If HOT ROD could crown a drag race king it would be Connie Kalitta. Why? Improbably, he’s the last man standing from the early days. He’s outlasted Don Garlits, Don Prudhome, Tommy Ivo, Ed McCulloch, Tom McEwen—all of the greats of drag racing. They have all retired, but Kalitta is still racing. And winning. And fielding not one but four cars—the Top Fuel dragsters of nephew Doug Kalitta and JR Todd, and the nitro Funny Cars of Del Worsham and Alexis Dejoria. His income is not derived from racing, but from his Ypsilanti, Michigan, cargo air services for the US government and private companies, though it originated from drag racing. More on that later. He won drag racing’s version of the Triple Crown by winning the 1967 NHRA, AHRA, and NASCAR Winternationals, back when NASCAR was dabbling in drag racing. With his winnings he bought a 310 Cessna and provided cargo delivery services to Ford Motor Company, who was sponsoring his Top Fuel dragster at the time, among others. This evolved to become one of the largest cargo plane services in the country, providing Kalitta the means to stay in drag racing. He and Don Schumacher are the only multi-car owners that don’t rely on racing for a living. He oversaw Shirley Muldowney’s first World Championship team in 1977. He quit racing for a time in the 1970s to focus on Kalitta Air, but in the 1980s he was back in the seat, and finished in the Top 10 seven years in that decade. 1999 was his last year of driving, when he beat his son Scott at the Gatornationals in the first-ever NHRA father-son Top Fuel final round. In 2008 he lost Scott to a fatal injury in a nitro Funny Car at Englishtown, NJ. Due to his strong conviction that Scott would want him to continue racing, he has done just that. HOT ROD has pursued Kalitta for over four years to wrangle this interview, as he doesn’t like to do them. But on this August day just prior to the Brainerd, Minnesota, races he was upbeat, forthcoming, and a willing participant at 78 years of age. At the end of the interview he said, “You know, I enjoyed this.”
A driver’s body gets pretty heavy in a car that’s going 5-Gs.”
HR] 1000-foot times keep going down today. Where do you think Top Fuel is headed?
CK] The only way you can put a control on them is to control the supercharger. NHRA has even run tests on this with different bore and stroke combos. I think you’ll see innovations with the superchargers, you know, getting the air into the engine. NHRA is dead against these high speeds.
HR] And costs to race keep soaring…
CK] Right now we are having problems with crank life. We get four or five runs on them and have to throw them away. The forged cranks we use and the quality are so much better than in the past to give longevity. NHRA has paid for some test engines to try and build a better mousetrap because the cost of doing this is crazy, I mean we can’t get full fields. NHRA is trying to put together a better program for first and second round money because those are the guys that need the help.
HR] You and Schumacher don’t rely on your winnings to be in business—you and Shu don’t need drag racing, in a sense. If one or both of you didn’t like something NHRA does you could pull out, and that puts them in a precarious spot.
CK] Yes it does. You see right now NHRA is trying to find the right person that knows what goes on in a nitro engine—a crew chief-type of person that knows his stuff, to come and work for them. Every meeting of the PRO group (the group of owners in the professional series) we invite NHRA management to sit in and hear what we’re hearing, so they’re not hearing different things from different people. The group has got teeth—would we exercise it? No, because we would shoot ourselves in the foot. If NHRA isn’t making money it hurts us, and hurts where the sport is right now. Schumacher and I have talked about it. The guys in our group that have less means, we want them to stay in drag racing. We don’t want them to go away because then there isn’t a decent show, and then there won’t be giant crowds. Spectator-wise NHRA has done well this year (2016). It’s a better show because the races are better and closer. Both Top Fuel and Funny Car are all qualifying at less than a tenth of a second. And personally I’ll help some of the competition if I think they’re doing something crazy. I mean, I’ve gone over to some guys in the pits and said, “Guys, let’s sit down and talk about what you’re doing.” Things like fuel distribution, nozzling, and compression ratios.
HR] What is it that keeps you going—is it figuring out combos, or tweaking components or what?
CK] Winning. It’s about winning. I like winning. I’ve won in the aviation—I’ve done things that nobody else has done or dreamed about doing. That’s why I’m still into it. In my hangar in Oscoda I’ve got over 1000 mechanics there and they’re the best bunch of mechanics ever assembled. 70-percent of them have been with me for 15 years or more. 70-percent of them carry an AP&P—the Airplane and Powerplant License from the FAA. Do you know what others have—they’re lucky to have 5-percent of their people who have that. My repair shop is booked up for over a year, and that’s with outside work not Kalitta Air work.
HR] How do you think fans view you.
CK] (Long silence) What I see more is people that are middle aged will come up to me and say we really appreciate all that you have done for drag racing. It’s very common that I hear a lot. If a person has grown up in a certain time then he or she has heard of me or seen me—I mean we’ve got 24 races this year and I go to all of them. It’s very gratifying that people will go out of their way to say something like that. Does it help my ego? Sure it does. I’m a real person.
HR] What was your background?
CK] I just graduated from high school and that was all. I had no formal education I just was out there learning the hard way.
HR] Did you have some grand plan to take your winnings from the 1967 NHRA Winternationals and start a charter airplane company, or was this just a fluke?
CK] The guy I learned to fly from had a 310 Cessna, and he hauled auto parts around for Ford. He’d take the seats out and load it with parts for Ford. Back then they couldn’t track parts well because there were no computers—they didn’t know what they were getting, that’s why it was so lucrative for small charter aircraft operations. Well, I was intrigued, and upstairs from Ford’s racing offices was the traffic department for the auto assembly division. So my relations with Ford through racing opened up another way for me to make money, otherwise I would have just continued to try and make a living drag racing. See, Bunkie Knudsen was at GM (he was Executive Vice President), and Ford went out and hired him (February 1968). Knudsen and Mickey Thompson were tight. So he comes over to Ford and in three months spends what the money allocation was for racing for the entire year. They spent serious money. Around 1970, Ford ran into a problem with emissions, and they could not meet the first threshold because all of their top engineers were in racing. So racing is out of money and Ford’s got emissions problems, so they pulled the plug on the whole racing thing, took all of the engineers and put them in the emissions labs. When Ford quit racing my sugar daddy disappeared and I had a pretty good chunk of change in my pocket so I had the ability to take the aviation and expand that. I went from the 310 Cessna that you could put 600-pounds of freight into and went to a Volpar or what was a converted twin-Beech. The fuselage was stretched and it had Garrett turbocharged engines in it and it hauled 3400-pounds of freight. I did very well with it—it was very reliable. With that turbojet engine it just ran and ran. When Ford quit racing I was in the middle of growing my fleet of aircraft, and I found I could make a pretty good living hauling these charters with the planes I had. I ended up having seven Volpars and it was a natural for the automotive part thing.
HR] How did you get involved in Ford’s 427 Cammer in the mid-1960s?
CK] I had done a deal with Chrysler. They didn’t have the money—they were doing hand to mouth on everything they were doing. I went through HOT ROD magazine and there’s the SOHC. I had a few contacts at Ford so I talked to Jacque Passino and then Charlie Gray. At the time Gray was overseeing the drag racing portion for Ford—they were really into the racing back then. So I went down to meet with them. They had a bunch of these SOHCs and didn’t know what to do with them because NASCAR had banned them. In reality I was at the right place at the right time. This was in 1965.
HR] Why did you want it?
CK] Because I needed a sponsor like Ford. My agreement with them was you supply me a vehicle and all of the engine parts. That was a healthy deal back then when I’m sleeping in my station wagon because I don’t have money for hotels, right?
HR] Why did you want such a complicated engine?
CK] When I ran it hard I hurt stuff but I could take the heads off between rounds. I could undo the cam, and I had to be careful with the degree wheel—it had to be done right. I could set the cam, and I knew where the crank was, and split the overlap just like we do today—you drop a couple of lifters in the hole and run it on the overlap side and set the cam to it. I could take the heads off and do all of this in between rounds.
HR] And you could compensate for the chain stretch?
CK] The chain didn’t stretch—it’s hard to stretch a chain like that. I never saw chain stretch. That was Ed Pink talking and making a mountain out of a molehill, and I kicked his ass all over the place. These were great motors, nodular iron blocks which gave it a lot of validity. And you know that head in today’s time flows as good or better than anything before or since for an off of the shelf part—especially the intake side. You couldn’t put one of the intake valves in a 392 Hemi, they were so big. And because it didn’t have pushrods in the way the ports were just excellent—they were round ports.
HR] Then you went to the Boss 429…
CK] And that was a f*****g disaster, and I can tell you why. The intake port turned 120-degrees. It went down into the head and turned to create a high swirl rate to supercharge the flame propagation in the combustion chamber. I’d warm the car up and hit the throttle and I could bust a head. Literally. It took a while to figure this out. Nitro is very heavy and is a non-aromatic fuel—it doesn’t want to stay suspended. Gas is like seven pounds to the gallon and nitro is 10 pounds to the gallon, so it’s heavy. What the port was doing to me was that once it went around that corner the nitro would separate and it would be rich around the outside diameter of the combustion chamber and lean in the center, so the fuel was along the cylinder walls and nothing was in the center from the swirl rate. On Holman and Moody’s dyno it would destroy the heads. I was getting tired of this because I’d never get the engine into the chassis. There would be no signs, no blown head gaskets, just nothing and I’d blow up one of these heads. It got so bad that I drilled down next to the valve springs and put a stud down in to put a load against the combustion chamber from the backside to keep it from moving, and that helped. I even had Ford cast up some heads with a post in it. I ran it like that for two years until Ford quit racing. To this date I wish I had never done that but of course hindsight…
It was really frustrating. The induced swirl in the combustion chamber. When I thought I had discovered this I went to the engineers at Ford because they had a terrific group of engineers and they were kicking everyone’s asses. I thought it was going to be the hot setup, but it wasn’t and I didn’t realize it until much later, and I don’t think they ever realized it. Ed Pink and Pete Robinson came along later, and they were solid guys and that was exactly what Ford was looking for, but I had a couple of years on it before them. I know that guys later went to a gilmer belt and Pete Robinson with the gears, but it wasn’t going to make any difference. Remember, a chain doesn’t stretch but a belt does.
HR] Has your drag racing operation continued to make more components and buy less?
CK] Our shop does its own heads and we can do the line hones, so we can do a lot more than we could a couple of years ago. It has been a big savings for us. We do our own chassis. We watch things pretty close and we’re getting about 70 runs out of them. We have our own inspection program that is second to none and between races we’ll inspect every weld with a magnifying glass.
HR] Are the drivers today as good as when you drove?
CK] Yes because you’re only as good as the machine you’re driving, so if it’s got repeatability and quality and the ability to go down the race track isn’t compromised then it’s doing what it was designed for and that means the drivers can drive it. And knowing what the car will do helps us know when something isn’t working. Like when Alexis got in the accident in July 2016, we just put the car in the jig and put a new front end on it. Things are more sophisticated today, you’re not guessing. A bad fuel pump could bite you for six months before, but now the cars come back to the shop, the pumps come off and we have levels we test everything to so if I need a part I go to the drawer and the new part is confirmed to be like the one coming off of the car so we’re not guessing.
HR] You are the crew chief for JR’s dragster, right?
CK] I make the calls on JR’s car. That keeps me young, that keeps me involved, that’s how I do it because I still have the exposure to it.
HR] Do you ever reach back and use something from the past for today?
CK] Yes.
HR] How can you still be in it when Karamesines, Garlits, Prudhomme, Eddie Hill—they’re all out of it?
CK] Well, drag racing has a way of tailoring itself because of the cost. With the aviation thing behind me I can lose 2-3-million dollars and it’s not a problem. It’s all deductible, I don’t have an IRS problem, and the racecar doesn’t have a problem.
HR] What win was the most significant for you?
CK] The biggest win for me was winning the US Nationals.
HR] Who did you get the most satisfaction beating?
CK] Oh, I used to love to use up Garlits. I had a competitive nature and I didn’t like to get beat, especially by Garlits. In 1962 I built my car and put the names of all of the other drivers on it and it rubbed Garlits like you wouldn’t believe. He came over to me and said, “Take my name off of your car,” and I told him, “Get your own list.” He had quite the attitude about it.
HR] What’s something that you doggedly pursued that didn’t turn out?
CK] That Ford engine I called the porcupine 429.
HR] Did you like running Top Fuel dragsters or Funny Cars better?
CK] I liked the dragsters because there’s less s**t to go wrong in it. If you snap the body off of a Funny Car it’s an automatic $75000 hickey. It’s a nice piece, but… I can tell you the first time I drove the Funny Car at Detroit Dragway I was sitting in the car on the starting line and fired it up and they dropped the body down and I said, “What the hell am I doing here?” It was a whole new venture.
HR] Are you happy with drag racing as it stands today?
CK] I’m happy with it to a certain degree but the biggest problem we have now is that most of the drag strips we have were built in the 1960s. The surfaces are not as nice now which is concrete—1300-feet of concrete. And no bumps, because the Funny Cars are a nasty piece of equipment when they hit those bumps. A dragster will get airborne and it will survive it because of the download and efficiency of the wing on the back because that thing generates about 8000-pounds of down force at 300mph.
HR] What’s Top Fuel going to look like in 10 years?
CK] There won’t be a big change and the reason is because NHRA has teased the spectator with an awesome show and if they try to suck that in they’re shooting themselves in their own foot. The enthusiasm will leave the pits and stands and it will be flat racing like going out to the local drag strip on a Saturday night. NHRA is reviewing this now because of the cost being so prohibitive to maintain a viable Funny Car or dragster because you have to have the best of everything. I foresee that they’ll do something to the supercharger to cut back on the manifold pressure because you can only put so much compression and pressure into it until you get a problem. Not many racers understand that. In fact, I’ve got a mechanic that works for me that is good and I told him to richen it up .0040 and he said it will put the cylinder out—it’s too rich. But nooooooo, it didn’t. My whole life what I’ve done in fuel racing, I retain all of that.
HR] So what is the cylinder pressure problem?
CK] The supercharged air is getting into the combustion chamber and the spark plug has a .0013 gap in it. When the pressure gets too high, it puts out the cylinder. As the car is going down the track there will be 50-pounds of manifold pressure, and when it gets to the finish line there will be 62-pounds of manifold pressure. So the supercharger is ramming air into the engine, and so is the amount of air going into the engine because it’s rammed air. When you get a cylinder that is lean it entices the flame front propagation in the combustion chamber so the faster it goes the more power you make and the more pressure is in the combustion chamber. With that much pressure in the combustion chamber the spark can’t jump across the gap. So now if I put a cylinder out, I richen it and it comes right back to life. That’s how close to the edge we are running the combustion pressure in these engines. This happens at the end of the run when you have 330mph of wind going into the supercharger, you can see the pressure rise in the engine because of the ram air. It puts the cylinder out. It usually won’t hydraulic the engine. It happens when the engine is making a lot of horsepower, and the air is blowing into it—supercharging it. The supercharger is making about 50-pounds of air without the ram effect. I’ve had as much as 66-67-pounds of manifold pressure and it doesn’t like it.
HR] So how do you rectify that?
CK] What I’ve done to help it is I’ve got a wastegate. You could back off the manifold pressure, but then it loses the pressure it needs at slower speeds. Turbocharged cars all have wastegates because they can’t tolerate the pressure the turbos pump. And that’s what we’re doing. If you look at the back of the supercharger we have a relief valve on it.
HR] What’s something that has gone away in drag racing that you’d like to see come back?
CK] Well, the nostalgia cars are doing that.
HR] Are you tempted to field a Nostalgia dragster?
CK] I’ve kicked it around. I might be finding myself in an airplane going to Bakersfield for the Nostalgia Drags in October.
HR] Are you considering building a front engine dragster?
CK] I don’t think I would do that….
HR] Would you like to be driving?
CK] I look at it and I miss it. I can’t be competitive so why should I spend that kind of money. This old body ain’t going to make me competitive. You take those 20-year-old kids and they’ve got good timing in their bodies—I’ve worn mine out. (Expletive).
HR] How can you concentrate on racing or this massive business when both need so much concentration?
CK] Drag racing is fun, this business is fun, so I live the best of two worlds—I love what I do and do what I love. I fly and I race cars—it don’t get any better than that: One’s during the week and one’s on the weekend.
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