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Click on any image to get the bigger picture |
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We will start this pot pourri of drag racing with this unusual 6 wheeled car. My rather speculative suggestion that it must have been a prototype for Lady Penelope's latest limo appears not to have been the case after all. Paul Plested has been in touch to say he thinks it is John Dodd's twin Rolls Royce Merlin powered car which was built after his original single engined effort burnt to the ground in Germany. James Death disagrees and says that the car is the (single engined) Jameson Merlin which featured in the Guiness Book of Records as the most powerful road car. |
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This is a tractor puller named Knightmare which was powered by three 440 cubic inch Chrysler engines which makes it one of the largest displacement (and slowest) vehicles ever at Santa Pod. |
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Back in the really early days of drag racing, before Christmas trees were developed, races were started by the flag man. Clearly the tree was down on this occasion which allowed Chief Start Line Marshall Stu 'The Midnight Cowboy' Bradbury to practice his own exuberant style of flag starts. |
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Stu is really going for gold in this shot. |
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We have become used to seeing a small army of marshals and machinery swinging efficiently into action during those inevitable oil spillages and after minor showers. Well it wasn't always like that as this infernal device proves. Propane gas was used in an attempt to dry the strip - it didn't last long. |
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This is a bit more like it. Santa Pod Raceway's experience with jet engines used in their various demonstration cars led to this early lorry-mounted strip dryer. |
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Mind you, if it's jets on lorries you are into, look no further. Steve Murty's very tidy looking ProJet truck seen in the pits at Santa Pod. |
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Steve Murty on the strip at the Pod. |
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Now this really is a sight for sore eyes - nine fuel funny cars and the sun beating down. A chocolate bar to Andy Rogers (alias Tog of Eurodragster) for providing the following IDs from left to right - The Force (Ron Picardo), Gladiator (Allan Herridge), Houndog (Owen Hayward), The Snowman (Gene Snow), John Woolfe Racing (Dennis Priddle), The Blue Max (Raymond Beadle), Paeppen (Tom Anderson), Flygvapnet (Lee Anders Hasselstrom) and Ragnarok (Hasse Fromm). |
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I have seen quite a few vehicles streak up the strip at Santa Pod but nothing quite like this! |
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Combine a broken window above a urinal in one of the malodorous Santa Pod toilets and a wag with a marker pen and you get 'Observed runs only' - well really! |
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A reminder that drag racing was always hard on engines, nice to see a bit of humour in the face of adversity. |
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This looks like an extremely expensive repair job even to my untutored eye. The way the connecting rod has been mangled shows the incredible power the engines were making even back in the '80s. |
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A reminder too that drag racing has always been dangerous and not just for the fuel cars. Colin Gill and Nick Hickford's competition altered is pictured on its trailer after an unpleasant looking shunt. |
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This gent was about to take off using a NASA rocket back pack (as used in the opening ceremony for the Los Angeles Olympic Games) for motivation. Dick Thompson has kindly identified the intrepid aviator as Kinnie Gibson of the American Flying Belt Corporation and even sent me a scan of his business card. |
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My photographic attempts to capture the rocket man in flight were not wholly successful. I have therefore come up with this surreal version of what was a very poorly exposed shot which I think could easily pass for the Lunar landscape. Well, if you ignore the presence of the Guinness beer tent that is . . . |
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Talk of rocket men leads inevitably to the greatest of them all. The late, very great 'Slam'n' Sammy Miller is pictured here being introduced to the Santa Pod crowd. Sammy is the fastest and quickest man of all time over the quarter mile with a staggering 3.583 seconds at 386.26 mph, this was run at Santa Pod at the July meeting of 1984. |
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And here is another drag racing legend - on the left is 'Big Daddy' Don Garlits who was a giant figure in the sport for a long, long time. Amongst a large number of other achievements, Garlits was the first man to make a rear engined fuel dragster really competitive. He worked on the design whilst recuperating from an horrific accident when the clutch on his slingshot rail exploded and literally cut the car in two taking part of his foot with it. The rest, as they say, is history. Herb Andrews wanted to know who the other chap was so he e-mailed the great man himself - back came the answer - Peter Billinton. |
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I agree with these two
blokes wholeheartedly. In my book Dennis Priddle
was the pre-eminent figure in drag racing during the period covered by The
Acceleration Archive. He was a great driver and a superb engine tuner and
chassis builder, he was also very useful with body panels. There is no room
here to catalogue his many achievements but, suffice to say, if the great Don
Garlits trusted him to drive his car, that ought to tell you
something. |
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From left to right : Alan Wigmore (commentator and leading light of the National Drag Racing Club), Dennis Priddle and 'Diddy' David Hamilton (Radio 1 DJ). The venue is Snetterton and, if my memory serves me correctly, Dennis was explaining that he would be unable to race that day due to a grenaded engine. He had earlier been rattling a lot of very expensive broken parts about in the sump pan which can be seen on the ground. |
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And now to finish with, a real bit of drag racing history. On 20 April 1975 Dennis Priddle driving his Mr Revell slingshot dragster raced Peter Crane in the Stormbringer rear engined car. The result was a win by Priddle 6.04 seconds at 218 mph to Peter's losing 6.79/204 effort. This picture was taken as they waited for the lights to run down. |
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Dennis Priddle and Mr Revell are presented to the crowd after the world record breaking 6.04 second pass. This record was to last until the 1990s before being surpassed. The quality of these two pictures, which unusually for me were scanned from prints rather than slides, is not wonderful. I have no hesitation in including them in order to record this historic event. |
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