Tom “The Mongoose” McEwen
He Figured Out That Winning Races Wasn’t the Only Way to Win Drag Racing
Tom McEwen was born January 14, 1937, in Pensacola, Florida, and grew up in Southern California when drag racing was still deciding whether it wanted to become a major sport or remain a very noisy hobby practiced by fellows with dirty fingernails.
McEwen helped settle the argument.
He raced nearly everything that could be persuaded down a drag strip, from an Oldsmobile borrowed without much maternal authorization to gas coupes, altereds, fuel dragsters and Funny Cars. He won major races, drove for some of the best people in the business and stayed competitive for decades.
But that is only half the reason he belongs here. Tom McEwen understood something long before most racers did: the race car was not the whole product.
The driver counted. The rivalry counted. The sponsor counted. The story counted. And if a kid who had never seen a drag strip could race miniature versions of your car across the living-room carpet, McEwen understood that counted plenty too.
Before There Was a Mongoose
McEwen’s racing career started early enough that he was reportedly sneaking his mother’s 1953 Oldsmobile out to Santa Ana before he was old enough to legally drive it on the street.
This was not the sort of beginning usually recommended by driver’s education instructors.
He moved through the usual Southern California progression — stockers, coupes, gassers and altereds — before Art Chrisman helped teach him the business of driving dragsters. By the early 1960s McEwen was moving among serious fuel teams, driving for people including Ed Donovan, Gene Adams and Lou Baney.
Then, in 1964, McEwen beat Don Prudhomme in a match race while driving for Donovan. Prudhomme was already “The Snake,” and Ed Donovan knew enough about Rudyard Kipling to recognize the obvious marketing opportunity.
Tom McEwen became “The Mongoose.” A nickname intended to needle another racer turned into one of the most valuable pieces of branding drag racing ever produced.
The Mongoose Knew How to Sell a Race
McEwen was a very good race-car driver. He was an even better promoter.
That distinction tells you more about him than another elapsed time. Drag racing in the 1960s was full of excellent racers who could make a fuel car do astonishing things and then become almost invisible the moment they climbed out of it.
McEwen was not invisible.
He talked. He bragged. He promoted match races. He flashed victory signs. He understood newspaper ads and radio spots, and he knew a rivalry needed two recognizable characters with enough personality to make the crowd care which lane won.
Prudhomme supplied the perfect opposite number. The Snake was intense, disciplined and famously interested in winning. The Mongoose was the fellow making sure everybody knew when and where the fight was going to happen.
Then McEwen went looking for money outside the usual automotive companies.
That changed everything.
Snake, Mongoose and a Few Million Kids
In 1969 McEwen and Prudhomme formed Wildlife Racing Enterprises, and McEwen used a connection with Mattel to help put together what became the Hot Wheels Snake and Mongoose program.
It is difficult to overstate what that meant. Mattel was not a piston company, tire company or oil company looking for racers who already bought its products.
It sold toys.
Beginning in 1970, Prudhomme’s yellow Snake and McEwen’s red Mongoose became real race cars, miniature Hot Wheels cars, track sets, television commercials and promotional appearances. The full-size racers toured the country while tiny versions of them ran down orange plastic tracks in houses where nobody had previously cared about elapsed time.
Drag racing had found a way into the toy box, and an entire generation learned the names Snake and Mongoose before they learned what a Funny Car clutch smelled like.
McEwen deserves a large share of the credit because he understood the proposition from the sponsor’s side. A company did not necessarily need the racer with the most trophies. It needed somebody people noticed.
Prudhomme usually won more races. McEwen made sure there was a show worth sponsoring.
He Could Drive the Thing Too
All the marketing ability sometimes hides the inconvenient fact that McEwen could wheel a race car.
He won the 1972 Bakersfield March Meet in Top Fuel, one of the biggest independent drag races in the country. In 1973, after the Hot Wheels program ended, he scored his first NHRA national-event victory at the SuperNationals at Ontario Motor Speedway in Funny Car.
The route to that trophy had a little Mongoose flavor of its own. McEwen failed to qualify, then entered the field as an alternate after Bobby Rowe’s qualifying crash. From there he kept advancing until the final, where Dale Emery’s body-destroying semifinal fire left McEwen with a solo for the win.
Some racers get handed lemons. McEwen had a knack for finding a starting line and putting slicks under them.
He continued racing Funny Cars through a succession of sponsors and bodies, including a long relationship with Coors, remaining one of the sport’s recognizable names even when the win column did not look anything like Prudhomme’s.
Indy, 1978
If Tom McEwen had won only one race in his life, there is a fair chance people would still remember this one.
His teenage son Jamie died from leukemia just days before the 1978 U.S. Nationals. McEwen went to Indianapolis anyway.
Waiting in the final round was Don Prudhomme.
Of course it was.
Prudhomme was in the middle of the greatest Funny Car run the sport had yet seen. He had won the previous three championships and would win a fourth that season. Against McEwen, he was usually the quicker car and almost always the favorite.
McEwen’s English Leather Corvette had other plans. The team had experimented with a shorter rear gear during a semifinal bye run, and it worked well enough to leave in for the final.
McEwen ran 6.05 seconds. Prudhomme ran 6.33.
The Mongoose had beaten the Snake at Indianapolis.
There was no clever promotional line for what came afterward. McEwen pulled off into the grass and sat in the car crying. Prudhomme came over, and the two old partners and rivals embraced in the shutdown area.
There are bigger statistical accomplishments in drag racing. There are not many race wins people remember more clearly.
He Kept Inventing Ways to Stay Interesting
McEwen’s career did not end with Indy. He kept racing through the 1980s and won the Big Bud Shootout in 1984.
When his long Coors association ended later in the decade, he did something completely sensible by Funny Car standards and commissioned a fiberglass 1957 Chevrolet body for exhibition runs.
The car looked remarkably like a ’57 Chevy instead of a melted bar of soap with headlights painted on it. It was heavy, not especially aerodynamic and popular everywhere it went.
That was McEwen again. He understood that making people turn their heads had value.
Then, after years associated with Funny Cars, former major-league baseball player Jack Clark put McEwen into his Mobil 1 Top Fuel dragster in 1991. McEwen promptly won the Summernationals at Englishtown.
It was his fifth and final NHRA national-event victory and made him one of the comparatively small group of drivers to win NHRA events in both Funny Car and Top Fuel. He retired from regular competition the following year.
Five Wins Do Not Explain Tom McEwen
McEwen won five NHRA national events. John Force won 157. Prudhomme won 49. Kenny Bernstein won 69.
If the record book were the only test, McEwen would be a footnote somewhere behind men with much heavier trophy shelves.
He isn’t.
NHRA eventually ranked him No. 16 among its Top 50 drivers, and the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America inducted him in 2001. The reason becomes fairly obvious once the stopwatch is put away.
McEwen helped teach professional drag racing how to market itself. He helped prove that major companies outside the automotive aftermarket could use racers as national advertising properties. He turned two nicknames into a rivalry children could buy at the toy store and understood personal branding before race teams had people using the phrase.
And when the talking stopped, he could still climb into a fuel car and win Bakersfield, Ontario, Indianapolis or Englishtown.
Tom McEwen died June 10, 2018, but by then the evidence of his influence was everywhere: polished sponsor programs, drivers selling merchandise, rivalries marketed as entertainment and grown men who could still picture a red Mongoose Hot Wheels car disappearing down a strip of orange plastic track.
The Bottom Line
Tom McEwen was never going to beat Don Prudhomme by trying to become Don Prudhomme. That was the beauty of the pairing.
The Snake supplied relentless winning. The Mongoose supplied enough racing ability to make the rivalry legitimate and enough promotional instinct to turn two drag racers into names known far beyond the pits.
McEwen understood that a race could be won on the timing slip and still leave money sitting on the table if nobody cared enough to watch it.
The Snake won more races. The Mongoose made sure millions of people knew there was a race.
McEwen understood earlier than most racers that a good story, a recognizable name and the right sponsor could be almost as useful as another tenth on the racetrack.
➤ See the Snake vs. Mongoose story in Racing Shenanigans
➤ See When Mattel Designed the Real Race Cars in Racing Shenanigans
➤ See Bill Doner’s promotion story in Racing Shenanigans
↑ Back to the Top, Before the Mongoose Finds Another Sponsor