AMT’s Piranha:
The Missing Link

4/8/05

henever the subject of successful back-motored race cars comes up, I’m invariably bothered by the omissions of some significant creations of the '50s and ’60s. Granted, Don Garlits and Connie Swingle built the one that went the fastest, made the most money, had the greatest design influence, and undoubtedly saved the most lives. So, Garlits wins; no contest! (No letters, please.)

However, prior to the ’71 Swamp Rat, not every mid-engined fuel car was impossible to drive and “bad luck.” The one that possibly worked best of all gets no respect. It was a car without a class.

Although the AMT Piranha was heavily promoted in national magazine ads as “The World’s Fastest Funny Car!", it really wasn’t, and everyone knew it. Nor did it fit the criteria for dragsters of that era, which were longer, mounted their motors up front, and didn’t have a weird plastic body (supposedly molded from the same stuff as AMT’s model kits) that looked like a bathtub — and was satirized as such by cruel cartoonists and columnists. Top Fuel racers called it a slow dragster. Funny Car racers refused to race it. They all hated the Piranha, whatever it was.

In the mid-60s, you never knew what was going to pull through the pit gate on any given weekend. When the brand-new Piranha showed up at Beeline Dragway for shakedown runs, promoter Rick Lynch suggested a three-round match race with Frank Pedregon’s outrageous Competition Coupe. (Photo by J.R. Hollenbeck)

Driver Walt Stevens and mechanic Joe Anahory didn’t much give a crap what anybody was saying; they were too busy pinching themselves! Imagine: two young guys getting handed the keys to a complete race car, trailer and tow car in the exhibition-crazed mid-Sixties — plus an expense account, plus 400 bucks a week, each. All they had to do was get it built by May and hit the road.

The unconventional chassis was designed and constructed in Phoenix by Fred Smith, with fulltime assistance from Stevens, at AMT Corporation’s Speed And Custom Equipment Division. (Ironically, Smith had previously helped Garlits build Swamp Rat slingshots.) Gene Winfield, the customizer, was in charge of the Arizona operation, where AMT was producing full-sized, gull-winged, Corvair-powered, rear-engined street cars. AMT had acquired production rights from the Marbon Chemical division of Borg-Warner, which built a prototype coupe to demonstrate a super-strong plastic compound called Cycolac. Originally dubbed “CRV” (for Cycolac Research Vehicle) by Borg-Warner, the name was changed to Piranha when AMT jumped into the production-car business.

Utilizing the then-new process of thermoforming, Winfield molded the race car’s one-off body from two sheets of Cycolac, which were glued together at the side seam. One reason this wingless, scary-short creation handled so well was an innovative air-intake system, installed behind the grille opening. Air vented out through the “hood” reportedly produced significant downforce, thereby preventing the Piranha from getting airborne at 190-plus.

Anahory, one-third of Brooklyn’s infamous Dead-End Kids dragster team, knew how to build big horsepower. This time, he also needed maximum durability. His nitro-burning Chrysler would be running multiple match races each week from May through September, and almost nobody carried spares in those days. Remarkably, Joe’s original 392 survived the entire season! In a recent interview, Walt Stevens revealed that Anahory “borrowed” the winning combination from buddies Bob Skinner and Tom Jobe: “It was a ‘Surfers motor’: 98 percent, lotta lead, lotta blower,” said Stevens.