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Bookings were not hard to find in the summer of ’66.
AMT’s impressive promotional package included model
kits of both the race car and the road car in stores, plus
full-page, four-color ads of Stevens in action in Car Craft
and other major magazines. Additional tie-ins were generated
by television appearances of the street Piranha in a hit series,
“The Man From U.N.C.L.E.,” starring Robert Vaughn.
Stevens and Anahory barnstormed across the country, commanding
top dollar to match-race local heroes or make exhibition singles.
Fans loved the Piranha as much as racers hated it.
With the exception of the slingshot-framed Garlits Darts,
nothing else billed as a Funny Car was smoking the tires to
half-track or beyond, nor consistently clocking low-eight-second
ETs at speeds around 190 mph. Largely overlooked in all the
controversy was the fact that no other back-motored car had
ever steered so straight at such speeds. “It drove like
a Cadillac,” Stevens insisted. “I never had any
problems at all.”
Would you climb into this seat? His peers
thought Walt Stevens was nuts, but Fred Smith’s unconventional
chassis always went straight.
Durability was always the team’s top priority. Nevertheless,
the 1700-pound Piranha regularly ran respectable 8.20s and
.30s, with speeds in the mid-to-upper 180s. Its best-ever
performance is a subject of some debate, depending upon who’s
telling the story and whose clocks are believed. Although
Motor City Dragway once handed him a timeslip reading 7.82/198,
Walt says that 8.08 and 193 were the best legitimate times
recorded with him in the seat.
At the conclusion of the contract, in October 1966, AMT briefly
turned the Piranha over to Don Cook and Connie Swingle in
an all-out attempt to break the 200-mph barrier for Funny
Cars. Again, whether or not this speed was actually achieved
is open to debate. Contrary to Swingle’s claims of a
double-century run elsewhere, Stevens remembers Swingle hitting
197 at Lions, and believes that to be the car’s top
speed ever. (Ironically, four years later, it would be Swingle
who solved the initial handling problems that Garlits experienced
in his back-motored Swamp Rat, by slowing down the steering
ratio from a slingshot’s 6:1 to 10:1.)
By the time Car Craft published a major
feature (Oct. 1966 issue), AMT’s contract with Walt
Stevens and Joe Anahory was about to expire. The accompanying
illustration revealed conventional slingshot-dragster front
suspension. Wheelbase measured a mere 105 inches! (Illustration
by William A. Moore)
In 1967, the Piranha vanished. Nearly four decades later,
the infamous car without a class is reportedly intact and
undergoing restoration in southern California. This summer,
AMT’s 1/25-scale model will be reintroduced (by RC 2/ERTL)
in a box bearing the original artwork, showing Stevens boiling
the hides at Irwindale. Maybe now the controversial Piranha
will finally get its due as a successful forerunner of the
fuel dragsters that followed in the 1970s, and ever since. 
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