Russ Carpenter
Russ Carpenter is from Guildford, Surrey and started out in Drag Racing when he worked for a company fabricating and manufacturing diesel pile drivers. Russ’s first racing experience was helping Tony Anderson with his Ford V6 engined dragster named ‘Trouble’ in 1969. But it was the Daimler Hemi where Russ’s mechanical skills flourished and it is for his racing development of this engine and influencing others to go the same route for which Russ is being inducted into the BDRHoF.
The Daimler was the only British V8 Hemi engine. To check out its suitability for drag racing Russ contacted British Leyland and told them he had calculated that the team could get about 400hp out of it compared with 140hp standard. Leyland wrote back and said they had tuned the engine and after 200hp it became very unreliable and they didn’t feel it was a very practical engine for racing. However a friend of Russ’s at Shell tested the strength of the materials and found all the major components were made of high quality materials. So Russ and Tony stuck with the Daimler, which would eventually have been outputting well over 1000hp.
In developing the car the team built one of the first rear engined dragster chassis in the UK and eventually the car was on track in March 1972, named ‘More Trouble’. Developing a British engined car for drag racing meant making your own parts or adapting others and so Russ used a friend’s machine shop in the evenings and acquired aluminium from a friend to fabricate parts. The entire fuel system was made this way, topped by an adapted hood scoop, an adaptation for the Daimler engine of the design used widely on Top Fuel Dragsters.
Russ fabricated a slider clutch because a full size one would not …
Gerry Belton
The name Gerry Belton will be familiar to anyone who went along to the original DragFests of ’64 and ’65. Gerry’s was one of the voices heard commentating at the meetings and the one on the Dragfest LP subsequently released.
He really was in the thick of the action from the beginning, being the Allard Motor Company PRO. At the outset Sydney Allard handed Gerry the job of organising the 1963 International Drag Racing Challenge that featured Dante Duce in Mooneyes and Mickey Thompson in his Harvey Aluminum Special. This series of events was instrumental in anchoring the sport of drag racing in the UK.
He then went on to organise the British International Drag Racing Festivals in 1964 and 1965, acting as Secretary to the British Drag Racing Association as well as General Manager of the events. This was no small task given the American entries arriving and the complications raised by setting up six meetings to be held at different airfields with different organising bodies over three back-to-back weekends. Given the perfect weather throughout, not credited to Gerry, some 120,000 spectators enjoyed the meetings, still said by some as never to be forgotten. Gerry was also involved in organising World Record meetings in the UK and Europe.
His off track activities were matched by some personal success on track, as he has the distinction of winning Top Eliminator at the first ever British Hot Rod Association ‘Big Go’ meeting. He was at the wheel of a Ford powered Allard Dragon dragster designed by the company to be sold as kits to expand participation in the then fledgling sport. He was also part of the consortium that purchased Bob Keith’s 1964 Dos Palmas dragster which he drove in 1965. He drove his own ’65 Cobra 289 at Santa Pod …
John Whitmore
John Whitmore was born in Leicester. He started his career as an electrician by getting a Silver Medal from the Electrical Contractors’ Association for coming in the top three in the UK in his exams. Work for industry gave John experience of constructing electrical systems using conduit, which would soon prove useful in racing. In 1967, on a visit to Santa Pod John saw Bud Barnes from the US run a full track length smoker. It converted John to the sport and on seeing Harold Bull’s Stripduster it inspired John himself to build a front engine dragster powered by the four cylinders BMC A series engine.
John’s first car ran at the start of 1968 and its chassis was made out of the thin yet incredibly light electrical conduit. A new mild steel tube chassis that could take rather more power was brought out in 1969 and in 1970 the car was named Drag-n’-fly. Many parts on Drag-n’-fly were homemade including a fuel injection system with an oil pump from the ubiquitous BMC A series engine converted into a fuel pump. The gearbox was based on an overdrive from an Austin A35 although with all the power John made out of the engine it developed a habit of knocking gear teeth off after 2-3 runs.
A three-speed Borg Warner 35 auto gear box was modified and shortened, a manual three position control valve was used to change the gears: this replaced the A35 gear box. A 7½” friction clutch replaced the torque converter.
One advantage of using British parts is that spares were relatively easy to come by. Even the supercharger on John’s engine was able to be replaced by another unit previously in a machine used for melting the road surface that was manufactured by Nobby Hills’s company. A …
Dennis “Stormin” Norman
One of the true characters of British Drag Bike racing, Dennis originally started Sprinting back at the start of the 1960s, before moving on to the new world of Drag Racing.
Being older than most of his fellow competitors, Dennis’s natural riding skills were put to good use at the end of WW2 as a despatch-rider instructor. His teaching methods were interesting, to say the least, and quickly taught riders that staying on board was vital – especially when leading them through minefields that were still being cleared!
After the war Dennis settled in Hemel Hempstead and opened a motorcycle shop. Though toying with Speedway in the late fifties his interest turned to Sprinting in the early 1960s with an Ariel Square Four before moving on to the new sport of Drag Racing. With the opening of Santa Pod Raceway, Dennis was one of the regular Friday volunteers helping the SPR management set-up the track for the weekend racing in those early days.
By the late sixties & early seventies Dennis & his newly constructed supercharged twin-engined Triumph “Normans Conquest” had become one of the front runners and a firm crowd favourite with its long smoky passes. Also his off-track mischievous sense of humour was legendary in the pits
Dennis was an early visitor to the tracks in Sweden and Holland, but his proudest achievement came in 1970 as one of the first two European bike riders to race in America after Bob Phelps of SPR financed the trip. Dennis qualified on his first pass for the inaugural Top Fuel Bike eliminator at the premier NHRA Indy Nationals, running under 10 seconds for the first time to impress the American racers. Learning some new tricks while there, he performed the first bike burnout over here in the UK on his …
“Big Daddy” Don Garlits
Don ‘Big Daddy’ Garlits is the greatest and most successful drag racer by most measures and has introduced many technological changes that have had a game-changing influence on the overall direction of the sport. His sheer hard work and determination has set him apart. He was part of the wildly successful US team to visit Britain for the 1964 Dragfest and subsequently raced in the UK in 1976 and 1977. These appearances were crucial to the success of the sport in the UK.
Born in Florida, Don possessed natural flair for both constructing racecars and competing in the sport at a level that has been an inspiration to countless others. After starting racing in 1950 he built his first of thirty seven Swamp Rat dragsters in 1955. He raced around the US and modified the car so that by the time he retired it in 1959, he had already become the first racer over 170mph in 1957 and over 180mph in 1958. He also suffered a serious fire but his car continued to compete with long-time crewman Art Malone in the driver’s seat.
During the NHRA ban on nitromethane from 1959 to 1963, Don continued to match race nationally. It was at the 1963 Winternationals, for which the ban was temporarily lifted, that he scored his first NHRA championship win with the first Top Fuel Dragster to have a wing mounted on it. When nitromethane was finally allowed at all NHRA events in 1964, he ran the first backed-up 200mph speed.
In September and October of 1964 the First British International Drag Festival took place organised by BDRA’s Sidney Allard and the NHRA’s Wally Parks. In a series of six events, Don match raced Tommy Ivo and won “The People” Challenge Trophy for the best aggregate performance by any car, …