The return of Bill Mullins
Former Top Fuel, Top Alcohol, Top Gas legend finds 10.5 racing to his liking.
Story and photos by Dale Wilson
4/7/06
hose of us who know Bill Mullins would never dream that we’d see him in any kind of door car, much less a 10.5 machine. But then again, looking at how sophisticated some of the 10.5’ers have become of late, it’s no wonder that the legendary Mullins, who was known in some NHRA Division 2 circles as “Superman,” might drift over to the 10.5 side of racing.
After all, here is a guy, now 72 years young, who started racing a single-engine and then a twin-engine Triumph fuel-fed drag bike in the 1950s, switched over to dragsters from the 1960s through the late 1980s, and is the only racer that we know of who has won national and divisional races in all three NHRA “dragster” classes, Top Gas, Top Alcohol and Top Fuel.
He once built a twin-engine Chrysler-powered gas dragster to take on the fabled “Freight Train,” and did so handily, at the 1971 NHRA Springnationals in Dallas, Texas, where he won the whole eliminator. “I had a good-running single-engine Chrysler dragster, and I figured if one Chrysler was good, two would be better,” he says. He didn’t know it at the time (“I only found out about it last year,” he says), but the “Train” was twin-Chrysler powered too. Mullins thought the Peters and Frank-owned machine ran two small-block Chevrolets.
Ever the innovator and as tenacious as they come, Mullins discovered 10.5 racing about a year-and-a-half ago, and the whole idea intrigued him.
“I was attracted to the idea of the electronics of the 10.5 stuff. Normally, you go out and change jets and timing physically to tune your race motor,” he says. “You don’t do any of that with this car. You do everything with a lap top, just change the numbers. I thought that would be nice. With the FAST system, I have the capability of leaning down one cylinder, richening it up two more, advancing the timing on No. 3 and retarding it on No. 6 or 7. It’s
just very intriguing to me to be able to do that. It’s the ultimate tuning car.“I never had the same engine in any of my race cars. I had all kinds of different engines, Dodge wedges, Oldsmobiles, I had hemis, Chevrolets, but the only one I hadn’t had was a Ford. They had this engine that really amazed me because it’s a lightweight, small engine like I think they need to be, with a short stroke and small bore, and it turns a lot of rpm. Ithas a three and a half-inch bore and a three-inch stroke. Ford has some really good ideas, with four valves and four cams. It’s really tough to degree them in. All you have to do is mess up on one of them and the whole thing is off. But it will be a good engine and I don’t know if I will be able to get it done. It’s taken me forever to get the bugs ironed out. This has been one of the toughest ones (project race cars) I’ve ever had,” he said.
Mullins owns his own Mullins Car Service shop on 1st Avenue and 52nd Street in Woodlawn, a 'burb of Birmingham, Alabama, since forever. He has been a mechanic all his life. He has also been a “challenger" -- racing nitro motorcycles when few other drag racers did, following that into a series of legendary dragsters of all kinds, even hitting the body building circuits early in life and winning several “Mr. Birmingham” and “Mr. Alabama” awards (hence his “Superman” moniker that former NHRA division director Lex Dudas gave him when Bill raced and won in a small block Chevy-powered alcohol dragster).