Don “Big Daddy” Garlits
The Racer Who Put the Engine Where It Belonged
Don Garlits was born January 14, 1932, in Tampa, Florida, a long way from the Southern California hot-rod establishment that seemed to think it owned drag racing in the 1950s.
Florida did not get the memo.
Garlits became the most important Top Fuel racer of his generation because he was never satisfied with merely driving the car. He built it, tuned it, studied what broke, changed the parts that irritated him and then climbed back in to see whether the new idea worked.
Sometimes it worked beautifully. Sometimes the machinery made its objection known with considerably more violence. Either way, Garlits usually came back with another Swamp Rat and another idea.
By the time the sport finally caught up with him, the basic shape of a Top Fuel dragster had changed, the record book had been rewritten repeatedly and “Big Daddy” had become the standard against which several generations of fuel racers were measured.
Before Big Daddy Was Big
Garlits started with the kind of machinery early drag racing was built on: inexpensive parts, home fabrication and a willingness to find out what happened when more fuel and more blower were added to the equation.
The first Swamp Rat cars were unmistakably homemade race cars. That was not an insult. In the 1950s it was practically a job description.
Swamp Rat I established the pattern. In 1957 Garlits set a world record at 176.40 mph, and in 1958 he won a national championship with the car. The numbers kept climbing from there.
Garlits also helped prove serious fuel racing was not exclusively a California business. He hauled East Coast machinery west, raced the established stars on their own ground and developed a reputation for arriving with something that might look a little rougher than the polished cars around it.
Then it would run.
By 1964 he had recorded drag racing’s first official 200-mph run and won the U.S. Nationals at Indianapolis for the first time.
It would not be his last visit to that winner’s circle.
Swamp Rat Wasn’t a Car. It Was an Engineering Department.
There would eventually be more than 30 Swamp Rat dragsters, but the useful part of the number is what the series represented: Garlits did not treat a race car as a finished product.
If the chassis flexed, change it. If the steering was wrong, change it. If aerodynamics were becoming important, start enclosing things. If the engine or clutch was trying to kill the driver, perhaps it was time to reconsider where the driver was sitting.
That last problem became rather difficult to ignore in 1970.
The Explosion at Lions
On March 8, 1970, Garlits was in the final round of an AHRA event at Lions Drag Strip in Southern California when the transmission in Swamp Rat 13 exploded on the starting line.
The blast severed part of his right foot.
Front-engine fuel dragsters had always placed the driver behind the engine, clutch and driveline. It made for a wonderfully direct view of every rotating part that could come apart.
Garlits had finally received enough firsthand evidence.
Rear-engine dragsters had been tried before, but most had not handled well enough to convince the established Top Fuel crowd. Garlits, T.C. Lemons and Connie Swingle worked through the steering and handling problems until their new car became something different: a rear-engine Top Fuel dragster that actually worked.
Walked Away: Don Garlits — Lions Drag Strip, 1970
Swamp Rat 14 Changed the Shape of Top Fuel
Swamp Rat 14 debuted in competition early in 1971. The old guard was skeptical.
That skepticism survived right up until the new car started beating them.
Garlits won the 1971 NHRA Winternationals at Pomona with the rear-engine car and followed it with more major victories. The layout placed the engine and most of the dangerous rotating machinery behind the driver instead of directly in front of him.
It was safer. More importantly to racers, it was fast.
That settled the argument.
Within a couple of seasons, the front-engine Top Fuel dragster that had defined the sport for years was essentially obsolete. Garlits had not invented the idea of putting the engine behind the driver. He did something more useful.
He made everybody else want one.
Winning Was Still Part of the Experiment
It would be easy to turn Garlits into nothing but the fellow who built the rear-engine car and miss the other problem he caused for competitors.
He kept winning.
Garlits collected his first NHRA Top Fuel world championship in 1975. That year’s Swamp Rat 22 also produced a 5.63-second run at the World Finals, a national elapsed-time record that stood for more than six years.
At Indianapolis he became almost part of the scenery. Garlits ultimately won the U.S. Nationals Top Fuel title eight times, beginning in 1964 and continuing through a remarkable three-year run in 1984, 1985 and 1986.
Eight Indy victories are the sort of statistic that saves a lot of unnecessary argument about whether somebody was any good.
The Old Man Came Back
By the early 1980s, Top Fuel had changed enormously and Garlits was running only occasionally. Then came the 1984 U.S. Nationals.
At 52, using an aging Swamp Rat 26 and a crew Garlits jokingly referred to as his “dinosaurs,” he returned to Indianapolis and won the race.
The sport had failed to explain retirement clearly enough.
The comeback became something larger in 1985. Garlits built Swamp Rat 29, won six NHRA events and captured his second NHRA Top Fuel championship.
Then he decided the front wheels were creating too much aerodynamic trouble.
So naturally he covered them up.
Swamp Rat XXX and 270 MPH
Swamp Rat XXX appeared in 1986 looking as though somebody had decided a Top Fuel dragster needed equal parts race car, streamliner and science experiment.
The front wheels were enclosed beneath a streamlined nose. The cockpit wore a canopy. The whole car was aimed at cleaning up the air around a machine that was rapidly reaching speeds nobody had expected when Garlits started racing.
At the 1986 Gatornationals, the car ran 272.56 mph, making Garlits the first Top Fuel driver through the 270-mph barrier.
He also won the race and the championship. That gave Garlits three NHRA Top Fuel titles: 1975, 1985 and 1986.
Swamp Rat XXX also supplied one of the more memorable reminders that aerodynamic experiments at 270 mph occasionally produce results not covered in the brochure. During qualifying at the 1986 Summernationals in Englishtown on July 12, the car blew over backward in one of the most famous Top Fuel rides ever filmed.
Garlits escaped unhurt, repaired the car and continued racing.
Walked Away: Don Garlits — Summernationals, 1986
Of course he did.
Retirement Required Several Attempts
A second blowover followed at Spokane on August 21, 1987. This one hurt more. Garlits suffered two broken ribs and a back injury, and the wreck pushed him toward retirement.
He later returned, stepped away again and then came back yet another time because the word “retired” had a fairly flexible definition in the Garlits shop.
Walked Away: Don Garlits — Spokane, 1987
In 2001, nearly fourteen years after his last NHRA Top Fuel qualifying appearance, Garlits returned to Indianapolis chasing two numbers still missing from his personal record book: four seconds and 300 mph.
He ran 4.720 seconds at 303.37 mph. Two years later, at the 2003 Gatornationals, he ran a career-best 323.04 mph.
He was 71.
Some men that age are careful backing the Buick out of the garage. Garlits was still trying to make a Top Fuel dragster go faster.
The Numbers Only Tell Part of It
Garlits finished with 35 NHRA national-event victories and three NHRA Top Fuel championships. Across the various sanctioning bodies in which he raced, NHRA credits him with 17 season championships and 144 national-event wins.
He also helped preserve the sport he had spent decades rearranging, establishing the Don Garlits Museum of Drag Racing in Ocala, Florida, where the Swamp Rats and a considerable chunk of drag racing history could be kept together instead of scattered into private collections and forgotten warehouses.
In 2000, when NHRA selected the Top 50 racers from its first 50 years, Don Garlits was ranked No. 1.
That choice was not based on one car. It was the entire package.
He drove. He built. He tuned. He promoted. He argued. He experimented. He occasionally frightened himself. Then he usually changed the car and tried again.
The rear-engine dragster alone would have secured his place in racing history. The championships would have done it. The eight U.S. Nationals wins would have done it. The speed records would have done it.
Garlits managed to collect all of them.
Top Fuel did not merely get faster while Don Garlits was around. It became a different kind of race car.
Garlits had a habit of changing Top Fuel in ways that made somebody else’s carefully prepared plan look old almost overnight.
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