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The Story
in Mickey's
own words;
It
was late 1954 that I decided to build a radically new type of
dragster. For years everyone in the sport had been making noises
about traction, weight transfer and about getting as much of the
weight of the vehicle as possible concentrated on its rear driving
tires. As the whole sport learned to get more and more horsepower
from its engines, the need for greater traction became even greater.
During
my usual wakeful nights I used to ponder this and what could be done
about it. Gradually the idea took shape. The big obstacle was keeping
the driver between the engine and the rear axle. This required a
drive shaft of a certain length, which pushed the engine forward by
that amount. Now if you would place the driver behind the rear axle
you could couple the engine-transmission assembly directly to it and
you would really have the main weight of the vehicle focused on the
driving wheels.
There
was another problem to traction and that was the amount of rubber on
the ground. If you could double the area of rubber on the pavement,
you could probably transmit almost double the horsepower to the road
before the wheels would spin. That is when I went to dual rear wheels
and everybody laughed at my "Truck" But I got the results
I'd hoped for. Then I went to the A-1 Tire Company and talked them
into building molds for the first recap wide-tread slicks, which I
seemed to have invented. This paid off some more.
One of the
biggest factors limiting dragster performance in those days was
directional stability-the things were just desperately hard to keep
going in a straight line. I felt that this could be helped by
approaching as closely as possible to a three-wheel configuration
with the front wheels very wide apart and the rear wheels just as
close together as the width of the driver's body would allow. So I
built a dragster that way.
As
it gradually took shape, the result of all these ideas made me the
butt of jokes all over sothern California. But funny thing was that
it ran and one day a Santa Ana hot rodder Leroy Neumeyer said to me,
"You know what that beast reminds me of, Mick? A slingshot. You
know, the way the driver sits back there like a rock in a
slingshot." That was the name that stuck and the configuration
proved to be so successful, so unbeatable, that within a couple of
years it became the standard of the sport.
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