Donald Glenn Garlits, born in Tampa, Florida, in 1932, is as unlikely a hero as any sport has ever seen. In the post-war years, when the sport of drag racing was exploding in popularity throughout Southern California and the upper Midwest, Don Garlits lived across the continent, in the swamps of Florida. Worse, he wasn’t born into a wealthy family and didn’t even have the benefit of a college degree, yet he somehow understood all the mechanical engineering necessary to build race-winning dragsters and competitive engines.
In 1954, Garlits built his first dragster in the shade of a backyard tree, using a 1927 Ford Model T Roadster stuffed with a 1948 flathead V-8. The car was quick enough to whet Garlits’s appetite for speed, but its 13.5-second elapsed time in the quarter mile wasn’t low enough to win races. To fix that, Garlits removed the body to save weight, repositioned the engine and moved the seat behind the rear end, slingshot-style, to improve traction. His first attempt at building a dragster proved successful, and in 1955, Garlits’s 12.1-second pass at 108 MPH was good enough for a win in his first NHRA-sanctioned race in Lake City, Florida.
The sport of drag racing made sense to Garlits, who was once quoted as saying, “I liked the idea of two cars lined up side by side, not bumping into one another. It was one person against one person, one machine against one machine. There was a winner and a loser. It was real simple.”
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