There's a kind of lackadaisical running banter between men absorbed in working with their hands. Don Garlits and ace wrench Tommy ("T.C.") Lemmons, while deep into servicing the new rear-engine Swamp Rat I between rounds, muse on the day's happenings:

Garlits -- "Saw a big 'ol 3/8-inch bolt layin' down there in the lights."
Tommy -- "Oh, yeah?"
Garlits -- "Yeah, fine thread."

Don was telling T.C. and the world about the front-cockpit car's watchtower visibility. With the Jupiter-sized Dodge hemi out back, Don enjoys crystal-clear vision down the track; and more important, his person is secure from the burst trajectory of blower, clutch, drive shaft and engine.

Bedridden as the result of a grenading trans in early '70, Garlits immersed himself in reading automotive theory. A sentence from E.K. von Delden's "New Concepts in Fuelers" (August 1970 Hot Rod) gave him pause for thought. The mind-sticker read: "How the driver got behind these components in the first place is an easy question to answer, but what keeps him there isn't." Five haunting words rolled continuously through his mind: "But what keeps him there?"

For a better understanding of why drag racing spawned the slingshot design, we have to move back a notch in time. It's 1957, and Garlits, the speed king, tells what it was like: "Safety hardly entered my mind then. My only objective was to get that record -- go 169 mph, then 170-plus. First thought in those days was cost; we didn't have any money." A far cry from today's regimen of -- as Garlits calls it -- "simplicity, reliability and endurance. Now, if a better, safer part is available, we get it. We buy whatever the car wants."

His adventurous spirit rising above the sterile hospital surroundings, Garlits made several rough sketches of a rear-engine digger conforming exactly to the 217-inch wheelbase of his Wynn's Charger slingshot. Unorthodox? Yes and no.

Yes, because we've needlessly blinded ourselves with scary old wives' tales concerning rear engines, thereby retarding dragster progress (variations from slingshot design received verbal "garbaging" reminiscent of "Fulton's Folly").

No, because in our highly experimental period of drag racing (late '50s, early '60s), the engine (or engines) went anywhere the builder saw fit: behind the driver like the Red Greth, Lyle Fisher, Don Maynard Arizona Speed-Sport modified roadster; flanking each side of the driver like "Jazzy" Nelson's two-differential, twin-flathead rail which resembled an outrigger canoe; in file ahead and behind the driver as exemplified by Manuel Cuelho's dual-Chrysler AA/GD; or most radical of all, the Sidewinders One and Two.

Inventive Paul Nicolini had the blown Chrysler aligned transversely at the rear, Miura style. Sidewinders went fast when they weren't tossing drive chains into the grandstands. The Cook Brothers & Jahns Desoto 'Winder effected a "jack start" leaving the line -- until nervous sanctioning bodies banned this sort of thing.

Now to the present, and how Garlits the visionary built his "new era" rear-engine dragster. Constructed in its entirety at Don's machine shop-garage (located three or four digger lengths away from Don and wife Pat's beautiful Seffner, Florida home), this first born of a new Swamp Rat 1-R series reached completion, according to vice president in charge of engineering Connie Swingle, "not quite three weeks from the pipe comin' down off the ceiling."

Garlits' exploratory test rides in the bare-pipe "thingie" read like a classic chapter out of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde's rear-engine-car handbook. Things were lookin' fine up to an eighth-mile. Then the front end started carrying, the car began to dart, and the heavy tail section oscillated like a pendulum in an earthquake. For the car's first public showing, Garlits added a front spoiler. This locked the front end down, but the darting continued.

"I noticed that when it darted was when I moved the wheel around," Don recalls. "So we went and slowed the steering down. She's so much more sensitive and responsive than a slingshot." Swamp Rat 1-R ("R" for rear-engine) remained a couple of changes away from fully operational status, and these we'll cover in Don Garlits' principles of rear-engine design.

"There are three unbreakable rules," discloses Garlits. "If you break any one of those three rules, the car won't work." Don lists them in order of importance: "Drop in a rear end that's completely open in back. I beg 'em not to put spools or posis in these cars. Hit the least little funny thing (uneven surface, oil) on the track and . . . zappo! You're into the next lane -- or worse. Posi rear ends work okay with a slingshot car, because when the posi throws you around, you have enough time to catch it.

Rule two is to slow up the steering ratio by about 20 percent over a conventional slingshot's. Number three is bolting on a foil up front to keep the wheels from carrying. Originally we had it mounted on ten-inch tall brackets; later we chopped 'em down to six inches. Our aluminum foil's angle of attack is around ten degrees." The three rear-engine commandments. Amen.

Garlits: "Swingle and I decided that the car might not have the traction the slingshot had, so we moved the cockpit way forward, crowded the engine close behind the driver. We wanted 82 percent of the weight over the rear wheels. With me in the car, Swingle using scales, and moving a lot of components, we got it. We told ourselves we were building a car to excel on super-traction strips. For slippery tracks, we even planned on bars for mounting lead at the rear. You see, the rear-engine chassis has more static weight without the driver, less static weight with the driver -- but much less transfer. She's not as flexible as a slingshot, but is flexible enough to get the job done."

When they tested the Swamp Rat 1-R on the strip, it was obvious to all that they'd miscalculated -- but in a beautiful way. The car had beaucoup traction! We eyeballed Don's thundering-but-smokeless break-in pass down St. Petersburg, Florida's Sunshine Dragway, meanwhile keeping within earshot of Connie Swingle's unconventional way with words. "Swingle-ese" is the South's answer to Casey Stengel's "Stengelese." Connie watched till Don's chute came out; then he turned and said, "Ol' man kinda stayin' rat on top a that unit, an' he had a ton a clutch screwed in that thing theah."

In the following two weeks, reports of 6.83 e.t.'s and 220-mph speeds for Don's weekend match race dates filtered back to California. Garlits verified this over the phone. Really pumped up over the car's handling, he told us, "It goes just like it has eyes."

At Lions (Long Beach, California) for AHRA's Grand American series, Garlits' infatuation with the "Lotusized" prototype Swamp Rat 1-R showed all over his face. He was like a kid with a new toy -- and why not? Gone was the buffeting of his ears by the exhaust, and there were no heat waves or exhaust pipes to blur his vision. On real hard "leaves" with the slingshot, he'd lived with clutch dust fog. A veteran of thousands of 200-plus-mph trips down the quarter, he'd dreaded every run lately, especially toward the big end (timing lights). "It made me nervous to drive these things -- took a lot out of me," Don said, "but the only thing to do was bite my lip and hope against being bathed in fire, oil or whatever. I always hated night driving; didn't like the zoomies' wall of fire."

Once sitting safely to the fore of all that highly flammable hardware, Garlits traded off the traditional lid, face mask and goggles for a Formula One racer-type Bell Star helmet and crystal-clear vision ahead. "It was getting ridiculous," grumbled Don. "Those double-padded face masks, plus the foam lining around the goggles, pushes the lenses three inches out from your eyes -- like lookin' down a tunnel."

The rear-engine car's attributes far overshadow antiquated fears about the push truck riding up over the push bar and pinning the driver -- or the dire forecast that "that engine's gonna go right through you if you run into something hard." No provisions yet on Swamp Rat 1-R for stopping a freak accident in which the push truck rolls up and over the tires and roll cage, but you can be sure that safeguards are in the offing. As for the latter problem, note that there are no solid-front motor mounts; the big 426's prow lies on a saddle arrangement on the frame. In a crash, will this weightiest (and thus most dangerous to the driver) component in the car yank loose and fly safely over the driver's head?

Some 14 months ago, such an incident did occur: An experimental rear-engine digger, running at a West Coast strip, took a 65-degree right turn across three lanes of the track and punched itself into the guardrail. The car's nose section acted as a buffer, collapsed in slow progression -- like a stack of shipping cartons. The no-front-motor-mount hemi flew straight upward and over the cockpit and its human cargo. Not long afterward, the driver resumed his full-time racing career.

Winning, in its own right, is the attribute of any car. In this respect, Swamp Rat 1-R is already a legend via Garlits' rollback of the slingshots at Pomona (NHRA Winternationals). Garlits played Old Man River helming a "fresh as the morning dew" digger; the youthful opposition gambled (and lost) with cars right out of a 1939 Burlington Zephyr ad.

"Big Daddy" uses Goodyear's 570 series tires. These are a trifle shorter in height and give an iota less bite than other Goodyears, but they suit perfectly. "The rear-engine car's less sensitive to tire compound," said "Tampa Don."

Garlits delights in reciting his personal driving impressions: "Smoother, like fuzz-over-glass in the lights. Vibarations ('my head used to hit on the rollbar hard enough to knock me silly') from the engine, clutch, tire area stay isolated from the driver. Sittin' in front of the motor you're like in a cradle between two sets of wheels. All normal dragsters have a frame support right at the firewall. We took it out -- lets the engine think it's on a little suspension." Don matched his driving reflexes to the new-era dragster in less than a dozen runs, but getting acclimated to the lack of sound took longer: "You hear this big sucking sound, like the car is breathing. It's only the blower gulping air, but I can guess the engine rpm by the tone."

Armed with small tires, 3.42 or 3.56 rear end, high gear only and lotsa power, Garlits wants to make a try at 240 mph again. He loves the top end charge: "In my opinion, there should be a $2000 prize for top speed of the meet." Swamp Rat 1-R's a natural, since its center of aerodynamic pressure (c.p.) is behind the center of gravity (c.g.) compared to a slingshot (with that great barn door expanse of engine leading the way), where the c.p. is ahead of the c.g. That's akin to shooting an arrow feathers first! And leaving the line in a machine some 250 pounds lighter than the rest of the field scarcely hurts in the speed department, either. With only eight pounds of front end ballast aboard, Garlits jestingly points out that this is his "ecology" car ("we took all the lead out").

Last year, Don believed retirement was imminent. The slingshot configuration car exacted too much wear and tear on his psyche. "Retirement is easy; I've done it a thousand times," he points out with a grin. "But I'll say this: This new car will add at least three years to my driving career."

Digger Ralph: "Say, Don, we've got this 800mm telephoto shot of you going through the lights at Pomona at 220 mph. Could swear there's this trace of a smile on your face."