Little Red Wagon: The Accident That Became an Act

Moving the Hemi Changed More Than the Engine Location

Installing a 426 Hemi in an A100 was not a matter of opening the Dodge order book and finding the correct box. The engine and TorqueFlite transmission were moved roughly twenty inches rearward from the original drivetrain location, which required substantial rearrangement of a truck never intended to carry that machinery there.

Large holes were cut through the rear of the cab and into the pickup bed. A tubular structure supported the relocated drivetrain, while unnecessary weight began disappearing from the rest of the truck.

The spare tire went away. The heater went away. The front bumper went away. Even piles of factory body sealer were removed because Dodge had supplied several pounds the quarter-mile could live without.

What remained was a short-wheelbase pickup with a Hemi sitting much closer to the rear axle than any sensible delivery truck required.

Move enough weight backward, apply enough torque and physics eventually sends a complaint to the front suspension.

The Little Red Wagon’s complaint arrived with daylight underneath the front tires.

Jay Howell Found the Interesting Part

Dick Branstner’s operation was brought in to help sort out the experimental truck, and fabricator Jay Howell became its test driver.

The Little Red Wagon was quick. It ran into the elevens at around 120 mph, which proved that stuffing a Hemi into a small Dodge pickup had accomplished the original assignment.

It had also created another feature nobody had requested.

The front wheels kept leaving.

Not the familiar little launch where the tires rise a few inches, everybody admires the traction and they settle politely back onto the strip. The Little Red Wagon wanted to stand up and continue the trip that way.

The short wheelbase, rearward engine and altered weight distribution had reached a perfectly understandable mechanical agreement. When the Hemi delivered enough torque through the rear tires, the nose went looking for altitude.

Normally a race team would call that a chassis problem.

Then the crowd saw it.

The Handling Problem Got a Standing Ovation

A race vehicle that refuses to keep its steering tires on the ground is not especially useful if the only objective is reaching the finish line quickly. Wheelstands cost time, reduce directional control and give the driver a much better view of the sky than the lane.

There was another measuring instrument available.

The grandstands.

People loved the thing.

Nobody in the crowd was calculating how much elapsed time disappeared while the front axle hung several feet above the pavement. There was a red Dodge pickup charging down the strip with a Hemi behind the cab and half the tires refusing to participate.

That calculation was simple enough.

Do it again.

The characteristic Dodge ought to have fixed had become the reason people wanted another run.

Maverick Golden Knew Better Than to Repair Success

Bill “Maverick” Golden was already an accomplished Dodge racer when Chrysler paired him with the Little Red Wagon. He understood fairly quickly that forcing the truck to behave like a conventional race vehicle would cure the most valuable thing it had.

So Golden stopped treating the wheelstand as an unwanted side effect and started treating it as the assignment. What had happened accidentally now had to happen deliberately, repeatedly and without scattering Dodge parts across the shutdown area.

Golden developed the Little Red Wagon into a proper exhibition machine and learned to control it while the normal steering equipment was several feet too high to be useful.

Independent rear-wheel brakes helped solve that problem. Apply a little brake to one rear wheel and the truck could be nudged back toward the proper direction. Viewing openings helped Golden find the racetrack while the windshield was busy showing him scenery normally reserved for aircraft.

Throttle, rear brakes and judgment had become the steering system.

The Little Red Wagon no longer needed to be a particularly sensible race truck.

It needed to travel a long way on two tires and finish the performance with the roof still on top.

The Wheelstand Became the Race

By 1965, the Little Red Wagon had become an attraction. Golden took it from track to track, Dodge used it in advertising and model kits put miniature versions into the hands of kids who had no difficulty understanding why the front wheels belonged in the air.

Promoters booked the truck for the same reason.

Nobody was buying a ticket because the Little Red Wagon might produce an especially competitive elapsed time. The audience wanted to know how high the nose would climb and how far Golden could carry it before gravity reclaimed the front axle.

That turned ordinary drag-racing priorities upside down.

A proper race car is supposed to leave straight, remain planted and get to the finish line with as little wasted motion as possible.

The Little Red Wagon made its living wasting exactly the motion everybody had paid to see.

Driving on Two Tires Still Required Four-Tire Thinking

Making the truck stand up was only the first trick. Keeping it there without wandering out of the lane required Golden to manage a machine whose basic geometry had stopped behaving like a normal automobile.

With the front tires airborne, steering input through the wheel accomplished very little. Direction depended on the rear brakes, throttle and a driver’s ability to make corrections without turning a spectacular wheelstand into a spectacular parts sale.

The landing had to be managed too. Several thousand pounds of Dodge eventually came back toward the pavement, and front suspension components tend to notice when they are introduced to the racetrack from several feet above it.

From the grandstands, the act looked wonderfully wrong.

Making it look that wrong repeatedly required getting a surprising number of things right.

Then Everybody Needed a Wheelstander

Racing copies anything that makes a car quicker. Show business copies anything that makes the crowd louder.

The Little Red Wagon had managed to satisfy the second rule spectacularly.

Once promoters saw what Golden’s truck did to a grandstand, wheelstanders began appearing in other forms. Hemi Under Glass became another famous example, while additional trucks and altered cars were built around the same basic proposition.

Eventually exhibition vehicles were being designed from the beginning to stand on their rear tires and stay there.

The Little Red Wagon had not enjoyed that luxury.

It backed into the business while somebody was trying to build a conventional race truck.

Keeping the Show Going Wasn’t Gentle

Wheelstanding places considerable faith in the driver’s ability to return several thousand pounds to earth without letting gravity select the replacement parts.

Golden crashed the Little Red Wagon more than once. The original truck suffered serious accidents, and replacement versions eventually carried the act forward.

Golden kept driving for decades.

By then the performance had grown larger than the particular collection of Dodge sheet metal underneath the red paint. The A100 disappeared from showrooms, but the Little Red Wagon remained recognizable because nobody came to admire an ordinary pickup.

They came to see the front wheels disappear from the job description.

Dodge Built the Wrong Truck Perfectly

Nobody began with a clean sheet of paper and decided drag racing needed a Hemi-powered pickup capable of traveling down the strip with the front axle hanging in the air.

Dodge wanted an experimental race truck. Chrysler engineers moved the Hemi rearward. Jay Howell opened the throttle.

The truck stood up.

At that point there were two choices. Spend time correcting the weight distribution and teach the Little Red Wagon to behave like every other drag vehicle, or notice that several thousand paying customers had just announced their preference.

Somebody listened to the customers.

Bill Golden learned to control the defect instead of eliminating it, and the Little Red Wagon spent decades getting booked specifically because it refused to behave like the race truck Dodge had intended to build.

Other wheelstanders followed because promoters had already discovered the useful part: a machine did not have to be the quickest thing on the property if everybody stopped what they were doing when it made a pass.

Most race teams spend enormous amounts of time making the vehicle do exactly what the engineers intended.

The Little Red Wagon became famous when it didn’t.

Dodge built a race truck.

The front wheels resigned.

Show business took over.