Slicks: The Sticky History of the World's Fastest Racing Tires

The modern drag racing tire is one of the most fascinating products of automotive engineering

that exists in the world. It does things that no other tire on the planet does,

it's doing multiple jobs at the same time, it's enduring forces placed upon it that no other tire

sees, and somehow it keeps going faster and faster. This is the story of how those tires came to be,

a very detailed look back into the roots of their fascinating history which I truly believe

is unparalleled in any specific race car part, in any form of motorsports.

This is the story of a decades long collaborative push-pull effort between hot rodders and engineers.

Hot rodders would experiment and push things forward, engineers would take their learnings,

apply sound principles and pull them beyond what they thought they could do,

and then the hot rodders would push the engineers again by riffing on their sound

foundations to go even faster. It's fascinating in every aspect. It is a story of people,

of small companies in large, of a famous prediction in 1952, and of the literal rewriting of the

textbooks about things like traction and how tires actually work in a serious drag racing car.

I will say candidly as a guy who's been in drag racing for about 30 years now,

I learned more about drag slicks in researching this video than I could have ever imagined.

I was shamefully ignorant on the most awesome details of how these tires and their technology

evolved and how they all actually function. I suspect many of you will find yourselves in

the same boat while watching and frankly that's the fun of it. I'm going to tell this story in

a chronological format. I'm also going to tell it in the level of detail that I've seldom been

able to achieve in many of my videos because I have been able to gather roughly 100 period magazine

stories, locate and study many SAE reports, physics papers, along with other academic work,

I dove into dozens of books and more, and conducted conversations with people who are

involved in the business of making drag slicks better, faster, and safer over the years.

This is the sticky history of slicks, the fastest racing tires in the world.

To truly understand the 340 mile per hour tires on today's funny cars and top fuel dragsters,

along with those that run about 150 miles an hour on the back of stock eliminator and

super stock cars, we have to head back to a decade where the sport truly came into itself,

the 1950s. In this time frame drag racing was a truly one-dimensional problem,

how to come up with the best solution to take a car from a standing start through the

quarter mile finish line in the quickest time possible. There were such a dearth of rules

and regulations at this point governing the top classes of competition that any idea was

effectively permissible. Engine location, the number of engines, the type of engine,

length of the wheel base, where the driver sat, all of that was up for consideration.

But then like now, drag racers were on an eternal search for grip. The good news for them in 1950,

despite what they thought at the time, even the strongest of their engines had not started to

truly plumb the depths of the horsepower ocean that would be explored in the coming decades.

This said, they were still on the hunt for the drag racer's most elusive friend, traction.

When we look at the early cars racing at places like Santa Ana,

we can see some interesting things going on with tires. Most of them are wearing some sort of tread

and rubber. Some cars are wearing dual tires on either side. There are also a scant few photos

from the 1950 time frame that appear to show cars wearing what seem to be drag slicks and they are.

Kind of. Tire recapping was a massive industry at this time and as the case was, there were

companies across the country performing this service not just for passenger car tires but

for modified and jalopy race cars. When we see some of the early drag cars with slicks on them,

they are most certainly stock car or at the time so-called track racing tires as they were

referred to in the 1950s, especially in the early part of the decade. Despite the fact that they

were not dedicated drag slicks, those racers seemed to be onto something and the logic made sense.

These things were somewhere between 6-7 inches wide whereas a normal passenger car tire was

typically much more narrow and they could use different rubber compounds when they were recapping

the tires, which even if not for drag racing had to be better than some Montgomery wards or Sears

tires, right? The answer? No one really knew. In fact, no one really knew a whole lot about

a whole lot at this time as it was a sport of rebellious kids that people either saw as a

national scourge or a fad. Not everyone saw it that way though. Roger Huntington was one of the

most prolific and respected automotive journalists of the 1950s and 60s and for decades beyond that.

He was renowned for his ability to take an engineer's approach to high-performance stories,

presenting complicated information in a very down-to-earth way that people could understand

and digest to the common gearhead. He was also paralyzed from the chest down. The man's story

is amazing. He authored more than a half dozen books, wrote with insane volumes and prolific

nature for virtually every car magazine you've ever heard of and Huntington was rabid in his pursuit

of the story of drag racing tires as you will learn through this video. And there was a very good

reason for this. The most interesting, innocent and scientifically backed gaffe of his storied career.

It was without malice. In fact, it was well-intentioned. Huntington in 1952 while writing for Rodden

Custom Magazine wrote a story that stated, with the mathematics to back it up, that the quickest

a car would ever traverse the quarter mile was at 9.1 seconds at 166 miles per hour. And yes,

it sounds ridiculous like he pulled the number out of a hat, but Roger Huntington's math equations

spit out these numbers and they made sense at the time. Was the equation broken? Not the equation,

but Roger Huntington's crystal ball certainly was. Part of the equation that Huntington used

involves something called a traction coefficient. This was the simple calculation of the car's

weight versus how much of it could be transferred to the rear tires and how much grip that would

create. We're going to go much deeper down this rabbit hole a little bit later on in this video,

but that's really the basics. Huntington used the coefficient of 1.0 in his equation, which

engineers truthfully believed could never be improved upon. 1.0 would be perfect traction.

As I do not have access to the actual story from 1952, we have to go off of these quotes from

Roger Huntington himself as he admits here it was the most famous blunder, but one that was

absolutely based on the engineering knowledge or theories of the day and he doesn't regret it.

But he did hear about it for the rest of his life. In July of 1953, something momentous happened,

but like so many things in the course of a story, they didn't seem like a whole lot at the time.

The pioneering SoCal Speed Shop, operated by the incomparable Alex Zidious,

published an ad for something called SoCal Slicks, which were special drag racing tires.

What made this momentous was the fact that it was the first time in history anyone

had advertised a special tire for drag racing purposes. These were recap passenger tires,

but they were recapped as to give 7 inches of flat surface for traction, which the ad claims

means 4 times more traction as a regular tire. The ad also states that every major record at

California drag strips were set with cars which used slicks. This ad would appear just one more

time in Hot Rod Magazine, shown shortly into the May 1954 issue, which just so happened to have

the SoCal Speed Shop cars on the cover. It's incredibly interesting that SoCal being the

first to market drag racing tires is little more than a footnote in this story. There is no major

record of business success with their tires, they likely won some races, but the simple fact is that

for a company and its ultra iconic status in the aftermarket, their drag racing tire business

really didn't crack the code and there's really not much more to their story and our story about

this. They were first, but they certainly weren't best. Next up is a great story in the July 1954

issue of Motor Life called Striptease for Speed. It's likely the first time this story was executed

in magazines. This style of story would be done many more times through the years. Famously Hot Rod

had Caddy Hack and Pony Hack over the years as well as the Vet Hack and more modern times.

The premise is brutally simple. Take a slow car and start cutting stuff off of it,

not messing with the engine and just see how fast you can go. The victim here is a 1942 Mercury

Club Coupe with a flathead V8. The car goes quicker and quicker with weight removed as we'd all

expect, but run number 8 out of 10 is the one we're interested in. No weight was removed on this run,

but a set of 7 inch would appear to be recapped slicks was bolted on the back.

These could have been Moxley's, Inglewood's, Bruce's or a near anonymous local tire shop's

version as so many people were producing in them at the time, but with those slicks added,

the car picked up 4 tenths of a second with no other weight removed. Of course, for those of us

in modern times, it seems rudimentary that the tires would seem to have lots of magic lurking

in them, but no one seemed to care or know anything but wider and less tread pad and were better

back in the early 50s. One guy who knew more about drag racing by the sheer volume of observation

he had done by the April 1955 timeframe was CJ Hart. He was the operator of the drag strip at

Santa Ana Airport. He was operating the first commercial drag strip in the country when he

opened in 1950 and by 1955 one of the busiest in the world. Hart talks about many interesting things

in this story, among them house stockers and so called semi-stockers were the backbone of the sport

as the cost of dragsters continued to jump. The interesting disparity between speed and

elapsed time where cars that should run huge speed could not make a decent elapsed time because of

how they launched and had to manage traction. He also makes an interesting prediction in that he

believed the car that would break 150 miles per hour in the quarter mile would not necessarily

have killer elapsed times. He was more right than you may believe. While Lloyd Scott and his twin

engine bustle bomb did it first and had a car that actually could eat tea pretty well, the green

monster of Art Arfons with its massive airplane engine did it next and would continue to shatter

speed records with lumbering elapsed times that couldn't hang with smaller lighter dragsters

simply because of the early run power application the monster engine struggled with.

Not much was made about tires in this heart story outside of a few mentions but

Arpal Roger Huntington was set to fix that in the December 1955 issue of Hot Rod Magazine.

A story called Getting a Bite serves as what can only be described as a landmark piece of

drag racing technical journalism. Huntington in his signature fashion goes deep into the

theory's practice and engineering behind traction and drag cars. Huntington begins with the point

that CJ made in the last story. Cars with big, hairy engines are losing drag races to lighter,

smaller, less powerful cars because of wheel spin. Everyone is building more horsepower by the day

but they have no way to use it. Traction, he surmised, was the most overlooked part of the

drag racing world in late 1955 and he aimed to fix it. He explains that traction is friction

and the maximum horizontal thrust a car can make depends on the friction between a tire and the

road. The amount of torque your hairy engine is making is meaningless if it all goes up in smoke.

There is static friction and kinetic friction with of course static being what's necessary

to overcome to break the tire loose from the pavement and kinetic to traction that is generated

as a rolling thing. The law of physics that drag racers had been making mincemeat out of already

in 1955 was one that stated that friction between two bodies in sliding contact will depend only

on the surface conditions of the two objects and the load pressing them together. Surface area

should not play into this at all according to the physics equations. The existing theories and

equations basically said that a large tire and a small tire with the same road conditions and load

should produce the same grip. Not being a totally versed physicist, this is at least how Roger

decides to tell it in print. Now we have to talk about traction coefficient. As defined by Huntington,

this is the horizontal or friction force as a fraction of the total weight pressing the two

surfaces together. Cars had a traction coefficient of 0.75 to 0.95. In simple terms, if there is a

1000 pound load on the tire, the math that Roger referenced said that the maximum of 750 to 950

pounds of forward driving thrust could be produced. The most important quote of the whole story comes

next and will define the decades to come for drag slicks. Quote, scientists are quite certain that

this coefficient of sliding friction could never be above 1.0. End quote. Let's just say that those

scientists hadn't met the drag racers yet. The reality is that by 1955 racers were already seeing

more than 1.0 traction coefficient and it was happening for a reason the scientists

that were very sure it never could be never considered. The slicks were kind of attaching

themselves to the track like a self-conforming gear. Instead of riding over the low spots in the

pavement and riding only on the high spots for each revolution, the drag slick was accepting

the high spots and deforming to actually grab the low spots as well, taking the effect of

kind of gearing the car to the pavement. The slicks of the day run at ever lower pressures

were producing more traction than engineers deemed possible on their slide rules. The drag

racers had cracked a code that no one knew existed. Beyond that, this was only the beginning

of the beginning, technologically speaking. Huntington made brief mention of the tire

options for racers, how some use natural rubber, some only synthetic, some softer compounds,

some harder. He did say that hard spinning tires were anathema to the best acceleration

and that drivers who showed the most skill, lightly smoking the tires for a few yards at

the head of the throttle, were by far and away the most successful. Huntington surmised that the

most successful design of a drag racing car would be comprised of the elements of lightweight

with as much of it positioned to the rear axle utilizing a system to cancel out engine torque

which unloaded the right rear tire and caused a lot of smoke and an error dominated by open

differentials. Huntington then explained that in frequent and odd happening curiosity at the drag

strip, known then as the wheel stand. If we take a 1,500 pound dragster with 1,050 pounds of its

static weight on the back tires and launch it with the driver hitting the gas, we'd achieve

.9g on the head of the throttle which is awesome. So now we've taken another 210 pounds of front

to weight and moved it to the back via inertial transfer and then another 180 pounds of longitudinal

front to back rear transfer and we're running out of weight on the front end very quickly.

By this math we have moved all but 60 pounds off of the front end and that will be a problem

because the wheels of the front will be coming up more quickly than the driver could ever react.

CJ Hart actually threw people out of Santa Ana drag strip for pulling wheelies. Fans loved them

but they were ultra rare and they were highly discouraged at this point and seen as reckless

and very dangerous. Huntington Tocks tire pressure as well and what the early racers were learning

by experimenting and the findings were interesting. Low pressure gave massive grip on the launch pad

but had bad handling at the top end which seemed kind of weird. Pumped up the tires gave little

early bite but they were way better down course in terms of handling. Now clearly there was a

correlation between inflation pressure and performance but these guys were kind of wondering

what it was. More importantly what the heck were these guys even running for tires? In so many ways

they were running other people's old tires. Drag racers didn't have a ton of options for tires

back in their day in 1955 but they had a few and all of them came from the same process.

Recapping or otherwise known as retreading. The beauty of a bias ply style tire was the fact

that it was basically a reusable item. The idea of retreading tires was introduced in the early

1900s and by 1950 was a legitimate industry across the United States. Gas stations and tire

stores represented the largest group of retreaders nationally and among them were guys who not only

did passenger car tires but had developed a process for racing as well. This most typically for

stock cars, midgets, modifies and others. Bill Moxley was one of those guys who haven't gone

into business in 1950. Bill Cretchen is Englewood tire company which had been producing a recap

line called Positraction Racing Tires since the 1940s as well as Bruce Alexander of Bruce's tires

who like Kretsch got into the business of retreading tires just after the conclusion of World War

II and Alexander saw racing as a massive market beyond the normal passenger car stuff which was

the foundation of his company. So what is a recap tire? It's a brutally simple concept. These

companies would purchase worn out passenger car tires. Step one was to inspect the side walls

and general carcass or casing of the tire from the inside to make sure there was no significant

damage or flaws and then next the tread of the tire would be removed by a machine called the

buffer which is really kind of underselling it. This was really kind of a massive medieval looking

grinder with a tooth wheel that would grind off all the rubber all the way down to the carcass of

the tire. Next up the casing of the tire would be wrapped in a new layer of rubber. Now this

rubber would be chosen from one of the vendors that the recapper worked with. They would choose

the rubber for its chemical construction meaning its hardness its softness thickness and more.

Lastly the tire would be placed in a mold and then inside the tire would be a device that was used

to hold its shape and structure in the mold as heat and pressure were applied to bond the new

rubber to the casing and form it into the tread shape and design that was desired. Now here's

where I need to explain just a couple of basic things so we're all kind of on the same page here.

Firstly this process had plenty of nuance in it as simplified as I've made it seem. The selection

of the proper casings for use in racing was important not all tires were made the same with

sidewall strength section height and width and more. There are also loads of options to choose

from when it came to which rubber to cook onto the casing. There was rubber suppliers like Voight

and dozens of others who had their own catalogs numerous levels of softness and compounds layer

thickness and more. This process could be reasonably well tailored to the end user.

Now this is also where the famed pie crust look came from as well.

In modern times we call these pie crust slicks because of the unique look of their sidewalls

like the edge of a pie whose top was sealed to the bottom with the traditional method of pressing

a fork against the top to lock it in with the bottom layer of the crust. In the case of recap

slicks this was done not for looks but for strength. Each one of the bars you see in the

sidewall is a buttress like reinforcement and that's helping to support the wider than stock

tread on the reused casing. They do look really cool and retro now but again those things were

there to support the square shoulders of the tire and maintain their integrity as they tended to

extend well past the area kind of where the factory tread was on the factory casing kind of a

rubber gusset I guess you'd call it. And oh by the way nobody called them pie crust slicks back

in the era when they were actually made. New I should say is not a retro item. Now there are

many pluses and minuses to recap slicks. The minuses were pretty negligible in the 1950s but they

would grow over time. So what are they? For starters you're basically building a house on an old

foundation. You can build a really pretty house on top of it but you're stuck with whatever is under

it and in the case of a recap especially at this time in history we're talking about a worn out

passenger car tire in most cases. This also means you're stuck with the structure of that passenger

car carcass. Before we go too far down this road we have to talk about the basics of tire construction

to make a lot of this stuff we're going to talk about really makes sense. Some terms like the

bead. The bead of the tire is the part that's effectively going to attach it to the rim it's

stiff and in this era was largely made out of piano wire. Now we need to talk about the cord angle

which is an interesting area and one with drastic effect on the topic of this video. To make a bias

ply tire there are plies in the tire that have cords in them that gives the tire structure and

really kind of define how it works. Now imagine we're looking at a tire that is standing up in

front of us and if we had x-ray vision we could see the cords and they were running straight up and

over the top of the tire from one bead to the other. We would have called that a steep cord angle

we'd actually call it a 90 degree angle because it was running straight up from one bead into the

next. Now if the cords were instead swept back at an angle coming off the bead kind of headed

through the radius of the tire we'd call that a shallow cord angle. The steeper the angle the more

strong and rigid the tire is but the worse the ride quality is. The more swept back the cords are

the more flexible and forgiving the tire is. Manipulating this angle and the construction of

the tire will become a huge part of this whole story and the evolution of the drag slick.

So now that we're clear on that stuff let's go back in the time machine. By the time the 1955

NHA Nationals rolled around the Recappers were making lots and lots of drag racing tires and

as the culture of hot rotting kind of encouraged they were learning as they went with the racers.

For starters they figured out that the best product they could hand to a drag racer was

the slick they had built off the casing of a used Firestone racing tire. Firestone was about

the only brand that had been with racing for a long time now and they had developed and tested

racing tires for multiple different disciplines. Now none of them were drag racing but they were

still a racing carcass or casing to use. Goodyear had quietly gotten into NASCAR in 1954 but Firestone

was the most well-known racing tire manufacturer in the country at this point. For the majority of

people who had no connections to buy used Firestone racing tires the Recappers had learned a few other

things in a short amount of time. The most important was that it seemed like the more used up and

softened the sidewalls were on a casing the better it worked for the drag racers. Secondly and along

the same point tires of fewer sidewall layers or ply seemed to also be performing better but like

with all things there's kind of a catch. If the boys ran those tires with too little pressure they

could barely avoid wrecking at the top end at more than 100 miles per hour. The stock car recaps didn't

do this or suffer this issue and it was to some degree confusing to everybody. Part of it may have

been related to raw speed and wear. For instance when Fireball Roberts grabbed the pole position

at Darlington in 1955 his average speed for his qualifying laps was 110 miles an hour so that might

have met 130 in the straights and far less in the corners. This and a heavy stock car that would have

the tires changed during the race. The drag racers and lighter equipment were exceeding these speeds

and doing it with truly violent acceleration. The Recappers figured it was the inexperienced drag

racers lacking in chassis engineering and the drag racers figured it was something to do with

tires but they weren't sure what. The reality is that the recap slicks that use old passenger car

casings or carcasses were suffering the effects of centrifugal force on the tire at these higher

speeds. The sidewalls were too weak to hold what was a heavier tread section flat so as the center

of the tread was pulling outward harder and harder as the car accelerated and went faster and faster

the sidewalls are supposed to hold it in place. Instead as we can see here the tread would pull

outward the sidewalls would stretch and the car had virtually no contact patch or lateral stability.

This was the root cause of the handling issues with cars that ran these recap tires especially

when speeds kept going well over 100 miles per hour. They did know that in rare occurrences the

top performing cars could actually grab the track hard enough that the wheel would spin in the tire

ripping the valve stem into the wheel shearing it smooth off and causing the tire to rapidly

lose pressure. When that happened at the top end guys got hurt. It was a rare but it was a scary

issue. By 1956 dragsters were starting to get some attention beyond the realm of the youthful sport

they were the stars of. In fact in February of 1956 at Bakersfield the Hashimba Plogle Dragster

ran 912 at 153 miles per hour this within a hundredth of the theoretical limit that Roger

Huntington had proposed in 1952. The top speed of the year came from the Lakewood Auto Dragster at

159 miles per hour creeping in on the proposed maximum speed as well. Whether it was these numbers

or something else Roger Huntington published a story in 1956 that did something no one else had

dared to do to this point in history. Place dragsters on the same plane as the almighty Indy

Roadsters of the day and the world-class Grand Prix racing cars burning corners at this time as

well. Not only did he put the lowly drag racers in the same chat he clearly laid out how what they

were doing was more impressive than a lot of stuff anybody else was doing at the time. Using his

trusty math he produced a chart of an acceleration race between a dragster and Indy car and an auto

union Grand Prix car as well as a Mercedes Grand Prix car. The dragster destroyed them all through

the quarter mile it was a moment where drag racing gained some legitimacy in many circles and was

viewed as an uninvited guest and others. 1957 though would be the year that our story truly takes

off and it didn't take long. On February 3rd of 1957 at Lion's Dragstrip the famed team of Emery

Cook and Cliff Bedwell did the seemingly impossible. They ran 166.97 miles per hour in the quarter

mile and they officially broke the slide rule and did it on eight inch wide Bruce Slicks.

Two months later in April at Bakersfield the pair would take their carved,

nitro burning, heavy dragster into the 8 second bracket to be the first in history to do so at

889. They had single handedly proven that hot rodders could beat the math and do so in a manner

that let the world know they were just getting started. The numbers triggered headlines in magazines,

panic in the control rooms of drag strips who had operators fearful of the danger,

the cost escalation and potential wreckage hurting their sport and the phone melted off the wall

at Bruce Alexander's tire business. Everybody wanted his Slicks. Why? He had the fastest

drag racing tires in the world right now and that was very good for business.

Later that summer a young upstart from Florida would save his money and gain the courage to

attend the 1957 AATA World Series of Drag Racing in Illinois. His name was Don Garlets.

With his own fuel dragster along with his wife he planned to take on and fight the teams of Cook

and Bedwell and all the others. It wasn't going well when he got there. His car was horribly slow.

Emory Cook actually felt so bad he came over and helped Garlets get his fuel system squared away

and in doing so he launched the most incredible career in drag racing history.

Garlets would go on to beat the Cook and Emory car at the track before losing in the top

eliminator final to settle Pistoyan but a star was born that weekend. That star would turn into

a supernova that November. On the 10th of November 1957 at Brooksville, Florida, Don Garlets went

through the quarter mile at 879, some say 876 but in his own book he says 879 so I'm going with that

at a never before considered speed of 176.4 miles per hour. These were two records by a mile and

because of these two runs Don Garlets would get a call from a man named Bob Ossicki to attend a

high paying high profile meet that Ossicki was putting on with his International Timing Association

in Chester, South Carolina. There would be media, there would be competition and most importantly

if he kept his act together there would be money. Someone else was heading to that race as well,

a tall relatively quiet guy from a small berg outside of Boston, Massachusetts named Watertown.

His name was Marvin Riftian and he was not completely empty handed as he headed to the race.

Marvin had tires, in fact he had the very first scratch made purpose built drag racing tires

anybody on the planet had ever created. Marvin Riftian had an idea that these tires could change

the sport of drag racing and like so many other times in his life, Marvin Riftian was right.

A lot of men had been in the tire business in this world but a few of them have loved it,

obsessed over it and helped advance it like Marvin Riftian and to say that he's an unlikely hero

is being real about it. Born in 1915, by all accounts, Marvin was a bright kid,

good at school and he loved cars, especially race cars. By the time he was graduating high school,

Marvin's father who operated a gas station and tire recapping business in Watertown,

Massachusetts on Main Street needed some help. That was nothing special, it was a small typical

auto shop at the time and there are two things I don't know for sure about Marvin.

The first is whether he actually attended college or whether his innate understanding of

engineering and how tires worked was simply learned on the job or if he's learned in the books.

The second thing I don't know is about his war service. It's rarely mentioned in some

recountings of its life and I have found at least one instance of him being referred to

as an Army Intelligence Officer. Now I want to be clear about these two things. I don't want to

commit Marvin to a college education he didn't have or say he didn't have it if he did and I

certainly do not want to claim he had military service if he didn't or detract from that if he

did. Because I can't verify these two things I just wanted to be upfront with both of you.

Now they may be immaterial to the entirety of the story but I want you to understand this

guy's life and that's why I'm coming clean on this front. But one thing we can say for certain

is this. In 1942 Marvin and his father Harry got together and started the M&H Tire Company.

Like other recappers out there the business was rooted in passenger car tires but

it really didn't take long for M&H to get in the racing business. Now when racing got fired up

after the close of World War II, New England midget racers had a major issue. The 12 inch

tubes they needed for their little midget tires were all but nonexistent because of the rubber

rationing and needs during the war. People simply stopped making them to make stuff other people

actually needed in day to day life. Marvin was appealed to and he developed a process where he'd

take a 16 inch car inner tube and cut it down and then rebond it for the midget tires that needed

12 inch tubes. These things worked flawlessly and M&H's entree into the racing business,

humble as it was, was made. Marvin and his father got their recapping rubber from the

Denman Rubber Company in Ohio and after some communication back and forth between Marvin

and Denman's president Harry Webster, they came to a working agreement that Denman would supply

M&H with some special rubber blends developed jointly by his people at Marvin for use on

racing recap tires. Now this agreement was made in the 1940s, the late 40s after the war of course

and it worked well. So well that M&H was becoming more of a racing tire recapper than a passenger

tire recapper. These guys experimented in every way possible. They even tried using

truck and bus tire carcasses to base racing tires off of because of the toughness and innate

strength of their construction. It was a good idea but didn't quite pan out. There was a better way.

In 1952 M&H and Denman entered into an even more extensive partnership to produce full-on

circle track tires from scratch. Because Marvin and his dad didn't have the capital or resources to

build their own tire factory, teaming up with Denman made all the sense in the world and Denman

was a unique company. Over the course of their entire existence, they did a lot of let's call it

private label or side jobs for people. They would manufacture what people wanted, didn't really

care if their name was on it so long as they were getting paid for making it and that is exactly how

it went with Denman and M&H Tire in 1952. So because the fact they went into this partnership,

tires started getting made and born was the famed M&H Cruiser which is a scratch built,

not recapped race tire for stock cars, modifies and really anything else that went fast in circles

on asphalt. The Cruiser line of tires was a huge hit. Their midget and sprint car tires were also

considered the class of the field and while Firestone had done some racing tire work at the

highest levels of competition in the 50s at places like the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, M&H was

really the first kind of meat and potatoes home spun race tire builder because of their

partnership with Denman. As Marvin traveled the country peddling tires and building a dealer

network he met so many people in racing and one of them was named Bobo Sicki.

Bobo Sicki was a Mickey Thompson-esque figure and if he had lived past his early 40s he would be much

better known today. He was a racer in every discipline you can think of from NASCAR to dirt

and drag racing, a brilliant mechanical mind that developed parts and hopped up engines. He built the

insane mad dog racer that Art Malone set a speed record with at Daytona and he was even a promoter

like Thompson with his ITA, the International Timing Association which was a drag racing

sanctioning body. By 1957 Bobo Sicki knew a few things. Firstly he knew that Marv Riftian was

whip smart. Secondly that drag racing was taking off like a bottle rocket and thirdly there was a

massive market for somebody, anybody who could actually make a real tire from the ground up for

all these guys to use. Oh Sicki knew that Riftian was probably the guy to fill the gap that was

needed in the industry just kind of had to talk him into showing up but it didn't take much because

Marv was interested to take on this challenge. The one wrinkle in this whole plan was that Marv had

never actually ever been to a drag race before but what he did was study the equipment and understand

the needs of the competitors before sending a new design to the Denman factory to produce.

It was a slight take off on his cruiser circle track slicks, nothing radical but he understood

that the passenger sidewalls on recaps were not really ideal for any kind of racing tires so

what he did was he made these sidewalls just a little less robust than the stock car tires.

Understanding weight was a concern he made the slick treaded layer a little thinner than the

cruisers and knowing the contact patch was likely the biggest concern he had them molded with a

slight crown in the tread. Now this crown would flatten out when the car's weight was placed

upon the tire and they weren't quite as wide as the seven inch bruce slicks at six and a half inches

as they came out of the molds but frankly Marv didn't see that as a disadvantage. The question is

would he be able to convince racers that to try them? With six pair of tires made he hopped into

his truck to see what drag racing was all about and if his basic ideas rooted in experience outside

of this sport and his intrinsic knowledge of how tires work could actually help drag racers.

His ride to Chester South Carolina was seemingly uneventful. Don Garlett's rides at Chester South

Carolina however were anything but. Garlett's had run 166 miles per hour and then lost the

brakes in his car completely and in an era before parachutes he was a hopeless passenger as his car

shot off the end of the drag strip which was actually a runway which thankfully ended with a muddy

swamp. Garlett's was fine the car looked like it had been pulled out of the La Brea tar pits and

the last thing on Garlett's mind was tires and then he ran into Marv Riftian. As it turns out

when Garlett's ran the insane 176.4 mile per hour speed earlier that month at Brooksville Florida

he had bruises licks on the car and like all top runners across the country they were the ones that

everybody chose but those tires had spun really hard on that run and had blistered and been

roughed up to the point that Garlett's didn't want to use them until he got fresh tires from Eddick

and Darien who promised to send them from California as part of a sponsorship deal.

In the meantime before those tires arrived he wanted to make some test runs and

he had located a pair of M&H Cruiser stock car slicks and installed them

with the idea that perhaps their harder rubber surface may be less apt to blister or come apart

than the softer bruises. It was pure happenstance then that he had those tires on when Marv walked

up. Marv was blown away to see his M&H tires in the back of a dragster and because of that

he offered this young Garlett's man a pair of his new tires. The keen eyed Garlett's had

immediately noticed that the M&H slicks were more narrow than the bruises that were apparently

stuck in the mail so this caused Garlett's to pepper Marv with questions about the tires.

As he was doing so Settle Pistoean ran 10 miles per hour faster than he had ever run before

on one of the other sets that Marv had brought to the property. As you can imagine the questions

stopped and the winning started. Garlett's would run 895 at 170.71 as his best numbers at this race

he would capture the top 118er title and put M&H on the drag racing map immediately.

He would also become an M&H devotee for a long time to come. Marv Riftian had found his new

professional obsession walking around the pits. Now Marv quickly realized that drag racers knew

little to nothing about tires and he didn't think that in a negative way he thought that in an

objective way. The stuff they were using wasn't great and he knew with time thought and experimentation

he could almost single-handedly revolutionize the sport of drag racing and he did. Profiles of cars

often highlighted the massive slicks of the era like on this dragster which of course are quaint by

standards. These are 8 inch wide jobs. It's interesting to consider that from 1953 the

introduction of those SoCal 7 inch drag slicks we were still talking about the same size tires

all these years later. How did they not figure out that wider was better? Racers knew it but there

was two massive limiting factors in this time frame. For starters the casings being recapped

were only so wide. Secondly it was actually rare to find a passenger car wheel that was 7 inches wide

in the junkyard. Sure if you had big money you could spring for a set of trick magnesium wheels

that were wider and could handle wider tires but ironically when you did that they were still only

an 8 inch wide recap to buy because that's as large as these guys could go on stock casings.

But there's more to it and that's why in Hot Rod Magazine of February 1958 a story named answers

to your racing problems ran. This story used none other than Bruce Alexander himself or Bruce's

slicks for its information. Bruce's were still by far the largest most used tire in the sport

and he opened his business in 1946. By 1958 he claimed he had recapped more than 10,000 tires for

passenger car and racing use combined. His racing tire line included midget tires,

tires for stock cars, sports cars, roadsters and drag racing. He also claimed that he was

shipping tires to racers across the world. So what does this story teach us about period drag racing

tires in the late 50s? It sets into stone a rule that companies have been preaching since the

SoCal days and would continue to preach a decade into the future. Racers needed a 1 inch to 1

inch ratio wheel to tire. A 7 inch slick needed to be on a 7 inch wheel ideally. Sure you could

vary up to 1 inch of wheel width but absolutely no more than that so a 6 and a half inch wheel with

a 7 and a half inch tread would work but no more differential than that much. The fear at the time

was that using too wide a wheel and too low an air pressure would allow the wheel to rotate in the

tire as we previously discussed with catastrophic results. In this story Alexander mentions what

recently happened to Emory Cook and Honolulu Dragstrip in Hawaii where both rear tires were thrown at

some 150 miles per hour and the car skated for a long while totally out of control. It was the

bleed off of air pressure that caused the tires to lose their integrity and fly off the wheels of

the top end. It would not be the first or last time a racer would suffer this but Cook was among

the lucky ones to walk away. Magnesium wheels held the tires better than steel but the ratio was

still recommended to be 1 inch wheel 1 inch tire match it up meaning again 8 inch width slick find an

8 inch width wheel 6 and a half inch width slick find a 6 and a half inch width wheel. Alexander

cautioned in the story about killing performance with too much diameter of a slick on a car basically

causing the final drive ratio to suffer. He also talked about the importance of running an actual

tire designed to do what you wanted to do meaning on a drag racing car you should not run a circle

track or sprint car slick because the rubber compounds and casing selections were different.

Also the drag slick was designed with a slightly concave tread that had sharp block shaped shoulders

on the tire this tire would then flatten out when it was inflated and pressed to the ground giving a

good contact patch. Circle track slicks had one sharp and one rounded shoulder for cornering

purposes and more. Incredibly it was recommended that if a tubeless style casing was being run with

an inner tube or a liner the outer tire should be punctured on purpose a couple of times to prevent

an air build up layer between the tire and the tube and this seems like really bad advice. Clearly

it was done a lot but it just seems like really bad advice for something you're going to drive at

150 plus miles per hour. A chart of inflation pressures was published and these show us something

pretty interesting so-called track slicks had a wild variation between asphalt and dirt well

drag racing slicks all came in between 20 and 30 psi this is of course way high when we consider

slicks today as we'll learn in a few minutes but these numbers were all taken with a grain of salt

they do what they please in terms of the racers decision making no matter what the experts said

they already proven the engineer is wrong in the first place so why did they have to listen to

everything these guys told them now prices slicks were mentioned at the 200 to 300 per pair mark which

is way higher than what i have seen in research as i'm putting this thing together so it seems

like a bit of propaganda for a guy like bruce's slicks to be able to say that they were so

astronomically high when the recaps for about a hundred bucks a pair so i think the two to

300 dollar name is really more of a marketing ploy or a discouragement to potential

customers than actual fact because as we're going to learn they never got that high even later in

the decade or in the 1960s but really even this early the guys like bruce understood what the

introduction of the mnh race master meant for the sport of drag racing he understood what it meant

for the advent and advancement of recaps and he understood what his place would be in this sport

if not sooner then maybe a little later and it would be certainly different than where he was

right now 1958 would also give us a very clear indicator and how tires and specifically the

mnh race master were starting to evolve the actual equipment of the sport of drag racing

the racers had gotten themselves far along and now the engineers like riftian self-taught as he

might have been had taken what they knew applied their technical knowledge and the result was

improvement don garlets had a front row seat to this action marv sent him a pair of experimental

slicks which he bolted on for a match race in montgomery new york on october of 1958

there were eight inch wide pieces on 15 inch wheels garlets set a new world record of 836 and

only went 160 miles per hour lifting early he knew the car and maybe more importantly the tires

were magic together back at home he set a new record for asphalt paved drag strips in 174.15

on the same tires he then took the same car and tires to texas and ran 890 at 180 miles per hour

at an nha event that was certified on the clocks by nha officials and it was the engineer and the

racer making history together also as the magazines are freaking out about the performance of the

dragsters and unlimited type cars in drag racing there were massive strides being made with the

stock style car and modified full body production cars in the sport they too had a new tire option

that began to bubble up it was called the cheater slick and it too would have a massive impact on

the sport but just not quite yet this 1959 rod builder feature on the hasham hilton crossley

dragster tells us a lot firstly this is considered the first car in drag racing history to use a

wheelie bar or some sort of wheelie suppression device which they call the fifth wheel at the time

running m&h race masters they quickly discovered what so many other racers did

when their stubby little dragster actually got some traction with these new tires the front end

wanted to leap off the ground and the thing wanted to flip over backward these tires not

only ushered in the wheel stand era they ushered in the beginning of the wheelbase growth that

over time would bring us to 300 inch top fuel dragsters note the track width of this car as well

wheelies and modern drag racing cars are cool and celebrated wheelies in the late 50s were

considered reckless a sign of bad driving and actually got you thrown out of drag strips no

matter who you were isn't that right mr ivo read this from his own book to understand what i mean

the springloader wheel on the back of a hasham car and its little eight inch diameter rubber tire

stopped the multi-foot wheel stands the driver bill crossley was trying to prevent

incidentally ernie hasham would go on to be a huge part of the m&h story as the west coast

distributor of the tires and perhaps the closest personal confidant to marv riftian in drag racing

through his career guys like seto pastoian who was at chester in 1957 they continued to preach the

m&h gospel running eight inch slicks on his blown fueler but the advent of the eight and a half inch

and promised nine inch slicks meant that more grip and speed were ahead the good news for racers

and everyone else frankly is that the story was going far deeper than simple increases in width

and we're going to learn more about that shortly the fact remained though as good as m&h was doing

the recappers still really owned the game firestone had stuck their toes in the drag racing

sand for a short amount of time in this period but it was done so quietly that while they may have

had success it wasn't touted like other companies touted theirs as i previously mentioned englewood

tire in california was one of the first true race tire recappers in the country to gain prominence

and they still had it in 1959 i can say that because they were featured in this november 14

1959 issue of drag news which was at its time the largest circulating drag racing newspaper in the

country the story written by scottie fen is really built around bill crutch the owner of the company

and crutch is lauded for being a lifetime racer in the mind behind the highly successful pause

attraction racing tire line these guys made recaps for every form of racing you could think of

crutch himself was a dedicated racer of midgets the story talks about the process of sorting the

casings they get to recap and how only about 10 percent of them are even considered good enough

for drag racing tires the story talks about how they use void rubber how their quality control

is top-notch and most interestingly how their best drag racing recaps are made off casings of

firestone sportsman tires from the stock car world it was a dirty and kind of nasty business

recapping tires but englewood was still at its forefront in racing and selling tires as fast

as they could cap them moxley is another brand that was about a decade into its racing life at this

point in 1959 and it was as diversified as the others bill moxley made recaps for every form

of racing customers demanded and of course that included drag racing his 1959 catalog is an awesome

window into this era there's some funny stuff in here including the first line the reason for these

articles to sell my slicks people from the period say that moxley was a friendly but relentless

salesman and sure kind of seems like it would that opener in this catalog moxley of course

goes through his products and he does talk about some of the different things he employs in his

recaps and retreads to try to stop high speed distortion and more this illustration of the

high speed distortion that we spoke about earlier is again worth looking at note on the bottom image

he has a patent pending reinforced area in the center designed to keep the tires integrity at

high speeds the whole catalog shows a nice level of sophistication that many people forget existed

in this early stage of the sports growth this is a professionally made piece of literature and yes

it is a sales tool but it also looks like something that's corporately made out of some small recapping

outfit moxley like so many others in this recap slick game was in a good position in 1959 in fact

i'd have to guess that if he and the rest of them in this genre could have frozen time and

performance they likely would have but others sure didn't feel the same way in progress especially

in auto racing as plotting as it may be sometimes is unstoppable so where was good year in all this

yes they had been back in stock car racing for about five years or so at this time but the

company wasn't really interested in doing a lot more if you consider the state of drag racing in

1959 you may better understand why this was still a sport that was trying to shake the stigma of

being a fad a big dominated by scoff laws and hoodlums and it was also a sport that seemingly

ran okay on recap tires and all of those things didn't exactly light up the boardrooms in Ohio at

good year headquarters but something else and actually someone else sure did that guy's name

was mickey thompson thompson as he so often was was desperate to find a company to build them tires

capable of exceeding 400 miles per hour for his 1960 challenger one assault on the world's land

speed record thompson had been rejected by everyone else and the conservative good year tire and

rubber company was his last hope and because of that things weren't looking real good on the face

of this but the men sitting in that room listening to thompson pitches brains out for a special tire

project knew damn well that they were going to agree to do the project they just wanted to make

thompson was worth the investment and it didn't take long to figure out that he was

so how did a room full of executives immediately know they would do a high speed tire project

that a company that was barely involved in racing and had never done anything like this before

in fact they were already basically doing it before thompson showed up good year had provided

tires to supersonic planes already and understanding that there was a massive potential investment

from the government in these types of technologies had invested in a 1000000 dollar scratch

design and built extreme high speed tire testing dyno in fact their advanced engineering department

was already moving along nicely with tires for ever faster jets that the government was speccing

for the future the challenge in this design was using minimal diameter and cross section to make

the tire fit the body of mickey thompson's car and be happy at 400 miles per hour a lot of the

other elements not to say they were in hand but people were a little bit down the road on them

ted hallibrand designed the special wheels for the car 28 pounds a piece made of magnesium

they were a half inch thick at the center and 9 16th thick at the beads the wheels had big ribs

in them for strength and they were run up to a speed of about 300 miles per hour which they

were strong enough to handle but they began to literally sound like an air raid siren and they

churned up so much air that they were immediately covered with moon disks from dean moon for aerodynamic

efficiency gene mcmanus was the lead engineer in the project jim lulin was responsible for

compounding the tire natural rubber was used loads of carbon black and a painstaking process of

trial and error mixing was gone through constructed to resist growth at all costs this was a tire

built to the exact opposite end of the engineering scale than drag slick hot rod magazine called it

the most radically different automotive tire of all time a low oval cross section gave a broad flat

tread the lowest chord angle of any tire ever produced by good year was also employed in the

construction of these for thompson chord angle is something we're going to talk about a lot in

their upcoming discussion but in the case of this moment think of the cords of this tire

basically running bead to bead like a tire chain straight across the tread the design worked as

the tire grew less than one inch at 400 miles per hour amazingly they were tubeless and that saved

two pounds per tire porous magnesium wheels had to be coated and painted to properly seal and hold

air pressure the process was not without its moments in one dino session with the tire the

tire actually threw chunks of itself out at hundreds of miles per hour on the test rig

and one piece of it made it halfway through a concrete block wall in the test cell how would

that happen well they determined at 420 miles per hour centrifugal force overcame the ability of

the spring and the valve stem to remain its seal the pressure actually started to bleed out of the

tire as it was spinning that fast the tire lost its ability to hold shape and the result was a

wave that went through the tire causing it to basically come apart and nearly throw pieces of

itself through a concrete block wall tested by mickey tobson in his own kind of violent ways

they pass their flying colors even after the abuse of a 300 to zero manual braking emergency test

they did keep mickey safe the story contains this line quote good year is already conducting field

tests on drag racing slicks that incorporate the same carcass restriction principles as lsr tires

end quote but would these slicks ever see the light of day as it would seem

not for more than half a decade by the end of 1959 the top fuel record now stood at 823 on the

elapsed time side and the speed number of 186.72 which was held by ted sear as our story heads

in 1960 we enter the truly rapid evolution part of the drag slick in this 1960 speed mechanics

feature roger huntington once again talking tires writes about how high performance tires

are varying types are different the illustration of the michelin x tire shows us a great visual of

chord angle note the area where the number two is this shows us a perfect 90 degree chord angle

like was used on the good year land speed tires this makes for an insanely strong tire but it

doesn't give great ride quality which is why this style of construction wasn't typically used on

passenger car tires of the day now as those chords are leaned back to move more in the circular

pattern of the tire it does provide better ride quality allows for more sidewall give and more

distortion which was a few things that drag racing tires need a lot of and land speed tires needed

none of this illustration of the difference in contact patch on the same tire at 25 psi or 15 psi

is telling drag racers had long figured out that lower pressure didn't mean a wider contact patch

but rather a longer one and those longer patches work great but came with a price like everything

else in racing if you're going to gain something you're going to lose something else of all the

images we've seen so far this one is the best way to illustrate the way a high speed high performance

tire worked at this time in history versus a normal passenger car tire so this is a firestone

racing tire at 100 miles per hour as you can see it is perfectly around from where it is contacting

the roller in that moment and then giving up that contact and maintaining its perfectly round shape

now this is a firestone passenger tire the non-high performance variety and there's plenty

to look at here even if you think there isn't look at this as if the tire is rotating clockwise

look directly ahead of the contact area and directly after it the tire is no longer concentric

and this is creating a so-called traction wave this illustrates one of the base flaws in the

recap passenger slick versus one that is scratch built and it would only get worse as cars got

faster as we'll soon see roger huntington talks about the cheap nature of recaps at being 20 to

30 a piece but he recommends m&h race masters still the only scratch built slick on the market

three years after coming out and to those with very fast cars he thinks that's the best option

especially if you had the money to spend on him even he admits he doesn't know why those tires

are so good but he credits them with record-smashing drag racing performances over the last few seasons

one of those record-smashing drag racing performances happened to be the most controversial

run in the sports history chris caramacinus's 204 mile an hour shot at alton illinois 1960

was made on m&h race masters they were all just a part of the magic if you believe the biggest

numbers of 1960 red greth was clocked at 803 in the speed sport special and chris caramacinus a 204

to lead all racers that year which was a year of kind of suspicious numbers 1960 was also the year

that nha took the nationals to detroit this brought it in front of executives from the car

companies and they saw an event that looked like gear head wood stock well a decade before actual

wood stock but it was that whole type of environment that event helped to not only spark the muscle car

era but the drastic increase in attention giving to racing passenger cars mickey thompson also went

after fia acceleration records in 1960 remember those good year drag slicks that were casually

mentioned in a land speed racing story well they were called blue dragon slicks and mickey thompson

had them on this car but i've never heard of them otherwise even a lot of research and a

lot of poking around nobody's talking about blue dragons but if you look up enough about this mickey

thompson record attempt you will see the blue dragon slick name mentioned but then they went off

into the wilderness a major breakthrough for drag racing tires on full-sized and full-bodied cars

came in 1960 as well the nha allowed stockers to run so-called cheater slicks for the first

time they had to be the same width as the factory tire but these cheater slicks helped to produce

a lot of the big named big elapsed times of the moment they were basically recapped passenger

car tires with much softer stickier rubber and they helped the heavy stockers get off the line

better than they ever had before one of the best drag slick stories of the early 1960s can be found

in this issue of speed mechanics called know your tires it breaks down a lot of the trends

technology and advancements that were happening in that moment and it brought slicks to where they

were then starting with cheater slicks they're explained as recapped tires with wider and

softer rubber tread using minimal grooves to appear like a normal street tire stockers picked up a

half second the moment they were allowed to use them they appeared in 1958 and by this writing in

1961 that they were insanely popular but again as recaps in 1960 butyl rubber tires came out

now butyl rubber is much less prone to stretching and bouncing so when these things were forced

into the racetrack by weight transfer they stuck like glue the issue is that they were very expensive

they wore very quickly and they did tend to have kind of a lazy flexing to them on the starting

line which helped with bite this is also likely because they were under inflated atlas buckrun

was famous as a brand of butyl tires at the time that racers used firestone had a line of butyl

air tires good year got in on the action and even a boutique tire company called vogue vogue tires

offered the largest tread patch of any car tire on sale at that time and racers used them a lot

but they were brutally expensive and they were kind of short lived in terms of their useful life

the company itself is still in business recap tires were still half the price of the butyls

especially if you went to the high level vogue's now the highest level stock eliminator and doorcar

racers of this time that were traveling the country traveled with all three styles of the

tires mentioned here recap slicks grooved and recap cheater slicks and butyl passenger tires

using each as the surface the conditions and the rules allowed going back to the full on drag

slick front things were getting pretty exciting as well after m&h took the market by storm in 1958

with their seven and eight inch slicks they released one with nine and a quarter inch tread width

which went bananas on the top cars in 1961 they made their first significant design change rift

changed the design to add a soft middle layer of rubber between the tires casing in the actual

tread layer this allowed the tire to lay flatter on the ground now we also changed the rubber

blend slightly to provide more wear life for the racers giving them a little bit more bang for the

buck these tires use six ply nylon construction meaning they were not recapped they were made

from scratch using a relatively heavy duty process that resisted deformation at speed

firestone was in the game but again in a weird kind of quiet just to be their form

firestone tires were $35 a piece they were sold for 15 inch wheels only and they were made in width

from six and a half inches to eight inches of tread bruce's slicks weren't going anywhere

without a fight they came out with a white dot line of tires which had a new tread formulation

using natural and butyl rubber as a blend these perform roughly as good as the previous generation

of m&h race masters in terms of racer reviews and performance at the time the bruce slicks were

selling between 36 and 42 dollars per tire back then with m&h going for 45 to 68 per tire now

that's 390 a piece for the bruce's on the low end today and almost 500 a piece on the low end for

the m&h's in today's money and over 700 on the high end for their biggest size prices if you wanted

mag wheels at this time you were looking at 50 to 60 bucks a pop which is about 650 bucks a wheel

in today's money m&h wanted their tires at 30 to 40 psi bruce wanted theirs at 20 to 30 psi and

both companies said that going below 18 psi was asking for big trouble and injury remember that

number in 1961 the top fuel records dropped to 788 and 198.66 miles per hour both in don garlitz

name in 1962 the speed record went to eddie hill at 202.7 miles per hour and the et record stayed

with don garlitz and stayed at 788 by 1963 we're basically 10 years into our story and as much of

things have changed they have also stayed largely the same in many ways m&h remains the only major

innovating player in the game for pure built drag slicks and the recappers are still slinging their

tires by the ton and the freshest open front of the tire war was that of the stock in super stock

ranks dominated by the same recappers as the larger slicks m&h finally decided to act and in 1963

unleashed their super stock line of scratch built ground up engineered cheater slicks

for about 50 bucks a piece you had something that was ready to fly with all the engineering

prowess of a racing tire behind it and these did not disappoint making a huge splash in the

marketplace the year of their arrival performance was officially catching up to the recappers now

as well as the heavy full-bodied cars began to go ever faster breaching 100 miles per hour and up

in the quarter mile a scary thing started to happen when guys would air down their recaps the

cars that they were on were virtually uncontrollable and nearly unhandleable at the top end to drive

the passenger car casings with their two or four ply construction became wildly distorted at the

big end and were basically kind of distorting and slapping the ground on each revolution

causing the tire to skate and drift all over the racetrack the six ply construction of the m&h tire

kept their integrity even at lower pressures and the world was headed to lower pressures

across the board the m&h has employed a near 90 degree court angle construction which is way

steeper than a normal passenger car tire and they did that because these were designed to

be a street appearing tire that met drag racing regulations driver comfort on the highway was

not a consideration because these things were labeled and instructed and admonished to people

that they would never be used on the actual street just on the drag strip to meet the street

regulations of a drag strip rule book in the big realm m&h and firestone were now both offering

10 inch wide slicks these were the big fuel dragsters and top gas machines the butyl tires

are still providing competition to the cheater slicks and they still claim to be superior on

a slick or less than great ideal drag racing surface proper pressures and the one-to-one rule

on wheel width still range supreme in this era and in 1963 the top fuel records plummeted it was

down to 760 at 208.32 miles an hour with Jeep Hampshire behind the wheel and then a funny

thing happened in 1964 a small tire recapper in southern california named bill castler who had

been at it for a couple of years at this time hit the big time in drag racing hayden profit had

taken his tires and performed well at national level meets across the country and then he went

one the us nationals in indianapolis and when he did so he credited castler cheater slicks for a lot

of his performance without well as stalker had done bill castler's phone melted off the wall

once a guy who was on the verge of being totally broke after making bad business dealings this one

moment and this one product would set him on a path of aftermarket and hot rotting superstardom

in wealth in early 1964 perhaps the hottest tire you could have on your stalker or super stalker

was a castler recap on an m&h casing yes this type of thing was happening and it was happening a lot

the m&h casing was by far and away the best in the sport but castler had the magical rubber blend

that just seemed to outperform the m&h tread at the time so as weird as it sounds taking your used

up m&h slick or cheater slick over to bill castler and having him recap it with his own magic rubber

blend maybe gave you the ultimate drag racing tire in the sport at that moment the castler tread

was interesting as it used a lot of interlocking angular slits that were claimed to open up as

the tire grabbed the ground to provide more surface grip castler also made his recaps with

the tread cupped in the middle so that at speed the force would effectively round the tire out

it was a step that didn't seem totally necessary with the m&h casing but it sure worked well for

everything else m&h also rolled out a new line of seven inch detroit tires for stock eliminator cars

rumblings came from akron that good year was ready to enter the market and they have been

testing with the ram chargers meanwhile drag racing fans in the media were asking why top fuel

dragsters were seemingly stagnating in performance they were making more power more smoke had better

chassis and what was the problem was there some terminal issue with the slingshot maybe huntington

just got it wrong on the figures and the performance barrier he had come up with he just missed the

numbers but there still was a barrier that eventually would be reached with all these

questions swirling what was going to not only break the deadlock with physics but also re-inject some

life into top fuel the questions continue through 1964 in this report from drag racing magazine

our resident tire obsessive roger huntington examines where the various tire manufacturers are

and came to some interesting conclusions about the recent history of drag racing both m&h and

firestone had rolled out 11 inch wide slicks and they had seen virtually no performance enhancement

so both companies retreated to 10 and a half inch width for weight manufacturing and efficiency

purposes on the other hand a relatively unheard of company at the time called hoosier tire rolled

out a 12 inch slick that was the largest the industry had seen by a ton huntington believed

that the tire game had reached the point of diminishing returns when it came to whip and

overall size the tires were working blowing all recognized traction coefficient math into

the weeds handily almost amazingly gassers were achieving a coefficient of 2.0 and sometimes

more which was double what any engineer thought possible and quote the textbooks say it is impossible

and quote once again and only in passing the good year tire and rubber boogie monster is

mentioned in short terms in this story they seem to be coming into the sport but no one knows really

when or where m&h and firestone had the big slick market by the throat castler was killing it on the

small tire recap front and the bruce and englewood companies were finally beginning to slip the most

major problem the recappers had was the increased performance of cars across the board these guys

simply didn't have the technological means to keep high speed stability in recap tires and so their

products were increasingly relegated to cars that were going 120 miles per hour or slower there

were lots of those cars so plenty of business there just wasn't really many headlines on the

other end of the spectrum firestone rolled out its lightning drag cheater slick and had a tread

pattern that was perhaps the most interesting in the entire sport but really didn't seem to do a

whole lot in the marketplace m&h also began producing small high speed front tires for cars

after racers were using i'm talking wholly unsuited small front tires to deal with the speeds and

loads that they were running inflated to 50 psi the m&h tires perhaps offered the lowest rolling

resistance of any tire ever introduced into the sport at that point and then it happened good

year had finally entered the drag racing tire game it did so in the only way they knew how full force

magazine lead times being what they were made it seem like good year had come in halfway through

the season but they had been there from the jump and they had put in the work good year aligned

with conny coletta and rather than spend a cold winter in michigan conny spent a warm one in

california with most of his days at remona drag strip good year's race tire director tony wibbiner

who oversaw the project jim lulin who is the manager of race tire development and remember the

compounder on the mickey tomson land speed tire back in the day ej wasco the manager of race tire

design along with engineers rf corrigan and va caravito ran this project and they kept conny

busy they would test tires they would fly back build new tires test tires again and on and on

conny came out swinging in this year came out with a strong showing at the nha winter nationals but

didn't win he did however just a couple weeks later clean house at baker's field at the march

meet and took down m&h's poster boy don garlets in the process conny's 7.95 180 mile per hour shot

to take down big daddy was heard around the world and exactly what good year wanted and needed in

this tire launch this was a 10 inch slick on a 16 inch wheel it used six ply nylon construction

and it used a unique casing that used 2 4 and 6 ply construction in different parts to control

growth sidewall integrity and allow flexibility the tire unlike any other that had been released

by any company had virtually no rubber on the sidewall this is for both weight reduction and

to allow the sidewall to work as they wanted it but it did make the tires fragile and easy to

punch in that area but man that trade off for sidewall fragility made them work very very well

using their now extensive experience and race tire compounding they found the right tread hardness

which was the key factor in this whole process made the cocktail of fillers sulfur carbon black and

antioxidants properly and came up with a tire that not only worked it in many ways changed the game

an m and h tire needed 10 to 12 runs to be fully broken in these good years three conny ran of a

20 psi and by the time the stories hit the magazines the public was snatching them up the major leap

forward good year made was in the use of multiple thicknesses of construction in various areas of

the tire this was a show as a tour de force of how much engineering and dedication they had put into

the product so with this you have to imagine m and h faded off into the distance and was never

heard from again right that answer isn't just a no that answer is a hell no goliath showed up in

deck david but before anybody knew any different david meaning m and h was coming up off the mat

dusting himself off and preparing for a fight that would carry drag racing forward on tires no one

could have ever seen coming all because good year decided to jump into this battle royale

late 1964 brought mickey tomson into the manufacturing fold

yes of course he now had his own drag racing slicks was this a partnership with good year

i don't think it was but it was a partnership with someone as they were going to be a hot

commodity selling these tires and sears stores across america who's your name there 12 inch

slick the top eliminator and i couldn't find a whole lot of people who ran it or won it or even

ever sought the biggest news of late 1964 was a break in the known rules of the universe when it

came to drag racing tires marv riftian had spent some time down south than seeing the guys running

nine inch slicks on six inch wide wheels at low pressures and having incredible performance

in the southern match racing circuit think of it this way mounting a tire on the one to one

recommended ratio at this point really put the onus on air pressure to keep the tire seated on

the wheel and remember one to one means one inch wide on the tread means one inch wide on the wheel

eight inch tire eight inch wheel if we take that eight inch tire and say put it on to a six inch

wheel there's a natural tension created by the sidewalls trying to push their way out now that's

the good side but the downside is you've actually bowed the tread out into a kind of rounded convex

manner but if you run the tire at a very low air pressure and we're talking 12 to 15 pounds here

that same tire that was bowed out will actually sit flat on the track and give you an insanely long

footprint you won't make it any wider but you will make it longer meaning more of the tire will be

touching the ground at low pressure once again the racers had pushed the engineers by taking

their good product and using it in ways they'd never considered the tension created by being on

a narrow rim held the tire fast even at low pressure it was two birds with one stone now the top fuel

record this year as i keep tracking had fallen to 742 at 208.94 miles per hour by 1965 the incredible

shift in popularity of the production car drag racing the pursuit of traction and performance

in these cars had almost taken on a larger platform than the top fuelers check this out

a center spread story on exactly what marverician was talking about in later 1964 southern match

racers running 10 inch slicks on now six to seven inch wheels and a wild eight psi this violated

all the drag racing laws of nature how is this possible this was primarily done on stick shift

cars of the era because it allowed them to come off the starting line at 7 000 rpm dumping the clutch

and actually not roasting the tires into oblivion this was of course not without issues wheels were

spinning in tires with this set up on the most powerful cars and the fix to that run some sheet

metal screws through the wheel and into the bead it's something that is still seen at the drag

strip today and it started 62 years ago in the southern realms of match racing marve was quoted

about being horrified at the sight of this and he was adamant that he would design a purpose

built slick to do this job more safely a slick design to run at 10 psi pressure with a sidewall

that could wrinkle and to form in a safer way than the under inflated stuff screwed to a wheel

and that stuff really scared him to death also he really really as mentioned hated sheet metal

screws so didn't some of the racers as this photo of butch leal would lead you to believe

another problem showed up during this season as well and that was our old friend the wheel stand

a few factors had combined to bring the wheel stand back in vogue and drag racing the first was

the fact that the tires had kind of caught back up again and then there was this move to build

super lightweight cars mostly powered by small block Chevy engines a handful of small block

fords and they were built in the lightest manner possible back in the day the old hasham crossley

car was looked at as way ahead of its time because in 1964 it was now becoming common to run a fifth

wheel or as we would call it a wheelie bar in the back of your car and it wasn't just limited to

Chevy dragsters either garlets ran a fifth wheel and his car in bakersfield with a hemi the warren

cobra and team used one as well and it was seen as a safety factor as well as a performance factor

the wheel helped you save runs before the driver had to give up on him neanderthal man wheelie

control was in full effect during the mid 1960s m&h if anything was inspired by good years entree

into drag racing it should be mentioned though that the whole tire war of the 1960 and 70 was

fought on a very gentlemanly level and this bear is mentioning it was about respect and it was about

passion and yes the fight was between two guys and companies and ideologies that wanted to win

but they never slandered each other they were trying to out engineer each other and they treated

each other with the utmost respect as competitors and they were enemies only on the racetrack it is

a foreign concept in today's world to do business this way and both the engineers and competitors

on the good year side and the m&h side need to be exonerated celebrated for the way

that they approached the pitch battle they were in for the better part of two decades

marvin showed how his small company could be very nimble at the end of 1964 into 1965 he had been

working hand in hand with denman and he released a slew of new products there was the new model j

slick and this slick was 10 and a half inches wide and it used a new compound that was revolutionary

at the time it also had a different tread contour that was kind of rounded before it was placed on

a car this is the slick compound tire the don garlets used to break the 200

mile per hour barrier in 1964 which many people yes including me recognize as the first 200 mile per

hour run officially in drag racing marv riftian at this time did not believe a larger tire was

needed for top fuel cars he just felt a better tire was needed and this was a better tire it was

worth three tenths of a second and five to seven miles per hour to anybody who bolted it on this

is likely a good time as any to remind you that denman rubber in ohio was physically manufacturing

these tires for m&h at this time marvin's designs and compound formulations were used but the

manufacturing was happening at denman they also deserve credit here that's why i bring it up

the speed they made stuff and experimental products how quickly they turned things around

was truly incredible and speaks to the relationship that they and m&h had the recappers at this time

in history were being squeezed out of the big car game and they just had nothing to compete with the

offerings of m&h good year and even firestone to some degree and they just couldn't do it

because of very simple reasons they had no casings anywhere near 10 to 11 inches wide to cap

the ones they did have in small numbers they were recapping other people's race tires the series j

tire was also interesting in the compounding department i mentioned the fact that the model

j m&h tire had a new compound in it and that compound was interesting in that when it was spun

and heated it didn't lose bite and turn into grease it actually kept on gripping and pulling

on the super stock side marvin went all in with narrow wheels and low pressure as his mantra by

going from 20 to 40 psi down to 10 to 12 psi the tires would gain a pretty astonishing two to three

inches of lengthwise footprint and then didn't buckle or deform at the top end employing this

method basically guaranteed whoever was doing it two to three tenths of a second pick up

instantaneously this was also the true start of the wrinkle wall slick the little seven inch

cheater slicks that were used on a lot of the stockers if you will had to be run at high pressure

on a wheel that was about the right width they really couldn't do the same things that some of

these other tires were doing it would be too dangerous castler continued to be the dominant

player in the recapping space and especially in this seven inch zone of drag racing they'd use

any casings but good years m&h's and firestones were the best ones they would find and they were

the best ones that would deliver the results when he took those casings and added castlers proven

rubber blend narrow wheels and low pressure became the stock and super stock story for 1965

it was in every magazine and they were all over the house and wise of what it was doing the downside

some guys were only getting 10 to 12 runs out of a set of tires with this format hot rod magazine

got in on the party too they specified that the big splash of the low pressure small rim movement

came at the 1964 nha nationals the fx and gas class guys were all doing it and running like

crazy ironically marv could hardly get anyone to listen in his camp it was so ingrained into the

minds of people that the width rule was that even with the haranguing by a guy like

marv riftian he couldn't get people to change their mind until they saw one of the big dogs do it

and they would only do it at a national meet and the big dogs were waiting for someone else to try

it to see if it actually worked before they did it in front of a big crowd by the end of the year

many came around and when they did wheelies and full body cars became regular fun occurrences for

drag racing fans from coast to coast and it was awesome some guys tried five psi in these tires

and that was a bridge too far the handling was so bad they actually gave up on that idea pretty

quickly in 1965 a new product hit the market as well called bx10 this stuff was a tire treatment

softener that you painted onto the tires before running your car and it guaranteed more grip and

lower ETs I know it sounds like it's monkey business but it worked and this story proves how

well it worked it was also apparently ghastly stuff and frankly that's probably what made it work

bx10 was worth multiple tenths of a second to some of the best super stock and factory

experimental racers in the country at this time which is completely insane it was in the days

before track prep as we know it so if you couldn't treat the track you treated the tires to the same

effect I actually think I can smell this stuff through the video and through the decades by 1965

Bill Castler's recaps were the last ones truly making noise on the national stage his rubber

his program whatever his black magic was the castler tires were still winning a lot of races

he had started in business in the early 1960s and as previously mentioned Hayden

profit's success on his tires launched him instantly the castler sprawling as he liked

to call it tread pattern was unique and it seemingly outperformed what anybody else in the

competition area had the process he used was no different than what others had done for so many

years in recapping and if castler wasn't given a good carcass to use he would use a four-ply

passenger car casing black wall white wall it didn't really matter now those would be for his

five and a half inch to eight inch wide slicks race casings would often go up to 10 inches wide

with the tread buffed off there would be a cold kind of chemical process used to bind the rubber

to the casing and then there would be an inflatable bladder put inside the tire to hold its shape when

it went into the mold and then it would be baked at 300 degrees for three minutes per

132nd inch of racing rubber and this typically meant 16 to 18 minutes of baking in the mold

castler and his crew were producing 120 tires a day at this pace and once the pairs were made

early in the process they were matched and never separated it would be in this time frame the

castler would find himself not only in the tire business but also in the header business gary

hooker of the famed hooker header brand had a massive shop fire lost basically his whole business

and was sunk until castler bought in and the two of them made scads of money at hooker castler was

involved in loads of other businesses as well he was a true american success story a guy who barely

escaped the clutches of high school outside of being a star athlete castler would play a good

role in the drag racing scene over the next couple of years before beginning to fade off the

ram chargers lowered the top fuel record to 731 in 1965 and jim brissette took the speed record

at 219 miles per hour by the time 1966 rolled around the focus on things was actually moving

away from the tire always being the hero or villain and the chassis actually being considered and

how the tire was working factory experimental cars with their shifted wheelbases were making the most

of it gassers with their tall ride height had loads of static weight transfer and both of them were

basically leaving all the time with the wheels up fans loved it 100 weight transfer on the rear

tires was everything that a slick could ask for but also made the driver a passenger unless the car

was going straight the magical 10 and a half inch tires on these cars once only for the realm of

fuel dragsters just a couple years before we're making all this possible and the industry of

specialty chassis parts manufacturers was rising to meet the demand and performance of expectations

in 1966 in the april 1966 issue of street and strip magazine marv rishan did a massive q and a

story with some interesting stuff and some interesting stories information

was revealed and discussed tidbits like a seven inch tire picking up three psi of air pressure

during a pass from heat and friction his absolute detest of sheet metal screws run into the piano

wire bead of a tire to hold it on the wheel he offered solutions like epoxy more tire pressure

and even early in the wheels to get a better grip on it he talks about the importance of breaking

in a slick with a burnout to get rid of the mold release agents and silicon that was used to have

that happen and knocking any high spots off of it he's actually an interestingly in favor of

tire treatments like bx 10 and other rosin type substances to help traction but here's the best

one clorox he said will do the same job if you make a puddle of it and burn the tires through it

so if you've ever wondered where the bleach burnout came from in the 1960s 70s and 80s

it came from marv riftian and it worked according to him just as good as anything else out there

some other fun parts of the story were him talking about the fact that an average slick at this time

in history would grow between three quarters of an inch to an inch and a half at speeds over

140 miles per hour he talks about the fact that tubeless slicks could be an option in the future

but no one was quite there yet in 1966 he did recently call out the drag radial being a thing

in the future of course it became a huge thing in the future a long way off from this discussion

and he talked about a 210 mile per hour dragster slick growing an inch and a half to two inches

in diameter which is six inches in circumference and he mentioned this because sometimes people

design their zoomy headers too close to the tire the tire would grow enough to hit them and explode

now it's nothing earth shattering in this story but it's all good solid information

by 1966 the once rather quaint story of the recappers and the little guy from massachusetts

was now a full-blown global business good year in firestone raced and tested in every possible

realm of motorsports m&h was locked into drag racing stock cars even sports cars and formula cars

even without the testing budget of the massive corporations m&h not only hung in there they

won and were favored by some racers of course they would occasionally lose pace and then they

would catch back up again and then good year would get a run on them and they catch back up again

and occasionally they'd get a lead on good year and then good year would be playing catch up that

was the nature of this entire fun time to look back on this tire war but also it's the reason

why the tires advance so hard and fast because everybody was so committed to getting the job done

the market saturation was real at this point too was seemingly everybody and everything trying to

get their own private label drag slick or cheater slick onto the market and yes this magazine even

had their own brand of cheater slick the performance of cars and tires had finally reached the point

where people were really trying to understand exactly what the heck these things were doing

it couldn't be so easy as to think they were just big round and sticky right and the answer is right

there's so much going on here those deformities we had seen in the tires previously the passenger

car sidewalls asked to work on recaps for example those were bad but not all deformities were in

so many ways what people discovered that made the difference in what was happening with the tire

was that it was accelerating growing and deforming the deformations were adding traction

if the traction coefficient of the tire was one to one with no slippage how can you improve it

think of what would happen if we smashed the tire into the pavement as it was making contact and

then drove it out from under the wheel back up and over again and did this in kind of an infinity

loop when you see a drag slick almost square before it hits the ground that tire is being driven

into the pavement and then powered over producing multitudes more grip than if it were just spinning

like a passenger car tire with no change in the force being applied to the ground in effect the

tire hits the ground and shears and as the tire spins faster it keeps doing this with more and

more energy each and every instant if you shear a little too hard you get a haze of smoke if you

do it way too hard you get clouds of smoke but this is how the drag slick defeats the textbook

it is conforming and gearing to the pavement but it's also hitting the pavement with more and more

energy as it accelerates which means it can exert more and more grip on said pavement

and provide more and more forward thrust to the car the best numbers of the 1966 season and top

fuel were down appropriately in the sixes john mulligan went 695 for a season's best and tom

hoover went 223 miles an hour to carry the speed mark into 1967 in april of 1967 we learned a few

interesting things the nha will continue to mandate seven inch tires on stockers the ahra

will allow any tire with a tread pattern that will fit in the stock wheel well and the nascar

drag racing series will allow any tire that will fit in the wheel well and that includes a full-on

slick a new player joined the field in the form of the eliminator tire and rubber company of

connecticut this year they offered ground up built drag slicks which were not retreads now

they've been on the market since 1964 but actually began to gain popularity in 1966 specifically

they offered a unique tire called the prowler and that prowler was indeed the first true street

strip tire anybody ever sold you could drive it around town during the week and race it with

more traction than most other people had on the weekend this was a tire equipped with a full-on

drag racing compound but also equipped with a full-on tread pattern that you could drive around

in any weather these things were favorites of people running in the pure stock categories

which required a quote-unquote normal tire or road worthy tire to be used these things were built

for it m&h began offering multiple compound options on their tires this year not just multiple

sizes and this was pretty innovative and relatively significant at the time the eliminator tire and

rubber company would be around until their bankruptcy in 1973 where they were dissolved and

faded off into history popular hot rotting had a fascinating story in their april 1967 issue

progress in drag racing tires tells the story of an industry and a sport that's really growing up

and becoming specialized the traction coefficient of the tires has doubled over the last 10 years

through construction and compound technology and for the first time dragster and funny car tires

are actually being spoken about differently and this is a big moment casing construction even

basic rubber type differences are starting to be explored good year in m&h introduced offerings

for the funny cars the dragsters and the stock super stock crowd why was there a need for a

new funny car tire they do the same thing they got nitro burning engines what else is the big

difference turns out they were totally different mechanical animals at this time and we have to

talk about that the fuel dragster was still leaving the starting line by tacking it up and

dumping the clutch and smoking the tires for as long as they could down the racetrack the funny

cars by and larger automatic transmissions that didn't want any tire smoke they wanted to hook up and

go the automatic transmission and torque converter were way less violent than the high rpm clutch

dump of the dragsters many drag racers were running their stuff at 12 to 15 psi where 18 was

recommended because they were seeing how well it was working for the funny cars the funny car

tires use four ply construction not six which made them more pliable and flexible they had a much

lower chord angle than the dragster tires which also aided in this as well they were designed

to wrinkle and fold out at the launch mounted on six to eight inch rims they were run at eight to

10 psi they also used a way way softer rubber compound than the dragsters so yes these were

by all account the first on purpose wrinkle wall slicks not simply deflated tires to get a

bigger contact patch these were tires which had been constructed to act totally different than

those on a top fuel dragster m&h made adjustments to their 11 inch dragster slick by allowing

lower profiles recommending an 11 inch wheel and 10 to 12 psi which is far lower than ever before

and now we really start to see that low pressure trend don't we good year it had an exceptional

close to the 1966 year and was working very hard in 1967 to maintain their lead and frankly

they're doing a heck of a job at it but marv was battling back good year had a very stiff

casing 11 by 16 tire with a steep chord angle which would last 15 to 18 runs before needing to be

retired now famously don garlets had gone to good year for a lot of testing money and more

leaving m&h tire kind of in the dust several years before but the good thing about marv was that he

never harbored hard feelings against people he never kept grudges and the u.s. nationals would

pay him back in spades that year and like so many other racers garlets was struggling with a new

good year tire at the nationals and he could not make it work so the guys at good year as so often

happened back then offered to buy him a set of m&h's to put on his car to see if they could get it in

the show and get functional well marv was out of those tires he literally had none left he would

have sold them to don if he had them but they were gone the only thing he could do is suggest

that garlets went to see james warren and get the takeoffs from the warren cobra and car

garlets got them and was cruising through eliminations offering warren his tires back

after every round win believe it or not the two of them met in the finals and warren with a comfortable

advantage did not want to change his car at all and so of course don garlets ran 677 his first

six second pass ever won the u.s. nationals shaved his beard in front of the crowd and garnered one

of the most iconic moments in a career full of them and it all happened on m&h tires borrowed

from his competitor how cool is that the magazines continue to pump out tire tech pieces in the 1960s

this q&a with good year engineers is cool to peek at on a ton of new stuff here but they did mention

an 11 and 3 quarter inch slick was on the way of course if you remember the hoosier 12 inch top

eliminator people still got leery to go that big for good reason apparently after the u.s. nationals

ended and people went home and were able to consider the gravity of the event that just happened

a lot of the major performances were credited to the low pressure new model slicks being used

and there were some questions to be asked about those slicks and asking them was far as bond

asking an uncomfortable but real question in the form of new drag tires are they safe m&h debuted

their low pressure drag slick earlier in the summer of 1967 at orange county international

raceway in california on its very first day of usage on one of the very first runs it was

ever sent down the racetrack it produced the first 680 clocking in drag racing history it was

two to five tenths better than the good year which had been eating m&h's lunch up to that point

in the year but this tire came with consequences at indy this same car that ran the 680 had problems

with the tires chunking meaning pieces of the tread were literally flying out in chunks and a

bunch of cars made the turnout with flat or flattening rear tires and finally tom mcqueen

well he went straight to the red line he just bolted up a set of the funny car wrinkle wall

slicks to his top fuel dragster and ran 679 at 223 miles per hour and bond's closing words

in this story were compelling especially after the stunt that mcqueen pulled because it was

successful and he knew others would be doing it in the future bond wrote the following many have

told us that they don't believe the tires are safe and they should know the question has been asked

in the past how fast can we go what is the ultimate quarter mile speed

perhaps we are already past that speed now by the close of the year the et and speed records for

top fuel will be down to 670 and 230.76 miles an hour both ends held by the bb and mulligan fighting

irish top fuel car before the ink dried on bonds words and questions the numbers that he talked

about are already blown into the weeds and that is where i'm going to end this first part of the

story at the very dawning of the earliest stages of the modern drag slick we're still two years away

from the advent of the pre-run burnout in 1969 we still happen to be in the middle of a tire war

that's going to drag on into the 70s and beyond driving performances forward into heights that

even stunned onlookers in 1969 would scarcely believe heck we haven't even gotten to the creation

of pro stock yet all that will be coming and a whole lot more in the next part of the story

but for now the good news is you know a whole bunch more about how drag slicks came to exist

now than you did before you press play in this video and as i like to say knowledge is horsepower

i'm brian loans thanks for watching see you next time

Slicks: The Sticky History of the World's Fastest Racing Tires

About this episode

1942 Mercury Club Coupe

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Lakewood Auto Dragster

tire designed to do what you wanted to do

mnh race master

void rubber

manual braking emergency test

LSR tires

Michelin x tire