When Mattel Designed the Real Race Cars
When the Toy Had to Work, So the Dragster Had to Match
Normally a toy company waits for somebody to build an interesting race car, then makes a little one.
Mattel and the Snake and Mongoose operation eventually managed to get that procedure backwards.
For 1971, Hot Wheels wanted miniature dragsters that could perform a particular trick on an orange plastic racetrack. The problem was that the real Don Prudhomme and Tom McEwen dragsters were not shaped properly for what the toys needed to do.
There were two obvious solutions: change the toy, or change the race cars.
Prudhomme and McEwen were about to discover which side of that discussion was writing the checks.
Hot Wheels Needed a Wheelie
The Snake and Mongoose sponsorship was already working beautifully. Mattel had two colorful racers with nicknames a toy company could hardly have improved if it had invented them itself, plus Funny Cars, miniature versions and racing sets that put both men into children’s bedrooms across the country.
Then came the Wild Wheelie set.
The little dragsters were supposed to launch down the plastic track with their front wheels in the air before another section brought them back down. That was an excellent trick for a toy, but it required enough body and weight behind the driver to make the miniature car behave properly.
A conventional front-engine dragster was mostly engine, frame rails, rear tires and daylight.
That was inconvenient.
So Mattel designed the toy around what the toy needed. Then somebody informed the full-size race cars.
The Tail Began Wagging the Dragster
Mattel designer Larry Wood worked out a shape with tall, slab-sided bodywork surrounding the driver and extending toward the rear axle. In miniature it gave the Wild Wheelie car the shape and weight distribution Mattel wanted.
There was no compelling racing reason for a full-size Top Fuel dragster to look like that. By this point, racing reasons were no longer the only reasons in the room.
Master aluminum craftsman Tom Hanna was given the job of turning the toy company’s idea into bodywork large enough for Prudhomme and McEwen to climb inside.
And there it was: Mattel was no longer making toys that looked like the race cars. The racers were building race cars that looked like the toys.
The Mongoose Was Not Impressed
McEwen was the fellow who had helped bring Mattel into the operation, so he understood sponsorship very well. He also understood the ancient rule that when the company paying the bills wants something, the professional racer should listen carefully before explaining why it is a terrible idea.
He still thought the dragster was ugly.
McEwen later called it the ugliest dragster ever built. The tall bodywork enclosed the cockpit and added weight to a kind of race car normally designed by removing anything that could be removed without causing the driver to fall out.
The finished machines became known for their slab-sided appearance. They looked unlike almost anything else in Top Fuel because almost everybody else was designing race cars primarily to go racing.
These had another assignment.
They had to look right in the toy department.
Snake Got the Old One. Mongoose Built Another.
The two dragsters looked much the same from the outside, but underneath they were different cars. Prudhomme’s white Hot Wheels machine used a Don Long chassis based around the car with which he had won the 1969 U.S. Nationals, while McEwen’s blue version used a new Woody Gilmore chassis.
Both received the peculiar Mattel-inspired rear bodywork.
White for Snake. Blue for Mongoose. Matching promotion, matching toys and matching aluminum wrapped around two racers who normally spent considerable effort getting unnecessary weight off a dragster.
There are sponsorship decals.
Then there are sponsorship commitments.
They Picked an Excellent Year to Build Yesterday’s Dragster
The cars appeared at the 1971 Winternationals, which was unfortunate timing for anybody hoping the strange bodywork would be the biggest Top Fuel story of the weekend.
Don Garlits arrived with his engine behind the driver.
Rear-engine dragsters had been tried before, but Garlits’s Swamp Rat XIV made the layout work convincingly enough that he won the Winternationals with it. Suddenly the future of Top Fuel was sitting on the starting line with the engine behind the cockpit.
Snake and Mongoose had arrived at the same event with two elaborate front-engine cars shaped partly so miniature versions could perform wheelstands in children’s bedrooms.
That is poor timing even by racing standards.
The Toys Didn’t Have to Carry a Driver
The miniature Hot Wheels cars had another advantage over the real ones: they did not care how much their bodywork weighed.
The full-size dragsters did.
McEwen remembered his slab-sided car as being about as heavy as one of their Funny Cars, which is not a comparison a Top Fuel builder normally writes under Advantages. The enclosed body also produced a cockpit McEwen did not especially enjoy occupying.
But Mattel had not commissioned an exercise in minimum-weight dragster engineering. It wanted recognizable Snake and Mongoose products that worked with the Wild Wheelie set.
The toys did their job.
The racers merely had to carry the consequences down the quarter-mile.
Then Top Fuel Changed Underneath Them
Garlits’s Winternationals victory accelerated the move toward rear-engine dragsters. Besides working well, the layout put the driver ahead of an engine capable of producing fire, oil and expensive pieces of itself when things went badly.
That was a persuasive combination.
Within a short time the traditional front-engine slingshot began disappearing from serious Top Fuel competition. Mattel’s remarkable Snake and Mongoose machines therefore became more than strange-looking dragsters.
They became a wonderfully elaborate answer to a toy-company problem attached to a race-car layout that was already heading for the exit.
Mattel Wasn’t Finished With Reality
The move to rear engines should have put the whole business back in a sensible order.
It did not.
Prudhomme moved to a rear-engine dragster and experimented with wedge-shaped bodywork around the back of the car. McEwen also went rear-engine, but he did not race the same wedge-bodied arrangement.
Hot Wheels had another problem. Snake and Mongoose toys worked better as a matched pair.
So Mattel sold rear-engine Snake and Mongoose dragsters using the same basic wedge-shaped casting. That produced a miniature Mongoose version of a race car Tom McEwen had never actually raced.
By then historical accuracy had become less important than keeping both animals in the package.
Snake had one. Mongoose had one. Kids could race them against each other.
The toy aisle was satisfied.
Usually the Race Car Comes First
The Hot Wheels sponsorship became important because it demonstrated how a major company outside the traditional automotive business could turn racers into national personalities and race cars into consumer products.
The 1971 dragsters demonstrated something stranger. The relationship could run backward.
Mattel needed a toy that would perform a wheelstand, so Larry Wood designed the miniature around that requirement. Tom Hanna then built full-size bodywork around the same idea, and two professional Top Fuel racers climbed inside.
That left Prudhomme and McEwen racing cars shaped partly to satisfy the engineering requirements of an orange plastic track.
Usually Mattel copied the race car.
In 1971, the race car had to copy Mattel.
When the sponsor can redesign the car to make the toy work better, there is no longer much question about who successfully negotiated the sponsorship.