Dragsters of the 60s & 70s

The 1960s and 1970s represented the heyday of professional drag racing, and during those decades, the bold, recognizable cars were reflections of the personalities of the best drivers. Whether it was the it was the screaming Top Fuel Swamp Rat of "Big Daddy" Garlits or the "Bounty Huntress" Mustang Funny Car of Shirley Muldowney, fans knew the cars as well as they knew the drivers.

  1. Swamp Rat

    • The Swamp Rat dragster of "Big Daddy" Don Garlits evolved through 37 generations between 1956 and 2003, but none were more exciting than Swamp Rat numbers 13 and 14. While Garlits was racing Swamp Rat 13 in Long Beach in 1970, the car's transmission exploded, ripping the car into two pieces and severely injuring Garlits' foot. Garlits and the Swamp Rat could not be deterred, however, and the driver was back the next year with Swamp Rat 14, a rear-engine dragster that would influence Top Fuel design for years to come.

    The Snake

    • Don "The Snake" Prudhomme made his impression on the professional drag racing scene throughout the 1960s, but it was when he got behind the wheel of the Wynn's Winder dragster, a 396-cubic-inches mid-engine Top Fuel car, in 1969 that he became one of the greats. Back-to-back Nationals wins put him in the same class as "Big Daddy" Garlits, and although he stopped racing Top Fuel in 1973, he remained a formidable and popular Funny Car competitor for the duration of the 1970s.

    The Mongoose

    • Tom McEwen did not have the most wins among professional drag racers, but he knew how to sell a spectacle. Intent on capitalizing on Don Prudhomme's success, McEwen christened himself "The Mongoose" and challenged "The Snake" to a duel. In 1964, he beat Prudhomme's orange Greer-Black-Prudhomme dragster, but later rematches were more evenly divided between the two drivers. More significantly, the rivalry became iconic, and by the time the pair were racing in Mattel-sponsored Hot Wheels Funny Cars in the early 1970s, they were the biggest names in drag racing.

    The Bounty Huntress

    • Shirley Muldowney worked her way into the man's world of drag racing by showing how versatile she could be. Her first successes came in the 1960s in Top Gas dragsters, but in the early 1970s she switched to Funny Cars, winning the 1971 IHRA Southern Nationals in a secondhand Mustang she bought from Connie Kalitta. A series of fires inspired Muldowney to switch to Top Fuel in 1974, and she excelled behind the wheel in that class. She won the NHRA Winston Top Fuel championship in 1977 and added two more Top Fuel titles before her career was over.