At 87, ‘Big Daddy’ not slowing down
Drag racer plans to take electric car to 200 mph
Asked why, at 87, long retired and legend secured, he hopes to drag-race an electric car at Palm Beach International Raceway to a record speed of 200 mph, “Big Daddy” Don Garlits pauses and chuckles.
“It’s a long story,” he says from his Ocala office.
This is the great thing about Garlits. His fame came in eyenumbing bursts. He practically invented the sport of drag racing and, over the decades, became the first to drive 170, 180, 200, 240, 250 and 270 mph over a quarter-mile race.
But he talks in winding, wonderful stories that pay little attention to speed or finish lines. He takes in time and history with a storyteller’s arc. Take the simple question of his first car.
“I got it in 1949,’’ he says. “It was 1944, a V-8 with 85 horsepower that I bought with my own money. I was senior in high school. That’s when my mom allowed me to have a car. I was 17, got my accounting diploma from high school and everything was fine.
“You didn’t need college with that diploma. I got this nice job at Moss Brothers, a high-rise department store, in Tampa. Three months into the job, my stepfather said, ‘You don’t like
this, do you?’
“We had a dairy with 50 head [of cattle]. I had worked night and morning milking cows. But he knew me. He could look at my face and tell I wasn’t happy. ‘You love cars,’ he said, “That’s what you should be doing.’
“I said, ‘Mom thinks mechanics are grease monkeys.’ He said, ‘You’ve got to live your life. If you do something you love, you’ll be successful, because you’ll spend so much time at it, it won’t be work.’
“Here I am 87 years old. I came in at a quarter ‘til 9 this morning to the office, and I’ll be here until 5. I love it. I want to be working until the day I have my heart attack. I’m sure I will be, too.
“That’s what I always tell the young people who ask, ‘What should I do?’ I say, ‘Do what you love.’ ”
You see that? Garlits didn’t just tell a good story of his life. He weaved in some healthy advice about age, too. But then age and Garlits have lined up for years. Back in 1962, he was considered old in his 30s by the upstart drag-racers in their 20s.
“Daddy” Don Garlits, they called him, considering his age and his wife, Pat, had two daughters. But when he won, when he set the record for speed, the announcer said, “We’ll have to call him ‘Big Daddy’ now.”
So Big Daddy he became until now, at 87, he’s ready to race again. His professed long story to Saturday’s starting line began in 2000, a decade after drag racer Darrell Gwynn’s accident left him a quadriplegic.
Garlits and another racer, Mike Garrett, secretly built an electric dragster from a golf cart. Gwynn wheeled into the car at the U.S. Nationals in 2000 and went an emotional 20 mph before 100,000 fans.
“Everyone was crying,’’ Garlits said.
Gwynn then had the idea to build electric replicas of his and Garlits’ famed dragsters for charity for spinal cord research. They never tested them for pure speed, but they sold for a quartermillion dollars.
It all got Garlits thinking how fast an electric car could go. He loves the topfuel dragsters that burn nitromethane, but like many sees the efficiency of electricity in the world. So five years ago he began to apply his mind to electricity and speed.
They lightened the fuel dragster. They altered some mechanics. The car he’ll drive Saturday weighs about 1,500 pounds — or 800 lighter than when he started with the electric idea. Much of that is the better technology of batteries. He’s driven it up to 185.6 mph, he says.
He hoped to push for the 200 mph barrier at the National Hot Rod Association’s Gatornationals in Gainesville. But the NHRA demanded so much costly safety support from added firefighters to a forklift to move the car if needed.
He turned to the competing International Hot Rod Association with a track in West Palm Beach.
“They were elated I’d come there,’’ he said. “And I’m ready to go.”
The last time Garlits raced in public was 2003. He took his namesake Swamp Rat 34 out of his drag-racing museum and set a personal best 318.54 mph at the NHRA Nationals.
That was top-fuel gas. No one’s driven an electric car more than the 200 mph. Garlits will try on Saturday. He will make a few attempts in Jupiter between the IHRA Summit SuperSeries bracket series race, and gates open at 3 p.m.
“All our calculations and figuring says we can do it,’’ he said, before adding with a voice long on experience, “But calculations don’t race, do they?”