Don Garlits has never been one to easily swallow being told he has to play by the rules.

Necessity has taught him to conceive, engineer and construct cars far ahead of the competition. When a clutch explosion in a front-engine dragster took half of his right foot in 1970, he came back the following season with a rear-engine version that flipped Top Fuel racing on its head. He built dragsters with canopied cockpits, mono-strut rear wings, sidewinder transmissions – and most recently, an electric dragster. 

And even with a combined 17 championships in AHRA, IHRA and NHRA Top Fuel competition, Garlits has to keep an NHRA competition license up to date. The most-current license in his wallet limits him to Super Stock-division and slower classes.

Until Wednesday, that is – when he drove a gas-powered dragster down Rockingham Dragway’s quarter-mile with runs that upgraded his ability to drive anything up to Nostalgia Top Fuel. He hopes to set a speed record with his electric dragster April 23 at Palm Beach (Fla.) International Raceway, which is IHRA sanctioned, then hit the road at NHRA-allied tracks in markets around the country.

Garlits’ opinion of having to undergo scrutiny, given his championship record?

“I don’t mind making a few runs,” he said, “but I think it’s totally asinine that I have to make two 60s, two 330s, two eighths and all that. That’s not really right.” 

That said, having a competition license for the dragster he hopes will run between 205 and 210 mph in less than a fortnight, was – like it or not – a necessity.

Enter Roy Hill and Steve Earwood to make it happen.

Earwood offered his Rockingham (N.C.) Dragway as a venue for Garlits to relicense. This week was a perfect time for that, as Hill was using the facility Monday for his namesake drag racing school. Hill’s home is about 65 miles north of the track in Randolph County, and Garlits wasn’t the first big-name racer he’s tutored.

“We’ve had Don Prudhomme, Kenny Bernstein – a lot of people that people don’t know about,” Hill said, adding that he’s been a consultant to racers such as Darrell Alderman, Scott Geoffrion, Greg Anderson, Don Beverly, and Warren Johnson.

“Having Don here, he has run with and made NHRA. He’s made everybody in drag racing a way to go down the road. He’s not raced in a while, he doesn’t have his license, so it’s natural for him to come.”   

Hill’s school car is NHRA Top Dragster legal – and vastly different from most every dragster he’s driven. That took some getting used to for Garlits, who first strapped into the car Tuesday for his initial bursts off the starting line. 

“We respect him, and he’s the best Top Fuel racer there’s ever been, but he’s getting in a Top Dragster and it’s totally different,” Hill said. “So we had a couple little burps, if you want to call it that, on the starting line using a trans-brake. We got through to him and here he goes.”   

Once Garlits made a pair of 60-, 330- and eighth-mile shots, one of Hill’s instructors, Bubba Turner, climbed aboard and was clocked in the eighth at 4.68 seconds, 148 mph. Having seen that, Garlits reclaimed the driver’s seat and went 4.70 and 4.68.  

“He’s a real racer,” Hill said, “and it’s a lot of fun to work with a real racer even if they’ve never driven this kind of car. The way I work with them is in a car to see if they can feel and we go from there. Don has a lot of feel. He could tell me what the car was doing.”

When the parties – including Garlits’ daughter, Donna – returned to the facility Wednesday, Hill and his crewmen adjusted the car’s tire pressure, rear-wing downforce and engine performance. Those tweaks helped make the dragster quicker, faster and more top-end stable, and Garlits’ numbers steadily improved.

Near the end of the session, with the engine’s rev limiter changed from 3,500 to 8,000 RPM, Garlits made his first quarter-mile run. Hill said he could “sign off” on Garlits’ license with quarter-mile times of 7.40 to 7.70 seconds, adding, “but we all want a little more because we’re racers.”

They certainly got that.

When Garlits returned to the staging lanes, he took a seat beside Hill in a golf cart. 

Hill handed him the time slip, and – before relinquishing his grip on the paper – said, “Look what you just did.”

The time: 6.393 seconds. The speed: 182.01 mph.

“Oh, my word,” Garlits said.

The dragster left an impression on Garlits in multiple ways. He called it “the only car I’ve ever seen that had such a violent move to start with,” then noted the harshness abated due to the dragster’s horsepower limits. His first day’s work left “some of my bones hurting this morning” because the dragster is outfitted with a universal seat, rather than something form-fitting. Hill’s crew also had to tape a small pillow to the roll cage to cushion Garlits’ helmet when the launch snapped his head back.

Those were minor inconveniences considering the objective, and Garlits is now ready to turn his attention to the development of his electric dragster. He’s eager to test the changes he’s put in place as he tries to break the 200-mph barrier in it sooner than later.

“The car’s being teched on Saturday (April 16) to make sure that the chassis is OK,” he said. “It’ll be classified as an exhibition vehicle.”

Garlits said that his electric dragster has undergone major modifications since its last outing that he hopes will allow him to surpass the speed Steve Huff set when he became the first to break 200 in an EV dragster.   

“It was a chain drive and it was a weaker motor. Real wide rears because of the configuration, so I pulled the rears in like Swamp Rat 34, the Top Fuel car, and took four square feet of frontal area off the car,” Garlits said. “It’s driving into a Strange rear end with a 2.91 gear and just a nice, simple ol’ coupler from the motor to the rear end, so almost no friction loss at all. Got a little more wheelbase.

“It picked up about 10 pounds, which is nothing, but the friction we have thrown away, the parasitic drag with that chain, we could only make about three runs on that chain and it was all burned up and froze up. To do that, that’s really taking power away. Got rid of all of that. I’ve got a more powerful motor that will rev higher in a car that’s approx the same weight with four foot less frontal area, and that makes a whole lotta difference at 200 mile an hour.”

And now, with his upgraded license, he’s approved to put that dragster through its paces at scores more tracks than he was before Wednesday … not that he was at any point thrilled about having to go through the process.

“I could run all the other (non-NHRA) tracks all I want to, and nobody ever asks me for a license,” Garlits said. “It’s asinine.”