A generation has come and gone since it was financially feasible for fuel drivers to compete anywhere other than at national events, but 30 years ago,
drag racing’s biggest stars still ran each other at out-of-the-way tracks all across the country.
From Orange County and Irwindale in the Los Angeles area to New England Dragway in New Hampshire, Top Fuel and Funny Car drivers battled, and never was a rivalry better or a bigger draw than Don Garlits vs. Shirley Muldowney. From the mid-1970s until the escalating cost of operating a fuel car made match racing impossible sometime in the mid-1980s, Garlits, the undisputed all-time king of drag racing, and Muldowney, easily the most accomplished female driver in the history of motorsports, locked horns more times than either can remember.
Both had legions of fans. “Big Daddy” has always ranked among the most popular names in drag racing, but maybe some fans – the same kind who always rooted against the New York Yankees and Boston Celtics because they seemed to win the championship every year – wanted to see the underdog prevail. And it goes without saying that every wife and girlfriend in the stands was rooting for the lady driver with the pink car.
They raced so often and at so many venues that there’s no way to know who won the most.
“I have no idea,” says “Big Daddy.”
“I do,” Muldowney says. “Me. I won more than he did, I can tell you that. He knows. He kept a tally on his trailer door – the ol’ four marks and a line through it for the fifth one – and I definitely beat him more than he beat me.”
“Shirley ran every round like it was the final round of the U.S. Nationals,” Garlits recalls. “I didn’t – I had to make a living and didn’t want to hurt parts on every run. At least half the times I beat her, it was just because I didn’t smoke the tires or blow anything up. In my opinion, she ran a little too hard on some of the marginal strips.”
Muldowney disagrees. “He wanted to beat me just as bad,” she says. “No way he wanted to lose to me – ever. And he’d go about it dirty, if you ask me. What he’d do – not all the time, but lots of the time – was red-light on purpose. It was one of his classic moves. These match races were usually two-out-of-three, and on the last run, if it was at, say, 9 o’clock at night and the local affiliates had cameras there, he’d deliberately red-light. People watching the local news don’t understand red-lights – they don’t know that that means he lost. All they could see was him way out in front of me. He’s going through the lights, and there I am at half-track. That used to piss me off like you wouldn’t believe.
“That was one thing he’d do,” she says. “Another one, another of his little tricks, was to get into town earlier than I did and just slay me in the newspapers. That was enough to make me crazy. But all it really did was make my reaction times that much better.”
by Bobby Bennett
John Muldowney, son of four-time Top Fuel champion Shirley Muldowney, worked many match races with his famous mother in the 1970s and retains a photographic memory of those outings. They match raced Don Garlits at many of the larger tracks such as Orange County International Raceway, Irwindale Raceway and Raceway Park in Englishtown, NJ.
However, for every one of those larger tracks, there were a few of the backwoods venues on the schedule; And, John Muldowney remembers them all.
March 1979, and the night his mother match raced Garlits at Spartanburg Dragway in South Carolina, remains one of his fondest memories.
It was a different era. A new dually with a Chaparral fifth-wheel trailer was state-of-the-art. Drivers rode in the truck with everybody else between events, and the cars, while slower, were much more dangerous and infinitely harder to drive.
“The tracks weren’t as long, weren’t as wide, and didn’t have as much bite,” Muldowney says. “There wasn’t as much downforce, and the cars were always carrying the front end, too. You had to learn to drive that way. The cars didn’t smoke the tires like they do now, and when they did, it was because the track was a skating rink or there was crap all over it. Drivers today have never faced that situation – most of ’em have only run on ideally prepared tracks. The quality of the parts wasn’t what it is now either, so you didn’t have the consistency. If something was wrong with the engine on the burnout, you’d better know it without somebody having to tell you. You’d better be thinking, ‘Wait a minute…’ “
With his innate racing sense, unmatched experience, and iron will, Garlits could drive anything under any conditions, obviously. He’d been getting paid to just to appear at events since the ’50s, and as Shirley was emerging as a legitimate star in 1974 and especially 1975 and 1976, it quickly became apparent who his next rival would be.
“I realized she was going to be tough when she runner-upped at Indy [to Garlits himself] in ’75,” he says.
“It was inevitable, just a matter of time,” says Muldowney. “I could see it coming. I had to be stout and stand my ground, but on the inside, I was thinking, ‘Here it comes, you guys. You aren’t ready for this…’ And it didn’t take long.”
Garlits, who raced Muldowney probably more than he faced any other driver except “TV Tommy” Ivo, thinks their first showdown took place at Island Dragway in Great Meadows, N.J. (the same place he had made drag racing’s first 200-mph run in 1964). Muldowney’s son, John, has a photographic memory for racing history (not unlike Garlits’), thinks it happened in Fremont, Calif.
Garlits was never small-minded enough to mind losing to a woman any more than it bothered him to lose to anyone else. But his friends sure were. “I just didn’t want to hear a bunch of crap from all the other guys,” he says.
Shirley had been hearing it for years, and, as has been documented numerous times elsewhere, broke down countless barriers to achieve all that she has. “All kinds of things were said about me behind my back – very unkind things – and trust me, I know every one of them,” she says. “But no one ever had the nerve to say it to my face – no one.”
Sometimes, being a woman even worked to Muldowney’s advantage. “Nobody wanted to lose to a girl,” she says. “I knew that, knew they were afraid of it, and knew it could work for me. I didn’t feel like I needed any extra advantage against Garlits. I felt I had a better car, definitely a better-looking car, a classy, shiny, little pink car against that big, black Mariah of his. We had team uniforms, they were in greasy T-shirts. People loved it.
“One of the first times we ever raced was at Union Grove, Wis., at the Olympics of Drag Racing,” Muldowney says. “I beat him like three straight times, and he was very, very angry. He was embarrassed and plenty pissed. Never got beat by a girl before. I still respect him, deep down. I never wanted to see him get upside down or anything. I’d never wish that on anybody – not even Frank Bradley – and neither would Garlits. But it was a real rivalry between him and me. It was hatred on both our parts. It was the real thing.”
