NHRA Drag Racing Royalty: Don Prudhomme
10 months ago Racing
— HONORED AT SAN DIEGO AUTO MUSEUM WITH PERMANENT EXHIBIT
— ARMY ARROW FEATURED AT GRAND OPENING PARTY ENTRANCE
— THIS PART I SEGMENT CELEBRATES SNAKE’S ICONIC MOPAR® TOP FUEL DRAGSTERS
Don “The Snake” Prudhomme shared his memories of his past drag racing exploits and championships with the invited guests at the San Diego Automotive Museum, and one of the things he did was to thank his long-time friend Roland Leong for helping him early in his career. Many of his friends were in attendance and lots of great stories were told! Considered a living legend, 82-year-old Prudhomme came in right behind John Force and Don “Big Daddy” Garlits for the #3 all-time driver standings when the NHRA put together the Top 50 of All Time list.
As a driver, Prudhomme won 49 NHRA career victories and he had amassed a total of 112 NHRA National Event wins as a driver and team owner. In 2013, a feature film called Snake & Mongoose was released chronicling his friendship with Tom “The Mongoose” McEwen, with highlights of the Hot Wheels Plymouth ‘Cuda and Duster that debuted for 1970 racing season.
LEGENDARY ARMY ARROW GREETED THE INVITED GUESTS
This car secured his fourth consecutive NHRA Funny Car World Championship (1976-1979), the 1979 Plymouth Arrow. In late 1976, after winning is first Funny Championship in his Army Monza, it was announced that he’d be building a brand-new car with a brand-new body design, the 1977 Plymouth Arrow. “It’s going to be good to be back in the Plymouth camp again,” he told National Dragster. With George Kirby, Prudhomme and crew actually designed and built this new body. And the Arrow body went on to be an aerodynamic advantage, delivering three more NHRA Championships for the Snake, 1977, 1978, 1979, all with sponsorship by the U.S. Army.
PERMANENT SNAKE EXHIBIT
Inside the museum, there’s a total of 109 of Snake’s NHRA “Wally” National Event Winner trophies and for visitors there’s a video with highlights from his 47-year career. It’s great to see all this being shared with the public, plus some great exposure for the sport of NHRA drag racing in general. And it’s a permanent display!
THE BOOK ON SALE IN THE GIFT SHOP
Don’s book “My Life Beyond the 1320” from CarTech covers a lot of ground on his youth, early challenges and racing career in general. He tells about dropping out of high school and painting cars at his father’s body shop, then all the way to becoming a drag race legend, with at one time a four-car nitro team ownership and private jet. 192 pages of highly detailed race and personal info and plenty of rare photos of his quarter-mile ventures. ISBN #10-1613255187. Available in the San Diego Automotive Museum Gift Shop (staffed by the pictured Gianni Franco) and online book vendors, plus direct, autographed by Prudhomme at: www.snakeracinggear.com
SAN DIEGO AUTO MUSEUM, BALBOA PARK
A quick tour around the fantastic museum prior to the Snake Exhibit introduction, a great variety of pristine and historical vehicles for sure! And a museum with an exhibit on “The Snake” it’s certainly appropriate to have an original, one-owner 1992 Dodge V10 Vipers on display as well, a 1 of 285 car. The example shown is from nearby Carl Burger Dodge/Chrysler/Jeep®/Ram dealer. Also featured is a classic U.S. NAVY 1942 Willys MB (Military Model B) “Jeep” with 40-hp 124-cid L134 inline four-cylinder engine, with 3-speed transfer case.
HEMI® ENGINES ON DISPLAY
HEMI® engines are well represented at the San Diego Automotive Museum! The “Radical Custom” ’29 “T” Roadster/Pickup is a rolling piece of automotive art, highlighted by its Red Ram HEMI engine sitting between the frame rails, equipped with a tri of Stromberg 97 carbs atop an Offenhauser intake manifold. It came from the Whitworth family for special display next to the Snake Exhibit (Don and the late Ralph Whitworth were great friends).
With a 331-cid Chrysler HEMI engine under its hood (bored to 364-cid, Hilborn injected), in 1955 this Powder Blue-hued “aerodynamically-enhanced” rear-engined ’27 Ford Roadster (built by Bill Niekamp) set a new record at Bonneville with a run of 203.338-mph blast on the salt. This historically significant car was the first single-engined roadster to pass the 200-mph mark.
EARLY DAYS
In 1958, he had a paper route and with the money he made he bought a ’48 Mercury, a wrecked car his dad, who had a body shop, helped him fix up. Don eventually started painting cars at the body shop. He had a few more cars and then his big break into drag racing came as a result of getting into a Car Club in Burbank, California, called the “Road Kings”. That’s where he met Tommy Ivo, and went on tour with him. One of Prudhomme’s first assignments was installing a blown 392-cid Dave Zeuschel-built HEMI engine in Ivo’s Kent Fuller-built dragster. Soon after buying the car, at Bakersfield, 1962, at age 20, Prudhomme drove it to a big win at the storied Smoker’s March Meet, outlasting some 90 entries.
But Don still kept his trusty spray gun at close reach just in case the drag racing thing didn’t turn out, he could always fall back on painting cars. Years later, he shared his inner thoughts with Steve Evans, saying this: “I was a kid that didn’t do very well in school, didn’t know where I was going, didn’t have any idea about my future, I thought perhaps I’d end up painting cars for the rest of my life.”
KEITH BLACK CALLS HIM
One day in 1962, while Prudhomme was at the shop of chassis builder Kent Fuller, there was a phone call coming in from a guy that was trying to contact him about a job. The voice on the other end of the phone identified himself as being Keith Black, and he was offering Don to have lunch with him and Tom Greer, a bucks-up machinery shop owner. It was about having young Prudhomme drive a new dragster that was about to come to life. Prudhomme said “YES” to the job offer, and the orange-colored car became the “Greer-Black-Prudhomme” dragster and the deal was for Don to do the driving, along with helping out with other chores (running errands, etc.), and for that he was to receive 50 percent of the winnings. And there was money to be made right there in Southern California, doing match races against the top guns in the class. With Greer’s hefty financial backing, and Keith Black’s engine and clutch savvy, plus the lightning-quick driving reflexes from Don, the G-B-P car was nearly unstoppable! In the years the car ran, the history books quote that it saw a total number of event victories in the neighborhood of 230 times, with less than a handful or so of reported losses (7). The money that was generated was very impressive, and Prudhomme got his half of it right after the final rounds. Real steady income, week after week. And over the next decades, he kept on winning with a variety of cars.
HOT ROD MAGAZINE COVER
November 1962 saw Don and the Keith Black Racing Engines / Greer Machinery Special Dragster, with Laura Evans, in all its glory grace the cover of Hot Rod Magazine. 392 HEMI engine, high-gear only, original chassis was built by Rod Stucky, re-worked by Kent Fuller, 110-inch wheelbase. Wayne Ewing fabricated the unique injector scoop and body. Tony Nancy upholstery. Don Prudhomme painted it. Car ran a best of 7.77 seconds at 191 mph.
THE SWITCH TO YELLOW PAINT
The orange hue was replaced by a bright yellow (reportedly for a scale plastic model car company that the deal never came through) and when Steve Davis restored the car, the decision was made to go with the yellow paint. Today, the historic machine is part of the Bruce Meyer’s car collection.
HAWAIIAN FUEL DRAGSTER DRIVER IN 1965
Next came an opportunity to drive for a young guy from Honolulu, Hawaii, who had moved over to the mainland and built a stunningly beautiful blue dragster called the “Hawaiian.” Equipped with the best of the best from Keith Black Racing Engines. The car owner was Roland Leong, who knew that if he combined a KB powerplant and got a great driver in Prudhomme, it would be a winner. By now, Don had picked up the nickname “Snake” (given to him by crew member Joe Purcell) because of his starting-line quickness. And win races it did, after seeing victory at the season-opening Winternationals in 1965, the two young guns went on tour and smoked ’em, scoring win after win and only getting beat by one car, the Ramchargers dragster, and that only happened twice! When the duo also won the biggest race on the NHRA tour that year, the U.S. Nationals, there was no question that this was a winning combination, him driving, Roland owning and Keith Black’s smarts. Prudhomme by now had the confidence to hang up the spray gun for good and start to carry his driver’s helmet instead! The Hawaiian reportedly grossed about 65K during that year; however, unlike the previous deal he had with the G-B-P entry, the majority of the winnings went to the car owner, Leong.
Here’s how Prudhomme described it to CARS Magazine in 1976: “We took the Greer-Black-Prudhomme car on a sort of holiday to Hawaii for the dedication of a new drag strip there. We met a Hawaiian guy who could hardly speak English at the time. His name was Roland Leong and he came from a fairly wealthy family. He told me he was building a fantastic fuel dragster and he wanted me to drive it. We were having some financial problems with the G-B-P car so I accepted. Roland came over to the states, we built the car and then took it on tour. We won the Winternationals and U.S. Nationals and I was being pretty cocky. You know how a young guy can get — I was getting to thinking that I was a pretty good driver, and I thought I could make more money running my own car.”
B&M CAR
Besides having the desire to make better money while racing, one thing that did come up was the fact that some had said the only reason Prudhomme was winning so much was because of the high amount of available power that Black provided. This talk really got under his skin, so much in fact that the very next year, he quit the Hawaiian team and got a gig with his neighbor Bob Spar, who lived down the street from him in Granada Hills. He drove and ran the show with the “B&M Torquemaster” car in a program where he could campaign the car all season long to provide exposure to the automatic transmission business that Bob and his brother Don owned in Chatsworth, California. During the year in the B&M car, reality had set in for Don Prudhomme, he really didn’t know that much about engines and yes, he now realized that the engine was just as big of a part as the driver in winning races! So with help from “Golden Greek” Karamesines while on the road, he did start an all-out effort to learn what there was to learn about the inside workings of nitromethane as applied to the Chrysler HEMI engines. Snake reflects on that timeframe with the B&M dragster: “Didn’t do too well at all. The car ran fair but I got beat quite a bit and ran out of money.”
WYNN’S WINDER
Big news for Snake was setting up his own operation for 1969 with a Top Fuel car, powered by the 426 HEMI engine. The Chassis by Don Long with snake-skin body in aluminum by Tom Hanna. His career took another big step forward thanks to Carl Wynn, who listened to Don’s request for support of his car, and the result was a much-needed sponsorship deal with the Wynn’s Oil Company. With this modernized car, he was off to a great start; however, things didn’t always go so smooth on the race track. While racing side-by-side at Indy against fellow Top Fuel pilot Jim Nicoll, the clutch violently exploded in the Nicoll car and the force of it blew the chassis into two pieces, with the front section (including engine but no transmission) went flying out in front and passed Prudhomme after the finish line in a freaky sight. When Snake got his winning car stopped, he climbed out and sat for a second, saying: “I think I’ll quit. Oh my God, I saw that car go by, I couldn’t believe it! There was no back section on it, nothing…” He had run three 6.4s in winning, but after the finals, he had seriously considered quitting drag racing all together. Eventually, the Top Fuel cars switched to a rear-engine chassis configuration and things were much safer starting in the early 1970s.
THE WEDGE IN MID-1971: TOO MUCH WEIGHT AND EXCESSIVE DOWNFORCE
John Buttera built the 220-inch wheelbase chassis and Nye Frank did the magnesium body. It “loaded” the engine too much and only ran 6.70s first time in competition. The car performed better once the rear bodywork was removed, and replaced with a traditional rear wing. Snake’s car shed its skin but retained the Keith Black 426 HEMI engine, Crowerglide clutch, two-speed transmission and Halibrand quick-change rear axle.
THE YELLOW FEATHER
Aerodynamics wasn’t much of a priority for Snake in late 1971 as he had Kent Fuller do up the super-lightweight chassis for an all-new Top Fuel car. Said to weigh in at just 1,190 pounds, and with aluminum heads (fitted with magnesium rocker arms) on the stroked Keith Black “Elephant” engine, it was a potent performer! In January of 1972, this car, Snake’s “Yellow Feather” at Lion’s Drag Strip had run the world’s quickest run ever in drag racing history: a 6.174 ET.
SNAKE ON DESIRE
“It’s amazing what you can do when you want something really bad, the way I always wanted to race. I’d drive anything; just point me toward it. You look at anyone who stays in it and always does well and you know they have that will. The guy who had it big time was Don Garlits. He was the greatest,” said Prudhomme.
Here’s a video of Snake getting in the restored Greer-Black-Prudhomme dragster and firing it up after a long, long, long time had passed since he last drove it:
Coming up in Part II: Snake’s Mopar Funny Cars: Plymouth Barracuda, Plymouth Arrow, Dodge Omni!
Author: James Maxwell
