27
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