NHRA legend came up just short in quest to be first to blast a battery-powered dragster down the quarter-mile at 200 mph.
At age 90, “Big Daddy” Don Garlits has thrown down the gauntlet.
Maybe that should read: Seattle innovator Steve Huff has thrown down the gauntlet.
Garlits, for decades a trailblazer in drag-racing design, set out about 10 years ago to become the first to blast a battery-powered dragster down the quarter-mile at 200 mph. Ultimately, Huff— loosely speaking, a younger, less-swashbuckling, more nonchalant, but equally obsessive version of Garlits— beat him to it.
Just before midnight May 14, 2020, at Jim Hughes’ Tucson Dragway deep in the Arizona desert, Huff clocked a 201.07-mph history-making speed in his own Current Technology Dragster.
Garlits didn’t pout. (Well, only for a little bit, maybe.) Instead, he built “Swamp Rat 38” EV dragster (ditching the original 37 that Mike Gerry designed and chassis-builder Brad Hadman crafted for him) and is planning a series of match races against Huff and his own EV.
“It’s exciting. I can’t wait to race the guy. We’re going to have a lot of fun match racing, I’m sure, around the country, demonstrating to the people that there is a viable place in drag racing for electric cars,” Garlits said after guiding Huff through his staging process last weekend for an exhibition pass at the NHRA’s Amalie Oil Gatornationals at Garlits’ backyard track at Gainesville, Fla.
“I really like Steve Huff. He’s a really nice guy. I think it’d be real good for the sport. He comes across real nice—he does nice interviews. He’s just a super-nice guy. He’s my competitor, but we’re going to have a really fun time with these cars,” Garlits, who operates his own Museum of Drag Racing on his property at Ocala, said.
Don Garlits
Randall Cannon
“I just turned 90 years old (January 14, 2022), and here I am, talking about going around the country and making exhibition runs! I’m really excited about it,” he said.
The drag-racing legend said he finished Swamp Rat 38 just before the NHRA Camping World Drag Racing Series came to town and didn’t have a chance for the NHRA to certify it. Otherwise, he might have started that match-race challenge with Huff right there.
What launched Garlits’ intrigue was the project he worked on with Las Vegas design genius Mike Gerry in 2011—helping popular former Top Fuel driver Darrell Gwynn experience running down the racetrack again. Gwynn has been paralyzed from the chest down since an Easter Sunday 1990 exhibition-pass crash at England’s Santa Pod Raceway that also cost him half of his left arm. But Gerry launched the build that allowed Gwynn to drive a scale-model dragster equipped with a joystick-like device (which Garlits referred to as a “wobblestick”) for steering, one similar to what Gwynn uses to guide his wheelchair.
Gwynn made an inspiring pass in the car at Indianapolis, at the 2011 U.S. Nationals that was part of the NHRA’s 60th anniversary celebration. Gwynn and Garlits competed the following year in match races in a pair of battery-powered dragsters (which topped out at about 30 mph). Those helped raise money for spinal-injury research through his Darrell Gwynn Foundation and the Buoniconti family’s Miami Project To Cure Paralysis. The cars were later auctioned at Barrett-Jackson for another charitable quarter-million dollars, Garlits said.
Those races stimulated Garlits’ curiosity, and he asked Gerry, “How fast do you think we could go if we took the gloves off?” Gerry’s response was that “we might go 200 miles an hour. The record’s 156.”
Garlits’ original EV project was a collaboration among creator-designer Gerry, chassis builder Hadman, Lawless Industries, and LiPo battery supplier High Tech Systems (which later helped Huff).
According to Thomas Pope’s Feb. 2021 article for Competition Plus, Huff happened to see Garlits on TV, saying that “Electric vehicles are going to be a part of everyone’s future, and to go 200 in the quarter is just not possible with the current technology.” Huff told Pope, “I thought, ‘That’s a bunch of crap. They’re just doing it wrong.’ … I put my mouth out there in front of me like usual and let my ass follow, but that’s what inspired me.”
Garlits has never quenched his thirst for speed.
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So Huff used a different school of thought, opting for alternating current rather than the apparently ineffective direct current. After some trial and error, Huff and his “principal backer” Larry Carrell, hooked up with Colorado aerospace electrical engineer Derek Barger (owner of High Tech Systems) and found the “Yahtzee!” combination.
Now Garlits and Huff have become, well, fast friends, no nitro included.
Huff, 55, has been battling a rare form of kidney cancer and told Pope, “Statistically it’s not promising, but those statistics are on people who are 70 years old. I’m not that. I’m in great shape, and racers are fighters. Survival stories are everywhere in my life, but I look around and realize it’s because we’re all like-minded people.”
Garlits, 35 years older than Huff, can remember his dad, Ed Garlits, helping usher in an era of “modern electric phenomena.” And somehow, from somewhere, he figured Ed Garlits likely is plugged into all that his son is doing night now, almost a century later.
He said, “My dad went to work for Westinghouse right out of high school, and George Westinghouse sent him to night school, and he became an electrical engineer. And he was on the team that invented the electric iron and the electric fan. He’d be real happy now, watching all this.”
Keyword: At Age 90, 'Big Daddy' Don Garlits Still Plugged Into Electric Dragster