Don "Big Daddy" Garlits

The greatest drag racer of all time

Don Garlits is known as the greatest drag racer of all time. The NHRA made it official in 2001, when he was named number one of the Top 50 drivers from NHRA's first 50 years. He has been almost reverently called "Big Daddy" since the 1960s.

Garlits was born in Florida in 1932. During his high school years, he liked to work on cars and race on the street, but he soon graduated to the strip. He built his first Hemi-powered dragster in 1956. The car was the first of the famous Swamp Rats. In November 1957, Garlits astounded the drag racing world, with a 176.40 mph blast in the Swamp Rat at Brooksville, Fla. California cam grinder Ed Iskenderian advertised this feat to a skeptical West Coast crowd that had not yet seen a dragster exceed 170 mph. The drag racing establishment did not accept Garlits until he was lured west in 1959, and he beat them at meets in California and Arizona. Garlits would eventually build 34 Swamp Rats. He was the first to officially break the 200 mph and 250 mph barriers.

Garlits suffered severe burns in an explosion and fire in 1959 and briefly retired, but he was back in the driver's seat a few months later. He won the NHRA U.S. Nationals eight times. His most famous U.S. Nationals win was in 1967, a year when he was uncompetitive throughout the season and unable to break into the six-second bracket. He finally broke through on the final run of the Nationals, against James Warren, with a 6.77-second clocking.

In 1970 Garlits lost half of his foot when his transmission blew apart on the starting line at a race in California. In the hospital he began to lay out a revolutionary top fuel racer. As soon as possible, he built the car, Swamp Rat XIV, which would be the first successful rear engine dragster. He won the 1971 NHRA Winternationals with it, proving the concept. Soon, every competitive top fuel drag racer was in a rear engine car—powered by a Hemi^® engine, of course.