Race Legends - The Blog

The "Tobacco King" Rocket Car

Via Mecum High Performance Auctions comes the strange tale of the "Tobacco King" Ford Galaxie 500.

Most of us who watched racing in the sixties think of those years as a golden age in motorsport, but they also marked the end of another great era. In the years after WWII, before the advent of the Nader safety nannies and all the government agencies born of their insistent meddling, a daredevil brand of adventurous entrepreneurs brought an endless parade of fun and dangerous products to the market, from lawn darts to firecrackers to early ultralight aircraft. Without doubt, the most outrageous of these creative maverick enterprises was the Turbonique Company of Orlando, Florida. Aimed at the drag racing market, their product line consisted of three basic devices: AP superchargers, microturbo thrust engines and rocket drag axles. All were designed for short usage periods of mere seconds due to their use of a solid fuel known then as Thermolene, its proper chemical designation being N-Propyl Nitrate.

The most outlandish of these devices was the Rocket Drag Axle, which connected mechanically to a car’s differential and, when ignited, surpassed the engine’s motive power and launched the vehicle forward at an astonishing rate of acceleration. The infamous Black Widow Volkswagen Beetle, a basically stock Bug fitted with a Turbonique Rocket Drag Axle, became an instant drag racing legend by leaving Tommy Ivo’s four-engine Showboat dragster in its dust with a 9.36 elapsed time at 168 mph on Sept.19, 1966 at Tampa Dragway.

Built by tobacco magnate Zachary Reynolds of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, the “Tobacco King” 1964 Ford Galaxie was as wild an example of a Rocket Drag Axle-equipped car as one could ask for, and certainly reflected Reynolds’ daredevil personality. Playboy, pilot, Ham Radio enthusiast and all-around enfant terrible, Reynolds wanted a car that would terrorize everyone with its appearance alone, just before slamming their senses with a prodigious detonation of Rocket Axle power. The “Tobacco King” certainly fulfilled that mission.

Documented in the 1967 Turbonique product catalog, the Raven Black Galaxie’s original 390 V8 engine was replaced with a 425 horsepower 427 Ford big block fitted with a rare Latham axial flow supercharger fed by four Carter one-barrel sidedraft carburetors. Such automotive exotica alone would have been enough for most street racers, but not for the young Reynolds, who took the whole project the extra distance by having the differential replaced with an 850 horsepower Turbonique turbine Rocket Drag Axle. The rest of the car had to be modified to handle the colossal acceleration and speeds of which it was then capable; the frame was reinforced and suspension beefed up to handle the enormous torque delivered through the rear axle housing, and ground clearance increased to accommodate the huge turbine housing that shot its rocket exhaust out from underneath the rear bumper.

The car’s visual impact is arresting from every angle. From the front it looks every bit the mid-sixties A/FX racer of the Thunderbolt variety, with dropped suspension, dump tubes and unpolished American Torque Thrust wheels. The picture is only completed by approaching the thing, if you dare, from behind, where the black Simpson chutepack and twin large-diameter tailpipes draw the eyes down to that alien-looking rocket exhaust pod.

Inside, the Galaxie’s stock instrument panel is augmented by a set of gauges to monitor engine RPM, supercharger boost and the space-age bomb lurking out back. The Ham Radio installed beneath the dash speaks to Reynolds’ passion as a Ham operator (QSL card #W4TXL, now held by his surviving brother-in-law Bill).

This was as crazy as crazy got in 1967, and is no less so for the years that have passed. Zachary Reynolds put a total of only 3,611 miles on the car before his untimely death in a 1979 plane crash in North Carolina, after which the car was placed in careful storage until recently. It is accompanied by early registrations, the original owner’s manual made out to Zachary Taylor Reynolds, an original Turbonique product catalog with photos, the original Latham Supercharger literature and Zach’s personal notebook. Unrestored and original, it is in superb condition inside and out, a delightfully shocking artifact that speaks to a period during which daredevils and adventurers were given full sway to express the forces that drove them.

The Great Exploding Pinto

In August 1972, my friend Jim Leishman and I   took the bus from Hamilton to Niagara Falls for a big drag race at 1320 Dragway (Sundaaayyyy!!!!   Niagaraaaahh!!!!) : It was a solid big-name Top Fuel and Funny Car show, the   kind they screamed about on the radio during the week and, along with the local   talent, many guns were there: Snow, Schumacher, The Hawaiian, the M/T Pinto; the   Greek, a young Jeb Allen, Tommy Ivo, and yes, Big Daddy Don Garlits. I was a   wide-eyed fourteen years old and loved every second of it; the whole day felt   like it came straight from the pages of Drag Racing USA.

Come the final rounds, the light was fading on Dale   Pulde's Mickey Thompson Pinto and Gene Snow's Snowman Charger, the last two   survivors of a field of eight funny cars. When   the cars fired the Pinto sounded like it was packed with dynamite. I thought at   the time that maybe driver Pulde had piled on the nitro, as he'd been known to do that on occasion. Whatever the reason, its engine note was sharp and   loud. I didn't even think about Snow. I shouted   to Leishman that I was running down to the finish line because I thought the   Pinto was going to blow, and off I went at full bore. I heard both cars roar   through their burnouts behind me as I ran along the slope bordering the track.   They lined up just as I scrambled down the hill to watch them launch from about   a thousand feet away, separated from me by a couple of steel cables lining the   edge of the asphalt.

The Pinto left hard, way out ahead of Snow, and   sure enough it blew to smithereens right in front of my eyes at well over two   hundred miles an hour and won the race. It was magnificent. Fans scrambled to   retrieve the pearl red fiberglass shards and bits of blower that rained down.   The crew photographed the mangled car on the return road for posterity, and they   threw Peter-Paul candybars to the crowd on their way back to the   pits.

As if that wasn't enough, the very next race was   the Top Fuel final, in which Don Garlits beat a tearful Jeb Allan and set a new   national record at 6.10 / 244MPH, breaking Clay Harris' mark by .24 seconds and   9MPH, a big fat country mile. There was a huge fireworks show to close the   event.

What's special to me about the story of the Great   Exploding Pinto is that last week, 35 years later, I found this.

Here is a photo I took earlier   that very same day. Try getting that shot now.

Nostalgia Drag Racing

In the introduction to my new website, 1320Legends.com, I wrote,

Every race fan has his favorite era and his own heroes. For me, it's the late sixties and early seventies. Innovation was the rule. Aerodynamics, engines, tires and chassis design all took quantum forward leaps in every form of motorsport thanks to a generation of bold young racers who still thought of their pursuits as sport. Regardless of your preferred form of racing, it was an exciting time to be a fan.

Especially, I would add, if you were a drag racing fan. More particularly, nothing in my experience quite matched the prodigious power of a nitromethane-burning dragster, be it a top fueler, a funny car or a wildly unpredictable fuel altered. Now as then, these monsters will literally rattle the chest cavity and blur the vision when the driver hits the throttle. The noise is impossible to describe, except to say that you'd better cover your ears or the pain will bring you to your knees. That might not sound like fun to the uninitiated, and it really isn't for the faint of heart, but to a growing body of nostalgia drag fans, it's a candy-colored, fire-belching piece of Nirvana, served up six seconds at a time.  Today fans overflow from the grandstands at vintage drag races that feature a new phenomenon, the "Cacklefest", in which a throng of nitroburners line up along the track centerline and fire their engines in concert. While I have yet to experience this spectacle myself, I'm told its almost a religious thing; I'll find out for myself when I attend the Bakersfield March Meet next month. Ron Johnson, who authors the official Cacklefest website, describes its popular development:

Since it was first coined by Greg Sharp of the Wally Parks NHRA Motorsports Museum, this strange word has spread all over the world and spawned dozens of "spin off" events at race tracks big and small. Although you won't find it in any dictionary, Cacklefest has become one of the most alluring words in drag racing’s vocabulary. Since its inception at the 2000 California Hot Rod Reunion, Cacklefest has grown from 9 cars to 50 entries in 2005. In 2006 there will be at least a dozen more. Thanks to Cacklefest, there are in fact more functional Top Fuel dragsters today than at any time in the last 30 years.

Brothers Don and John Ewald both fielded Top Fuelers in the sixties and seventies, and now display and run their restored cars at West Coast events. Don described the Cacklefest to me as growing so quickly that he can barely keep up with the number and quality of the restorations returning to the quarter mile. Don's website, appropriately titled We Did It For Love, has to be the largest collection of period photographs ever assembled on the subject, and chronicles the modern Cacklefest events as well. I highly recommend a membership to WDIFL, and if you have any photos or slides of the period sitting in a box somewhere, I'm certain Don would appreciate hearing from you.

There is much more to tell about vintage or nostalgia drag racing. Groups and events are proliferating across North America, and even in England and Australia. More cars are either being restored or carefully recreated by dedicated enthusiasts, often including those who were originally involved as a fabricator, owner and/or driver. The phenomenon is clearly enthusiast-driven, and it's coming to a drag strip near you.

Bring your video camera and remember to pack a good set of earplugs!