Hemi Under Glass: When the Front Wheels Became Optional
Put the Hemi in the Back and See What Happens
George Hurst wanted an exhibition car people would remember after the rest of the race cars had gone back onto their trailers.
Merely building another fast Barracuda was not going to handle the job. Dragstrips already contained plenty of fast cars, and a fellow selling performance equipment needed something capable of interrupting whatever conversation was taking place in the grandstands.
Hurst wanted a Hemi. He wanted a Plymouth Barracuda. Bill Shrewsberry helped provide the final ingredient.
Put the engine behind the driver.
That certainly made the car different.
It also moved enough weight rearward that the front wheels began treating the pavement as optional equipment.
The Name Required Almost No Explanation
The first-generation Barracuda came from Plymouth with one feature unusually convenient for anybody planning to install an engine where the back seat belonged: an enormous rear window.
Put a 426 Hemi behind the driver and anybody standing behind the car could see the whole arrangement without needing a cutaway drawing.
There it was.
A Hemi under glass.
Marketing departments have spent considerably more time producing names that explained considerably less.
The engine location did more than give the car a memorable title. Moving that much weight behind the driver planted the rear tires and gave the front axle less reason to remain involved when the throttle opened.
The Barracuda Stood Up
A conventional drag car can carry its front wheels on a hard launch. Racers generally appreciate a little of that because it proves the rear tires have found traction.
They become less enthusiastic when the wheelstand keeps going.
Hemi Under Glass skipped the usual discussion about how much was acceptable.
Open the throttle and the Barracuda stood up.
Not a polite six inches. The front end climbed until the car looked less like a Plymouth launching from the starting line and more like somebody opening a garage door with a Hemi attached to it.
Any ordinary race team would have identified that as a chassis problem.
Then the grandstands started cheering.
Problem reclassified.
Now Somebody Had to Drive the Thing
Bill Shrewsberry drove the original Hemi Under Glass and helped establish the act. Bob Riggle later became the driver most closely associated with it after already being involved with Hurst and the car’s development.
Once the Barracuda was standing high on its rear tires, the conventional steering equipment became mostly decorative. The front tires were several feet above the pavement and poorly positioned to negotiate with the racetrack.
The car still needed directional control.
Independent rear brakes supplied it.
Riggle could touch one rear brake to persuade the Barracuda one way and use the other to bring it back. Throttle, brake pressure and judgment became the steering system while the front tires enjoyed the view.
Seeing where he was going required another adjustment. With the car standing nearly upright, the windshield provided more information about clouds than lane position, so the machine needed arrangements that let Riggle keep enough track in sight to stay between the guardrails.
A normal race team modifies the car to keep the front tires usable.
Hemi Under Glass was modified so the driver could continue after they stopped being useful.
The defect had become the product.
Little Red Wagon Had Already Given the Crowd Ideas
Drag racing had discovered that spectators loved wheelstanders before Hemi Under Glass arrived. The Little Red Wagon had already shown what happened when a powerful machine developed an enthusiastic habit of carrying its front wheels.
Hurst’s Barracuda made the mechanical reason impossible to miss.
The Hemi was sitting behind the driver under that enormous rear window. The slicks were underneath it. When the throttle opened, the Barracuda behaved exactly like a machine with a huge engine installed where Plymouth had expected passengers.
By then the objective was no longer getting from one end of the strip to the other with minimum drama.
The drama was paying the appearance fee.
The Crowd Didn’t Need the Timing Slip
Hemi Under Glass was nearly perfect exhibition machinery because nobody needed a technical education to understand the act.
Reaction times, qualifying ladders and weight breaks could all take the evening off.
The Barracuda left the starting line, the nose climbed into the air and it kept going with two tires doing the work normally assigned to four.
Everybody understood that.
Promoters understood it too. Put Hemi Under Glass on the poster and the advertisement explained itself.
Car goes down dragstrip on rear wheels.
Tickets available Saturday.
Riggle Got Better at Looking Out of Control
The first challenge was making the car stand up. The next was carrying the wheels farther, keeping it straight and bringing the nose back down without converting the performance into a parts inventory.
As Riggle gained experience, Hemi Under Glass became less like an unruly Barracuda and more like a precision act carefully disguised as mechanical foolishness.
From the grandstands it looked wonderfully simple. Bury the throttle, lose the front half of the automobile and somehow continue toward the other end.
Inside the car, Riggle was managing throttle, independent rear brakes, direction, distance and the eventual return of several hundred pounds of front suspension to the pavement.
The better he became, the less work the audience could see.
Dangerous skills have an irritating habit of looking easiest when somebody has spent years learning them.
Gravity Eventually Wanted Its Front Wheels Back
No wheelstand lasts forever. Sooner or later the nose has to return, and gravity is not especially interested in protecting sheet metal when it happens.
The Barracuda did not always provide a gentle landing.
Hemi Under Glass went through crashes, rebuilds and multiple generations over the years. None of that damaged the basic attraction because the act remained gloriously easy to understand.
New Barracudas carried the name and Riggle kept performing. A car running quickly on four wheels can become ordinary surprisingly fast.
A Barracuda running quickly while refusing to use half of them takes longer to ignore.
The Entire Bad Idea Was Under Glass
Plenty of automotive mischief depends on hiding the clever part.
Hemi Under Glass did the opposite.
George Hurst put the important part behind one of the largest rear windows Detroit had installed in a production car. There was the Hemi, the rearward weight and the reason the front end wanted to leave.
The mechanical explanation doubled as the advertising.
Most racers discovering that the steering tires had become airborne would move weight, change the chassis and make the car behave.
Hemi Under Glass went the other direction.
Leave the engine in the back. Let the nose climb. Give the driver rear brakes so he can steer without the steering tires and figure out how to see where he is going.
Bill Shrewsberry helped create the act. Bob Riggle learned to control it well enough that something resembling a failed launch became one of drag racing’s most recognizable exhibition performances.
The Hemi went in the back.
The front wheels came up.
Everybody cheered.
At that point, fixing the problem would have been terrible business.