Chrisman Is The King

3/8/05

Art Chrisman is amazing. Half a century ago, he made the first pass at the inaugural NHRA Nationals in a converted dry-lakes car he towed from California to Great Bend, Kansas. Twenty-five years ago, the same car and driver celebrated the Big Go’s silver anniversary by making a lap that lit up IRP’s scoreboards with a reading of 95 mph — despite “safety gear” consisting of a baseball cap and T-shirt.

A member of “five or six” motorsports halls of fame, Art Chrisman continues to drive supercharged slingshots at age 75. Shown bench-racing with longtime-fan Buzz Baylis at Indy, Chrisman also built and tunes the mouse motor in his son’s 7.1-second, 188-mph Junior Fueler. (Good Communications photo by Dave Wallace, ©2004)

Last September, at age 75, Chrisman and “Number 25” opened pro qualifying for Indy’s 50th-annual celebration, following a ribbon-cutting ceremony featuring the mayor of Indianapolis.

This time, the old guy in the baseball hat took it easy in his 70-year-old race car — to the great relief of officials who never know what to expect from one of drag racing’s greatest thinkers, innovators and drivers.

Among other accomplishments numerous enough to fill up his own history book, Chrisman was among the first to master the top-mounted GMC supercharger.

With the help of Leonard Simmons’ Windjammer Blower Service, he successfully switched from a crank-mounted system in time to win the inaugural U.S. Fuel and Gas Championships in 1959, driving the original Hustler slingshot. By that time, Art had already secured future membership in any hall of fame that would be worth entering, including the International Drag Racing Hall Of Fame (Ocala, Fla.) and the Motorsports Hall Of Fame (Novi, Mich.).

Chrisman had been driving dragsters since 1950, when he brought his converted dry-lakes car to the Santa Ana, Calif., airport runway that C.J. Hart had turned into the world’s first commercial drag strip.

In 1953, this flathead-powered “rail job” broke drag racing’s 140-mph barrier. A year earlier, Art had become one of the first five Bonneville racers to exceed 200 mph (even before the prestigious “Two Club” had been conceived).

Ironically, one of Chrisman’s most-significant contributions is also among the most-overlooked: His unintentional role in supercharging the fledging nostalgia movement.

No one could have predicted the far-reaching impact of Art’s smoke-filled exhibition runs at both the 1978 March Meet and the 1979 U.S. Nationals. The resultant national publicity inspired other oldtimers to drag long-abandoned slingshots out of barns and backyards. A sport within a sport was born, and the rest — like so much of Chrisman’s life — is history.