I never got to meet Steve. However, all the guys at his shop are the greatest! It is always sad when the legends pass. I just got off the phone with my Dad to tell him the news. He said, "There aren't many of us old racers left. It may be sappy, but all the greats live on everytime a car goes down the track." Ya, a bit sappy, but true. God bless everyone this holiday season, especially those dealing with lossed loved ones. Regards, Shawn McDermott
i always managed to hit up BIG DADDY up i nbrainerd, some of us locals were running couple of corvettes ,mostly slow , but fun, then hit the pits and make don garlits tell stories about the old days, and ,in my opinion, the meeting of him and carbone ,front engine and the rear engine, that day ,was the last hold on a way of life that had been and drag racing has not been the same, don didnt have much to say for once, he just agreed, the years are going so fast, i thin k this about 1985
Are you really 92 years old? You state in your Public Profile here that you were born in 1913!!...Hell, rocks don't live that long!
It should have been a mismatch. In one lane you had Big Daddy Don Garlits driving his revolutionary rear-engine Top Fuel Dragster and in the other lane you had Steve Carbone in his conventional front-engine car. Big had qualified #1 in the field with a stunning 6.21 while Steve had qualified second with a 6.39 almost two tenths of a second behind the leader. Don has won his first four rounds effortlessly and spectacularly, clocking times of 6.28, 6.32, 6.25 and 6.31 while beating Al Friedman, Kansas John Wiebe, Arnie Behling and Carl Olson, while Steve had managed to go four rounds with the help of three red light starts by his opponents Chuck Kurzawa, Kenny Safford and Gary Cochran to go along with a 6.39 win over the only driver who got a green light against him, Tom Kaiser (in round two). Garlits had already won the Nationals three times while Steve had a grand total of one national event win to his credit. Yep, it should have been a mismatch and it was. Steve Carbone won the 1971 U.S. Nationals championship by beating the seemingly invincible Don Garlits 6.48 to a losing 6.65. Poor Don, he never had a chance!! The Top Fuel final round at Indy in 1971 will forever be remembered as the great burn-down race, the one where Steve Carbone outlasted Don Garlits in a battle of nerves and then won the biggest race in the sport. Once I got past the semi-finals I knew I had the race won, Carbone would say after the race. We knew what Don was doing and we planned accordingly. What Don was doing was running a new Keith Black motor with aluminum heads, and what Carbone knew was that the car would build up a lot of heat and power the longer it sat there. I wasnt going to stage first even if the headers melted off, Carbone said prior to the final round, and he was true to his word. What did he have to lose?, Don would lament after the race. I was running 6.20s and they were running 6.60s. The stage for the great burn-down may have been set three years earlier when Don beat Steve in the Indy final round, a round in which Steve thought that Don had taken a little too long to stage. Now, at a seemingly insurmountable disadvantage, Steve decided to do whatever it took to win the race. Consider that Don was running a 1,260 pound, rear-engine car with a big wing and a 473 cubic inch stroker motor with those new aluminum heads while Steve was running a front-engine car that weighed 1,550 pounds, had a stock 426 cubic inch engine with cast iron heads and side mounted air foils. On paper it looked like a mismatch. On the track it was. Bob Frey
Larry, I double dog dare you to fire up the coupe when it's done and not have a smile on your face and a little tear form in the corner of your eye. My condolences to his family and all of his friends. Frank
I don't have any personal Carbone stories. But I do remember watching that beautiful black car race out here at Orange County Raceway and Lions, and in the Winternats. I loved that car and always enjoyed seeing Steve race. He was one of the greats.
The Jalopy Journal
