HIS LIFE IS A REAL DRAG : With Don Garlits Retired, Joe Amato Has the Top-Fuel Speed Record All to Himself; He’s Eyeing 290 M.P.H.

For nearly as long as top-fuel dragsters have been covering the quarter mile from standing starts, Don Garlits has been the standard setter.

Big Daddy and his succession of home-built Swamp Rats from Seffner, Fla., were the first to better 170 m.p.h. back in 1957, then the first over 180, 200, 240, the historic 250 landmark at Ontario in 1975 and 270 last year.

Garlits, an elder statesman at 55, has quit racing to concentrate on the making of a biographical movie, “Big Daddy,” leaving the role of pacesetter to someone else.

Joe Amato, a fast-talking 43-year-old super salesman from Old Forge, Pa., has already staked a claim.

Amato, who broke Garlits’ streak in 1984 when he was the first over 260, became the first over 280 with a 282.13 m.p.h. run in winning the U.S. Nationals on Labor Day weekend at Indianapolis.

“I’ll bet when I did that 282, it made the old man (Garlits) think about coming back to go 290,” Amato said. “I think he’ll miss the fun, but most of all he’ll miss the challenge.”

A month later, running on the all-concrete Texas Motorplex track near Dallas, Amato flirted with 290 in a rocket run of 287.72.

“Isn’t that a ludicrous speed?” he said. “That’s what we (the crew) called it, ludicrous. “We got that from the movie, ‘Space Balls,’ where one of the funny looking guys said to another, ‘We’re going to put it in warp-drive,’ and the other guy said, ‘No, I don’t want warp-drive, I want ludicrous speed.’ That’s what I’d say we got when we went over 280--ludicrous speed.”

Is 290 a realistic goal?

“Oh, sure,” Amato said. “It’s more realistic now than it was to think 250 might be broken after Garlits did it at Ontario. The record stuck right there for nine years before I did 260.”

A revolutionary new rear wing, designed by Indy car driver Eldon Rasmussen and built by Amato crew chief Tim Richards, helped create the breakthrough.

“Until then, the rear wing on a dragster had been used primarily as a spoiler, a wind deflector,” Amato said. “Our wing pioneered its use as a ground force instrument. By getting it into cleaner, less turbulent air, it provided the same amount of pressure on the rear wheels with less drag through the air.

“It was a significant move that opened people’s eyes to aerodynamics in building top-fuel dragsters.”

Garlits, after watching Amato break his most cherished record, was an enthusiastic cheerleader for the new concept.

“See that wing on Joe’s car,” he said later in the year at Pomona. “See how much higher it is and how it sits out over the rear wheels. They discovered something and next year everyone will be doing it that way.”

Garlits, ever the experimenter, took the wing and combined it with a streamlined chassis, then moved the record into the 270s last year at Gainesville, Fla.

When Garlits set his record in the streamliner, it prompted copycat enclosed-chassis designs.

Amato’s 280-m.p.h. car, however, is not a streamliner.

“We felt the trade-off, aerodynamics vs. weight, wasn’t enough to make us build a streamliner,” he said. “There’s just no way you can trim enough fat off to compensate for the added weight.

“Richards put the whole car on a diet this year to trim off weight. He even put me on one, and I lost 10 pounds. That helps just as much as if he’d trimmed 10 pounds off the chassis,” the 160-pound Amato said.

Conditions were ideal when Amato made his first over-280 run.

“The weather was cool, the track was clean, no one had blown an engine and dumped any oil, and there wasn’t too much rubber down.

“It was just an incredible feeling. It felt like it was chain-driven, the wheels and the engine were so hooked up together. I could hear them synchronize. There was no slippage anywhere. Everything about the car and the track was in perfect balance.”

This week, in the 23rd annual National Hot Rod Assn. Winston Finals at the Los Angeles County Fairgrounds in Pomona, Amato faces a different problem.

He needs to hold off Dick LaHaie, a veteran driver from Lansing, Mich., whose daughter Kim is his crew chief, to win his second season champion.

Amato, who won in 1984, holds a 162-point edge, 12,382 to 12,220, over LaHaie with only the Winston Finals remaining in the 14-event season. Such a lead is minuscule in drag racing, where 200 points are at stake every time a car takes the green light.

What it will come down to Sunday is that whoever advances the farthest in the 16-car elimination will win the championship. If they meet in the finals, it will be winner-take-all for the $100,000 bonus prize.

Qualifying for the $871,850 competition will start Thursday and run through Saturday, followed by side-by-side eliminations Sunday.

Amato, who got the racing bug when his father took him to the U.S. Nationals in 1962, is one of the most successful businessmen in Pennsylvania as well as a record-setting racer.

He owns Keystone Automotive Warehouse in Exeter, Pa., the world’s largest distributor of high-performance automotive parts. The warehouse covers 400,000 square feet and has listings for 100,000 part numbers.

“It’s the perfect mating of a vocation and an avocation,” Amato said, smiling. “The race shop, where Tim Richards runs the show, is on one side of the street, and the warehouse, is on the other side. I just bounce back and forth between them.

“It’s a unique situation where I deal with many of the same people on both sides of the street. I’ve always been a car freak and now I’m making a lot of money doing what I like to do. It’s fun to get up in the morning and love to go to work.”

Amato has almost never known anything else. He was 11 when he started work in his father’s speed shop and when he was 16 his father had a heart attack and Joe quit school to run the family business--which grew into Keystone Automotive Warehouse.

“I’ll never forget the time my father took me with him to Indy for the nationals,” he said. “We had about 15 flat tires and it took us 24 hours for a trip that normally would take 10. I remember we were going into garages and buying old tires for five bucks apiece and changing them ourselves.

“I knew right then that I wanted to drive a dragster. You can’t begin to believe the thrill I got when I came back 25 years later and won the U.S. Nationals at the same place. I was so excited that I was hanging on the steering wheel and almost forgot to pull the parachute.”

Amato’s wife, Gere, has become a familiar figure around her husband’s car on race day.

Each time Amato stages his car on the starting line, Gere can be seen standing in the middle of the lane, in front of the low-slung dragster, lining him up for his six-second run down the quarter-mile of pavement.

“If she wanted to, she could cause me a lot of trouble,” Amato said. “When you’re cramped down in the cockpit, watching the dials and the gauges, you can’t see much down the track. A driver has to rely on the person out in front.”

Gere also packs her husband’s parachute.

“She tells me she wants to pack the chutes because that way she knows I’ll behave,” Amato said.