It should have
been a mismatch. In one lane you had “Big Daddy” Don
Garlits driving his revolutionary rear-engine Top Fuel Dragster
and in the other lane you had Steve Carbone in his conventional
front-engine car. “Big” had qualified #1 in the field
with a stunning 6.21 while Steve had qualified second with a
6.39 almost two tenths of a second behind the leader. Don has
won his first four rounds effortlessly and spectacularly, clocking
times of 6.28, 6.32, 6.25 and 6.31 while beating Al Friedman,
“Kansas” John Wiebe, Arnie Behling and Carl Olson,
while Steve had managed to go four rounds with the help of three
red light starts by his opponents Chuck Kurzawa, Kenny Safford
and Gary Cochran to go along with a 6.39 win over the only driver
who got a green light against him, Tom Kaiser (in round two).
Garlits had already won the “Nationals” three times
while Steve had a grand total of one national event win to his
credit. Yep, it should have been a mismatch…and it was.
Steve Carbone won the 1971 U.S. Nationals’ championship
by beating the seemingly invincible Don Garlits 6.48 to a losing
6.65. Poor Don, he never had a chance!!
The Top Fuel
final round at Indy in 1971 will forever be remembered as the
“great burn-down” race, the one where Steve Carbone
outlasted Don Garlits in a battle of nerves and then won the
biggest race in the sport. “Once I got past the semi-finals
I knew I had the race won,” Carbone would say after the
race. “We knew what Don was doing and we planned accordingly.”
What Don was doing was running a new Keith Black motor with aluminum
heads, and what Carbone knew was that the car would build up
a lot of heat and power the longer it sat there. “I wasn’t
going to stage first even if the headers melted off,” Carbone
said prior to the final round, and he was true to his word. “What
did he have to lose?,” Don would lament after the race.
“I was running 6.20’s and they were running 6.60’s.”
The stage for the great burn-down may have been set three years
earlier when Don beat Steve in the Indy final round, a round
in which Steve thought that Don had taken a little too long to
stage. Now, at a seemingly insurmountable disadvantage, Steve
decided to do whatever it took to win the race. Consider that
Don was running a 1,260 pound, rear-engine car with a big wing
and a 473 cubic inch stroker motor with those new aluminum heads
while Steve was running a front-engine car that weighed 1,550
pounds, had a stock 426 cubic inch engine with cast iron heads
and side mounted air foils. On paper it looked like a mismatch.
On the track…it was. – Bob Frey
The Benny
Osborn dragster includes such details as:
- Aerodynamic
die-cast 204-inch wheelbase design
- Removable Hanna upper body panel exposes detailed interior
-
- 392 Chrysler hemi engine that's fully wired
with ignition wires and flexible fuel lines
-
Hollow simulated M&H slicks on five spoke Halibrand mag wheels
- Detailed tubular framework and fuel tank detail
- Fabric seat belts and shoulder harness with photoetched
buckles
- Color scheme detailed from actual vintage
racing pictures and reference data from Benny Osborn and WDIFL.com.
ONLY 3500 were produced!
(each car
individually numbered 1 to 3500)
This car is selling fast!
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