LEGEND LARRY RATHGEB PASSES AWAY

With a hoard of keen engineers, a hired wheelman, and one of the wildest cars of the era, Larry Rathgeb went to Talladega and did what nobody else in the world had been able do: he cracked the 200mph mark. Fifty years later, we’ve been given news that Rathgeb will be unable to celebrate that anniversary, having succumbed to Covid-19 at the age of 90.

Rathgeb started his engineering career at Chrysler, rising to the rank of lead engineer for racing development in the US by the mid ’60s. He worked closely with the teams running Chrysler products in stock car racing.

Rathgeb had a role in developing the Dodge Charger Daytona, but it was an impounded stolen-recovered example that enabled him to reach his crowning achievement. A Hemi-powered Charger press car was loaned out to a car magazine in Southern California. It was subsequently stolen, stripped, and left for dead.

Chrysler secured what was left and handed it over to engineering as a test mule.

Rathgeb used that mule to test-fit body changes that would go on to become the Daytona, and in test runs reached speeds of up to 240mph. He convinced his manager at Chrysler to permit the mule to qualify for the Talladega race in September 1969, where it ran painstakingly close at 199mph.

It put Rathgeb on his ‘last walk’ at Chrysler, however, as he had promised, the car wouldn’t exceed 185mph, for safety reasons — at the time the Formula 1 record stood at 152mph, while at Indianapolis it was 171mph. Nonetheless, Rathgeb, this time under the official orders of Dodge PR director Frank Wylie, took the car to Talladega in March 1970 for ‘transmission testing’. It took 30 laps and multiple adjustments, but the 200mph mark was finally broken, making the car the first in the world to lap a closed-circuit track at that speed.