Driving a sexy-looking race car, blowing off conventional career paths, being his own man, beating all the other poor pretenders who thought they had a chance to compete on his level  ... That's what appealed to Don Prudhomme. He somehow blended his

Machiavellian-wicked, win-at-all-costs attitude with beguiling charm to become one of drag racing's best and one of the most recognizable icons of American pop culture.

For that, Infineon Raceway saluted Don "The Snake" Prudhomme with induction into its all-motorsports Wall of Fame this past weekend at Sonoma, Calif., during the FRAM-Autolite Nationals.

But in all the national barnstorming he did in the name of blazing-quick side-by-side racing, in all the gleaming trophies he greedily and gleefully grabbed, in all the mechanical magic he spun, after blasting from the Road Kings Car Club to fame unimaginable, Prudhomme reckoned he might be remembered best for being associated with a little toy metal car, the famous Hot Wheels collection.

 

Driving a sexy-looking race car, blowing off conventional career paths, being his own man, beating all the other poor pretenders who thought they had a chance to compete on his level  ... That's what appealed to Don Prudhomme. He somehow blended his Machiavellian-wicked, win-at-all-costs attitude with beguiling charm to become one of drag racing's best and one of the most recognizable icons of American pop culture.

For that, Infineon Raceway saluted Don "The Snake" Prudhomme with induction into its all-motorsports Wall of Fame this past weekend at Sonoma, Calif., during the FRAM-Autolite Nationals.

But in all the national barnstorming he did in the name of blazing-quick side-by-side racing, in all the gleaming trophies he greedily and gleefully grabbed, in all the mechanical magic he spun, after blasting from the Road Kings Car Club to fame unimaginable, Prudhomme reckoned he might be remembered best for being associated with a little toy metal car, the famous Hot Wheels collection.

"I've won four world championships as driver, two as a car owner, done a lot of different things in the sport.," Prudhomme said. "But I think the thing I'm most regarded for is being with Mattel those three years, running Hot Wheels cars."

In the 1960s, Don Prudhomme and Tom McEwen were painting their own graffiti on the drag-racing landscape, establishing themselves as the renegade new artists in this postwar car culture.

It was a society of one-upsmanship. In the Pacific Northwest (where they'll be honored as legends at this weekend's O'Reilly Northwest Nationals), Jerry Ruth audaciously called himself "The King." So Ed McCulloch decided he would be "The Ace," trumping Ruth. And Dick Kalivoda showed his good humor by joining them as "The Joker."

Down in the cradle of drag racing, down in Southern California, Prudhomme had the swagger and the reputation for being quick off the starting line. He was "The Snake." So his on-track nemesis McEwen claimed to be "The Mongoose." Of course -- the mongoose is a snake's feared predator.

Then McEwen spoke with a marketing decision-maker at Mattel and the sport's popularity spiked with the Hot Wheels cars. This arranged match made in Mattel, despite Prudhomme balking at saying "I do" to the notion of a Funny Car, turned out to be blissfully beneficial.

"We were young kids. We were just trying to get from one race to the next," Prudhomme said of his and McEwen's status at the time. "We hooked up with Mattel and it was a whole new deal for us. It was overwhelming."

He said because of the commercials, "we'd go into towns to race and kids playing with Hot Wheels cars already knew who we were."

One little boy in San Luis Obispo, Calif., was smitten with these miniature metal replicas of the hot shots' hot rods. He staged his own Snake-Mongoose duels on the plastic track that -- defying the Mattel advertising -- was nothing like a real National Hot Rod Association showdown of tire-shredding horsepower.

The little boy was fascinated with what the toy company billed as "realistic racing machines right down to the decals!" He was caught up in the hype of Mattel's self-promoted  "realistic recreation of this coast-to-coast racing struggle" in which the toy race cars "lash out of the starting gate, swirl 360 degrees through the loop then burst past the straightaway and finish gate." The Mattel advertisement proudly displayed its totally unrealistic loop-de-loop track with gates and a checkered flag.

But the little boy loved it. Yes, Ron Capps loved it. And a quarter-century later he drove for Prudhomme -- and used the restored version of the life-sized Hot Wheels cars in 2002 to energize him and lead him from a funk into the $100,000 winners circle at the Big Bud Shootout at Indianapolis.

Haunted by his failure to qualify that year at Brainerd, the race just before the U.S. Nationals, Capps need some inspiration. Willie Wolter, with his surgeon-like hands and precise machining skill, had restored/re-created the neglected shell of the original Hot Wheels Barracuda. And Prudhomme urged Capps to sit in it.

Welling up with memories and a sense of his place in the unique and evolving sport, Capps corralled his psyche.

"I felt like Brett Favre looking at Vince Lombardi stuff before the Super Bowl, " he said.

Wolter said when his restoration rolled out in 2003 that its parts were no more complicated than toaster. Nevertheless, they came together to capture the fancy of children across America and the heart of this hard-shelled hot shoe called "The Snake."

Prudhomme, presented with the Mattel marketing deal, said he initially wrinkled his face in dismay.

"They wanted us to run Funny Cars. I wasn't hot on Funny Cars. I was a dragster guy," he said.

But the Hot Wheels were in motion and in 1970, The Snake and The Mongoose (by then teammates for Wildlife Racing Enterprises) debuted their soon-to-be-sensational Plymouth barracudas. Snake's was yellow, Mongoose's red. By 1972, the final year of the deal, Prudhomme was in a white Barracuda and Mongoose a blue version.

The John Buttera-built white Hot Wheels car featured a low-slung design that caught the significance of aerodynamics -- something Prudhomme said at the time was regarded as "space-age stuff." Said Prudhomme, "We Didn’t know much about aerodynamics back then."

Burned piston and blowing oil contributed to its fabled explosion at Seattle in the 1972 Hot Wheels Nationals. It erupted into a fireball near the finish line in the final round.

Years later, Prudhomme said, "Man, that was a bad-ass car. I was a Funny Car guy from there on out."

So while he resisted change, change came. And the Hot Wheels sponsorship changed him forever, changed drag racing forever. Mattel helped develop the niche sport of drag racing into a toy-industry cult of sorts, with Prudhomme and McEwen as Pied Pipers.

"I think it had an influence on drag racing, not just my career. It showed other sponsors that drag racing was a good place to be," Prudhomme said. "They were one of the first non-automotive sponsors in the sport.

"It started the whole die-cast industry, way before NASCAR had die-cast," he said, "way before pretty much anything (marketing-generated)."

"The whole Mattel thing was big thing . . . huge."

Elliot Handler, co-founder of Mattel, passed away July 21 at age 95. Prudhomme said he never dealt directly with Handler, but it was Handler's vision -- fueled perhaps by his industrial-design studies at Pasadena, Calif.'s Art Center College of Design in the 1930s and '40s -- that helped shape Prudhomme's career.

(In that age of traditional gender roles, Mattel vaulted to fame not only with the Hot Wheels brand but also the adult-body Barbie Doll, which Handler's wife, Ruth, fashioned after seeing a similar doll in Germany -- the Bild Lilli doll, based on Reinhard Beuthin's comic strip "Die Bild-Zeitung." The Handlers named the 1959 blockbuster for their daughter Barbara -- and in 1961, Barbie's beau Ken for their son Kenneth.)

In production is the Rhino Films / Storywise Productions Hot Wheels movie from producers Stephen Nemeth and Robin Broidy. Prudhomme and McEwen are labeled Executive Producers of the film.