Dirt
‘Big Daddy’ Don Garlits
describes birth of the burnout
By Ian Tocher
F
rom test-n-tune wannabes
straight off the street not really
knowing why to Top Fuel pilots
performing with practiced preci-
sion, nearly everyone opts to preview
every run down the strip with what announcer
extraordinaire Al Tucci would call a “beeyootiful
smoky burnout.”
It looks cool to spectators and no doubt it’s fun
from the driver’s seat, but the true purpose of a
burnout is two-fold: to absolutely clear the racing
rubber of any contaminants like sand, rocks or
cigarette butts picked up on the winding tow or
drive from the pits and to lay down hot, sticky
stripes of fresh rubber—ideally dead straight
and in the racing groove—in
which to back up and line up
for a neck-snapping launch.
It wasn’t always this way,
though, and no surprise here,
“Big Daddy” Don Garlits was
instrumental in creating a
ritual so prevalent in drag
racing to become an iconic
image of the sport. “Big” ad-
mits he wasn’t the first to
try boiling the hides before
tackling the quarter mile at
speed, but says by the end
of the burnout’s first official
day he was on board, too.
“I can tell you for sure
where the first burnouts
were done. Prior to this
event we just pulled up to
the starting line and we
went, but this was at Riv-
erside, California, 1969,
the HOT ROD Magazine
Championships. The cars
push started way in the back
there and it was a long drive
down to the starting line and one of the cars—I’m
thinking it might’ve been either (Bob) Creitz or
(Steve) Carbone, the actual car I wouldn’t swear
to, somebody out in California might know—did
a burnout, they actually smoked the tires for a
pretty good little distance because there was a lot
of room and then they made their way on down
to the starting line. And it made a difference; the
car ran quicker!
“So the next time I made a run I did it and I
actually stopped and then burned the tires. We
spun the tires (while heading down track) in
those days, but that gave me a nice gummy tire
when I got to the starting line with some heat in
it and of course it made a difference; it picked
up the ETs at least a tenth of a second. So that
was when the very first burnouts were done with
fuel dragsters and we’ve done it ever since from
that day forward.”
Garlits emphasizes those first burnouts at
Riverside were all completed prior to reaching
the starting line; however, it was the only track
he knew of with sufficient space for that, so it
required a change of tactics when he visited other
venues. Obviously unwilling to give up the obvi-
ous advantage a burnout offered, he took to the
now common practice of completing his burnouts
across the starting line and then being pushed
back into place.
“Of course at first some of the guys didn’t want
to do it, so you would tell the guy you’re racing,
‘Look, I’m going to do a burnout, so you fire your
car a little bit behind me if you don’t want to do
one because I’m going to take a little extra time.’
It was no problem, they didn’t care.”
What did create a problem for some, though,
was heat in their clutches created by the added
stress of a burnout. That brought on the appli-
cation of water to the new pre-run procedure,
Garlits explains.
“Actually it was bleach at first; for some reason
they wanted bleach. The clutches were getting set
so loos e that you couldn’t spin the tires anymore
on the pavement, this was before they sprayed
down the tracks, and a couple of guys smoked
their clutches out trying to get the tires to spin
(for a burnout), so then they put down bleach.
That’s when VHT and RFI immediately got on
the program making traction compound. It was
like the little tire patch material you get when you
buy a patch kit, only they had more solvent in it to
make it thinner. That’s what RFI was, you could
actually use that stuff to put a patch on a tube.”
Unwittingly, the RFI product led to another
first for Garlits: the crowd-pleasing and always
spectacular, though admittedly risky, Top Fuel
fire burnout.
“It was at Long Beach and they put down the
RFI material on one side, it was at nighttime,
and I rolled forward into the material but they
hadn’t got the material on the other tire, so they
pushed me back, but as they pushed me back the
flames were already coming out of the headers
and they were pointed pretty much at the tires.
So as the tire rolled up they caught that stringy
material that was on one side of the car on fire,
so I quickly spun on it to get out of the fire and it
made a beautiful, beautiful scene. That was the
beginning of the fire burnout.
“Me and Tommy (Lemons, Garlits’ longtime
crewman), we picked up on
that right away, so we de-
veloped a system where he
would put down the mate-
rial but then string it out a
little bit in front of the tire.
I would always wait until
there was a little bit of flame
popping out of the pipes, of
course this is slingshot days
so I could see them, and I
would spin the tire slowly at
first and that would get the
material all around the tire
and I would give it a little
light spin so it would sling
that stuff all up on the head-
ers and I lit my own burn-
outs like that.”
Garlits chuckles as he
recalls the efforts of NHRA
under early executive Jack
Hart to figure out how the
fire burnouts were happen-
ing and for safety reasons,
how they could be stopped.
“They knew we were light-
ing those fires on purpose; that no way it could
just be happening because we could make it hap-
pen any time we wanted, so they put cameras
on me because Tommy was far away from the
car and they went all over the car looking for
igniters but they couldn’t find anything. So in
the end I was just told I was not to light those
fires. But of course if it just happened it was out
of my control, right?”
Finally, by the early-‘70s, NHRA banned the
use of traction compound to aid burnouts and
mandated water only.
“That’s how they stopped it and that’s when
water replaced bleach,” Garlits says. “But it was
fun while it lasted.”
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