NHRA - National Hot Rod Association

For more than 50 years, the only design in Top Fuel has the driver sitting in front of the engine, but it wasn’t always that way until Don Garlits proved the design not only safer but faster in 1971.

After a 1970 transmission explosion in his front-engine Swamp Rat 13 severed half of his right foot, Garlits perfected a rear-engine dragster, Swamp Rat 14, and won the 1971 NHRA Winternationals in its debut over a field full of traditional front-engine cars. Within two years, every Top Fuel dragster had the engine behind the driver.

The car was physically built in late 1970 but mentally assembled by Garlits from his bed at Pacific Coast Hospital in Long Beach, Calif., in the wake of the March 8, 1970, transmission explosion that cut the unlucky Swamp Rat 13 (and Garlits' right foot) in two on the starting line at Southern California's Lions Drag Strip.

Between watching episodes of Star Trek with Tom McEwen, Garlits logically set out primarily to prevent a similar future accident more than he did to revolutionize the class, then ended up winning in the car’s national event debut less than a year later. The legend and imagery of that tale are just so great that it has become mythical in our sport, and the accomplishment is included almost anytime he is lauded.

That a need existed for a new paradigm in Top Fuel was evident in the late 1960s. Although teams were still making performance improvements with the front-engine slingshot design that had been the de facto norm since the mid-1950s, injuries and even death were a constant companion as engines, clutches, and bellhousings, pushed to and beyond their limits, began to give out with an alarming frequency, claiming heroes like Mike Sorokin and John Mulligan, and sending Jim Nicoll on a terrifying tumble alongside Don Prudhomme after a clutch explosion in the 1970 Nationals final.

Rear-engined cars had been tried before, but with little success. Anyone who snickered — and there were quite a few — when Garlits unloaded Swamp Rat 14 at Lions for AHRA’s 1971 season-opening Grand American event Jan. 8-10 were at least partially silenced as he clocked a 6.60 — just .05-second off the track record — and went on to score runner-up honors behind “Mr. C,” Gary Cochran, and his slingshot entry. A week later, Garlits was again runner-up, this time at the PDA event just down the 405 freeway at Orange County Int'l Raceway and again to Cochran’s front-engine mount.

Garlits didn’t initially have the quickest machine in Pomona, where the tight 32-car field was separated by just .33 seconds. Garlits was just the No. 9 qualifier with a mid-6.80 pass a tenth and a half behind the 6.70 registered by Norm Wilcox in "Terrible Ted" Gotelli's Northern California-based entry.

After a middling 6.85 win over Tommy Allen in round one, Garlits had low e.t. of the next three rounds, running a pair of 6.72s to beat John Nichols in Jerry Dee Hagood's Spartan Charger and local favorite Carl Olson, and then a 6.70 to beat Jim Dunn in the semifinals. Garlits’ final-round opponent, Kenny Safford in Larry Bowers’ car, was unable to make the call after a clutch swap between rounds, and Garlits, perhaps loaded for bear to put an exclamation point on his win or just out to put on a show, smoked his way to a 7.03 on a solo pass.

After defeating the NHRA Winternationals field with precision, Garlits drove back east to win the IHRA Winternationals, then back west to win the fabled March Meet. After that, there wasn’t much for most of the remaining detractors to say except, “How soon can I get one?”

See the complete to-date list of moments on the Top 75 Moments homepage