THE DRAGSTER CONCEPT
In the summer of 1950 and quite by accident, Santa Ana (Calif.) drag racer Dick Kraft stripped the frame rails off his roadster one Sunday, saving a ton of weight, and came up with an ungainly creature called "the Bug." He ran this bare-frame-railed piece at the Orange County Drags at Santa Ana that summer, and unbeknownst to him ran what many acknowledge as the first "dragster."

"There was a group of us in the middle 1950s that cared only about going as fast as we could on the quarter. We weren't concerned with looks; we just wanted to go fast. The two best in the early days were Art Chrisman with that 140-mph #25 roadster and Cook & Bedwell, who ran the 166-mph time.

"I went the same way Kraft did. I stripped the body off my car and shed 150 pounds by doing that. The car became faster because it was lighter.

"The racers picked up on that even back in 1950. When Kraft showed up at Santa Ana they wouldn't let him run; you weren't supposed to do that to the race car. Well, next week, nine cars showed up like Kraft's and Santa Ana had to come up with a dragster class." - Don Garlits

SLICKS
Alex Xydias' So-Cal Speed Shop in Burbank, Calif. produced "asphalt slicks" in 1953, recaps with seven inches of tread and purportedly four times the traction of a regular tire. In early 1957,Bill Kretch's Inglewood Tire Company and Bruce Alexander's Bruce's Slicks produced improved slicks and late that year, Marv Rifchin produced pure drag racing tires molded from special soft compounds at his M&H Tire Company in Watertown, Mass. Of the three, Rifchin's M&H Company is still pumping out donuts, now in Gardner, Mass.

"I'm not sure of the year, maybe 1957 or so, but I knew this Modified racer who wanted me to come down to South Carolina and go to a drag race with him and bring some tires. There were other racing tire makers out there then; Bruce Alexander of Bruce's Racing Slicks, made a treadless rear tire, but I wasn't that big on the design of it. His slick was based on a passenger car carcass, and under full acceleration the center of the tire would really come up on the car. I wanted to build a tire that would limit that somewhat.

"We used a soft compound and made a 7.50x15, 7-inch wide, 28-inch tall rear slick. In general, I'd say our rear tires were shaped more like a racing slick than a passenger tire. Today, they'd more resemble a Super Stock tire than a contemporary Top Fuel slick.

"I went down to the dragstrip in Chester, S.C., and guys like Garlits, Setto Postoian, and Bob Sullivan were down there racing and they all tried the tires. From what I could tell and from the orders we got,,I'd say they were well-received." - Marv Rifchin

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