Untitled Document

"SLINGSHOT-STYLE" DRAGSTER CHASSIS

Performance cars had drivers behind the rear-axle as early as 1902, but for the purposes of drag racing, Mickey Thompson rates as the guy who popularized the profile. His streamlined 97.5-inch dragster of 1954 featured shortened rear axles and the housings so the tread was only 36 inches wide. The driver sat behind the rear axle in a tubular steel structure that made the driver look like "a rock in a slingshot," according to racer Leroy Neumayer. At launch, the front wheels barely touched the ground because the set up allowed the car to leave harder than anything that preceded it.

"The slingshot dragster caught on because they moved so hard out of the gate. The real reason people called them "slingshots" was because they looked like they had been shot out of a slingshot. The rear tires back then were inadequate and were so until the very end of the front-engine era. The slingshot rocked back on the tires, got the front end up and off it went. Trouble was that when the cars started running 230-mph with the big 12-inch slicks, wheelstands happened a lot, forcing the racers to put as much as 250 pounds on the front end of the car. When I came out with my rear-engine car, I had no weight on the front. A big reason why I won was because the car was lighter.

"By the way, Mickey Thompson was not the first driver with a slingshot. Years before he had that streamlined slingshot, a guy in Jacksonville, Florida set the seat behind the rear tires because he was racing on the beach. Obviously, the guy needed all the traction he could get. - Don Garlits

REAR-ENGINE DRAGSTER CHASSIS

Most credit Don Garlits with popularizing the engine behind the driver approach (which he did do) in 1971 with his 215-inch long creation, but he is pre-dated by many drivers in the actual going of that route. A year earlier, Dwane Ong's "Pawnbroker" (above photo) won the AHRA Nationals in New York with a rear-motored dragster, and racers such as the Henslee-Cook roadster (1955), the fabled Speed Sport roadster team of "Red" Greth and Lyle Fisher (1956-1964) and Tony Nancy's 22 Jr. Top Gas dragster (1964) also experienced success with rear motor cars.