The Story in Mickey's own words: (Cont.)

   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 Anna 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.