Folks Of Interest You Can’t Handle The Truth.

Spending a few weeks snow birding on the west coast of Florida starting this week.
Finally got to see my hero Big Daddy’s Museum in Oscala. 86 yrs young!!!
For those who haven’t seen it. Make it your bucket list. What a collection of Hot Rod History.
Here’s an interesting view point from Big Daddy regarding new regulations and the future of drag racing and all of its political correctness.

 

Sorry loaded the correct video now.

 

Cool video.... Thanks!

 

He's right,we all like the flames and noise but the truth is fast is fast no matter how you do it.

 

Definitely not traditional. But when you see the father of drag racing jump in how can One not realize this is coming faster than we think.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Electric_Drag_Racing_Association

NEDRA maintains a list of fastest race times for both 1/4 and 1/8 mile ET's in the sanctioned classes, on this page.

As of December 2017, the quickest vehicle in the 1/4 mile is the Rocket (motorcycle), with a 6.940 second ET and a trap speed of 201.37 mph set at Virginia Motorsports Park in May 2012. This motorcycle became the first electric vehicle to break 200 mph in the quarter mile. Don Garlits' Swamp Rat has the dragster record, with an 7.274 second ET and a trap speed of 185.6 mph set at Bradenton Motorsport Park in August 2014.

 

I think it's fastinating (sic )
I've brought it up here a few times and it always disappeared from the Hamb.
Once they get the battery technology more advanced they will be going 300.
That is coming

 

I sure hope this expands and doesn’t disappear.
I see it as Very important to the future of hotrodding.
We’d be remiss to ignore this and lose it all.
The car market has profited and improved from early Hotrodders.
Who are we to think it should stop??
Certainly not our 86 yr old Big Daddy.

 

This is probably way off topic so I will try and bring my post back around.......I love battery/electric technology. My daily is a plug in hybrid. Not because I believe I will save the world, I just love the technology. I also have an electric bicycle. It's kinda scary fast.

I got to drive a Tesla Sport. It was amazing. 0-60 in like 3.8 with absolutely no fuss. Car just pinned you in the seat.

It's cool to see Garlits staying on the cutting edge of technology. You have to give him credit for still taking technology forward. Being as this site really isn't about that...........

The only time I met Garlits I was sort of dissapointed. Now everyone has off days and I do not know the history. Don was signing autographs (for free) as long as you bought something. I bought a t-shirt. It was pretty much, sign and move on. Across from Don, Tommy Ivo was handing out free color photos and signing them for free. He would sign and then thank you for coming to see him. He was serious when he said he was surprised people were still interested in seeing and meeting him and that he always appreciates it.

O.K............Up comes George Montgomery asking Don to sign a diecast for him. Don says "Is this for you or are you going to put it on eBay"?

I thought, Don, It's George Montgomery, just sign it. George says "It's for me" and Don says "I hope I don't see this on eBay".

Garlits is obviously the top of the heap where it comes to drag racing and no one can take that from him but it just wasn't a good initial impression for me which in the end, means absolutely nothing.

 

I think you may find the basic difference between Ivo and Garlits to be that Ivo is, was, and always will be, a showman. Garlits, on the other hand, was first, last, and always, a professional drag racer, driven to be the best by monetary concerns, as well as his comptetiveness (is that a word?). May they both live long, happy lives.

 

Big daddy makes some really good points.

 

I went about 12 years ago and got to talk with Big Daddy and I got his autograph on a tag that is attached to a spark plug from one of his Swamp Rats.

The history is incredible and well worth your time. HRP

 

Lotta years ago, Don was in the pits with an early Swamp Rat...I was standing, watching him spin bolts off the blower, then remove the left hand head. He then pulled the head off, and threw it right down in the dirt!
Next 'exercise' was replacing a burned exhaust valve, then ready to set it back on...I had picked up a shop towel, and said, "Don! A wipe?" He slowed down for just a moment, and I did a quick wipe of the surface... He smiled a quick 'grin', said "Thanks!" and set the head, bolts spinning with the 3/8" drive speed handle.
Busy man, but he always grinned and nodded when I'd catch a second of an exchanged glance...for years.

I recall a letter in the 'Post Entry' of Hot Rod magazine. It was a short note, stating that 'down here in Florida, I'm running a dragster. It has a Chrysler engine, and...' It was signed, "Don Garlits".
I worked at Westinghouse Electric for some months in 1960, my partner was a Floridian named Bob. Bob used to work for Don Garlits, drilling lug bores in mag wheels.

 

Great first hand experiences. Thanks for sharing.
Spent two days there. Would have loved to get in his garage. Damn thing looks like a plane hangar.
Fist item on the bucket list was checked off.

 

It sounds like the guilt trip that the cult of climate change has been peddling has managed to infect Big Daddy! Sorry but electric cars and the new "technology" coming our way is about as exciting as watching paint dry. I don't care if your Tesla plug in solar powered electric shaver does 0-60 in .001 seconds. Electric cars have no soul and never will. If the hobby dies with the demise of the ICE then so be it. I would rather stay at home than drive a shapeless electric pod.

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I'm wondering if you'd like to know the history and "truth" of electric cars?
I'm not sur you can handle the truth so I'll ask first

 

I know electric cars were right there at the birth of the automobile and actually competed in racing events against ICE cars. I also know that this utopian vision of all electric transportation would require terrawatts of additional grid capacity. Current electrical production is about 80% fossil fuel generated. The other 20% is nuclear and "renewables" and of that solar and wind account for about 10%.

One of the replys to this thread questioned why these types of threads dissapear on this forum... Its a forum dedicated to traditional hotrods and car culture. The people peddling electric vehicles want to basically erradicate that culture so thats why these types of threads haven't received a warm reception.

Like I said, if hot rodding dies with the rise of electric vehicles so be it... A history lesson on electric vehicles isn't going to change my mind.

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Yes don’t be so quick to judge without knowing history.
It goes beyond the 30’s and 40’s on the lakes.
Henry built one of his first to be electric. It goes much deeper but I’ll let you investigate on your own.
Yes electric is traditional.
But YOU do the study and open up your horizon.

As far as Big Daddy being infected.
He is the icon who infected a whole culture of hotrodding and hotrodders.
Not hardly. This man is just as sharp as a 30 yr old. No way he is infected unless your considering speed in any fashion. This push back reminds me of other push backs in the past when creative talent beat competitors with allky /nitrous crying the blues.
It’s all about being on top.

 

Super quick. Choppy and down and dirty.
Even though the first part has nothing to do with cars it's all part of the story.
Back then you had a few major players and pawns in this game. They all fit together nicely too. Inventors Nicola Tesla, Thomas Edison, bankers and finders Rockefeller & Jp Morgan, and engineer Henry Ford. 1884 Thomas Edison hired Tesla right off the boat and they invented, Tesla split off from Edison with hard feelings and got funding from JP Morgan. Tesla powered an entire city in Colorado with no wires and no power facility, did it for free from the earths magnetic field and a tower. JP Morgan says "neat idea but where's the money in that?" Morgan cut the funding tore all tesla's work down. In 1891 Edison hired Henry ford and they became great friends. Tesla kinda wandered around until he and Edison got into the current wars AC vs DC and all that electrocuting an elephant crazy stuff. Any way Tesla pitches his AC motor to Westinghouse and they buy it. Boom it is AC current - tesla won Edison lost. Edison ain't happy.

Tesla goes on built the first AC power plant, at Niagra falls and after initial build cost it ran for free from the falling water. Most cars were electric and now they can get power cheap and easy. The power company sells stuff (copper, distribution, electrons) they get for free to power cars. Tesla is making power for free and something people would buy. Henry starts his manufacturing company, a fully owned subsidiary of Rockefeller and standard oil at the time. They send his old buddy Edison (remember he hates tesla) over to talk Henry out of electricity and into gasoline. The oil companies byproduct or waist from refined oil was gasoline. They used to pay to throw the stuff away. But if Henry made cars that ran on gas the oil company would have a market to sell the stuff to. The propaganda you spoke of earlier terra watts of power & grid capacity and burning fuel ( aka coal not standard oil) is just that. Tesla went on to build an electric car that ran on the exact same principles as the town in Colorado. After that they shut him down, literally put tesla into the poor house and kept him there until he died. Tesla is personally responsible for a bunch and his technology even more of a lot of great stuff we have today. Radio, remote control, X-ray, mri, AC electric motors on and on and on.

The greatness of Pistons blowing fuel up and causing hauling ass cars is a huge part of what we are and love. I wouldn't trade it for anything but knowing how it all got started based on hard feelings and greed sorta makes it different. Just a few individuals shaped what we have today because of bad attitudes.

 

Amen to that.
If I had my choice of standing beside a Saturn rocket or riding on top of one to feel the g-force it would be the latter.
Salt racers and drag racers in the past were interested in one thing beating the competition. The numbers were the focus. Not the fire and noise.

I must say, as a young teen watching Big Daddy run the strips, it wasn’t the numbers that infected me but the show of raw power.

 

I'm so glad that most of us here have lived in such a cool era that we have wonderful memories of the very best of times in cars, aircraft, boats, music, movies, military and people in general. I thank God for my period of life and plan on getting as much more as possible. I respectfully acknowledge the new technologies but don't allow myself to be enslaved to them.
Chuck

 

As I noted, I love the technology but I have no desire to see the cars we drive here go away.

 

You can buy a high mileage Prius for around three grand. It's not out of the question that one could build a glass bodied Tudor using the Prius running gear and have a great driver. Traditional hot rodding has always been thinking outside the box. The only issue I could see would be where you would store an extension cord long enough to boogie down to the liquor store.

 

Wvenfield was this at the Hot Rod Reunion in Columbus by any chance ? I stood in both lines at that event and got the exact same impression. But im always inpressed by how everytime ive seen Garlits at how hard he works even at his advanced age.

 

A pneumatic drill might be a far more effective means of creating noise than a violin. That doesn't mean that it is a viable replacement for a violin.

Intravenous feeding might be demonstrably vastly superior to actually eating. That doesn't mean any honest gourmet is going to rave about it.

To be honest the change isn't the change to electric. The change has already happened. I haven't actually cared about new cars in over twenty years. When cars are generally already powered by featureless near-silent plastic boxes the change to electric propulsion is trivial, really.

The analysis in this is about DFM, threshold capitalization, ongoing externalization of diseconomies countervailing to economies of scale as taxation, and the relation of economic to political power. Nobody seems to be doing the analysis. Do you really think EVs would be happening if it weren't about this?

 

Interesting. Yes it was.

 

It's all about the "petrodollar" -All of it

 

The process predates the "petrodollar" by forty years or more - but this is perhaps not the place to go into detail.

 

I’ll embrace fuel economy or EV’s in my daily driver, so I can keep burning fossil fuels in my fun cars. Getting pissed off about the fact that things are changing is just stupid, change is inevitable. Big Petroleum never did a damn thing for me except charge me too much for gas, I don’t feel any need to side with the rich oil companies but I do want gas for my hot rods, now and in the future. I’m not hugging trees, I’m hugging old cars. There will be trees on this planet long after the oil is gone.

The boss is away this week, but this thread will likely get shut down soon. It’s a conversation we should be having.

 

The bad news is these electric cars are coming, the good news at 71 years old I seriously doubt I will have to buy one, so I'm not going to worry about it!

 

Just to see the man still at it at 86 impresses me be it nitro or electric.

I don't think I'll ever be an electric motor fan (pun intended) just because I love the sound of an internal combustion engine.

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