Welcome to Tuesday, or, as many of you will know it, the first workday of this week. Me, I spent Memorial Day in the office working on this column and National DRAGSTER assignments, trying to get caught up before we launch into a June that will feature national events on four consecutive weekends.

I'm still working on the AMT Piranha piece I promised last week, and there's a lot more to it than I expected, but I hope to have it for you later this week. It's some cool stuff. In the meantime, here are some tidbits to keep you going.

Got a note last Wednesday from Bill Holland on the passing of famed entertainer Art Linkletter, which is of interest to everyone here because the former ND editor's Top Fueler once was sponsored by Linkletter and his Art Linkletter's House Party show.

Holland shared the photo at right, which shows Linkletter, center, his late daughter Diane, and Holland (kneeling by the car). Holland's partner and driver, John Guedel, is in the cockpit. The photo was taken at the 1968 Santa Claus Lane Parade down Hollywood Boulevard.

Guedel's father was the producer of the Linkletter show as well as Groucho Marx's popular You Bet Your Life. George Fenneman, who was Marx's sidekick and announcer, even came out to San Fernando Raceway to watch the car run, according to Holland. Linkletter never saw the car race, although Holland and Guedel did take the car to the studio when it was first painted.

(In a weird twist, as a child, Holland was featured on Linkletter's show – which included the popular segment "Kids Say the Darndest Things" -- in the early 1950s. "I was one of those wise-ass kids on the show," he said. "The first time was around 1951, and I was invited back for a couple more of his shows. Don't you think I was pumped having a limousine show up at school (Grant School in Hollywood) to take us to the then-new CBS Television City?")

The photo below shows the car better. It was taken in Oahu, Hawaii, where Holland and Guedel were match racing Stan Shiroma, who was driving the Top Fueler of German Farias (featured here previously in the F edition of the Misc. Files), at Hawaii Raceway Park. Holland and Guedel won the race and set the track record, which, Holland noted, was a nice feat because such hitters as Beebe & Mulligan and Tom McEwen had raced there.

Reader Kellen Kennedy, reacting to my comments about the aerodynamic devices – more precisely, "augmentation devices" -- attached to Gene Snow's Top Fueler, actually found video  from the Diamond P show from the 1986 NHRA Southern Nationals in which Steve Evans explained the magic behind the "tomato cans." You have to fast-forward to 4:20 for that, but before you get there, you can also see footage of Gary Ormsby's Castrol GTX streamliner, also reported on here. You can watch Ormsby battle Don Garlits' Swamp Rat XXX in the first meeting between the two streamliners.

For those of you who don't want to watch the video -- which I believe constitutes probably 0 percent – the theory is that the area between the cans and the headers would create a vacuum and more downforce. They claimed that they worked, but, because they quickly disappeared, I'm guessing that they didn't work well enough for whatever upkeep was necessary. That has probably been the bane of many drag racing innovations: too much effort for too little reward.
 

In the course of working on articles for National DRAGSTER, I stumbled across a couple of items in old issues that relate to previous postings here about the Buttera/Setzer monocoque car and Sammy Miller's wedge dragster. Both appeared in the Bits From The Pits column. If you're new around here, I have NDADD (National DRAGSTER Attention Deficit Disorder), so the simple task of doing one piece of research for one specific item sends me thumbing through an entire issue looking for cool stuff. Anyway, the first, from July 1972, noted that Dwight Salisbury was chosen by car builder John Buttera to drive the monocoque car. If you remember, Buttera and Louie Teckenoff built the car and had hoped to campaign it themselves but sold it to Setzer when the financial realities of doing such finally hit home.

The item went on to note that "a whole flock of subframe cars" were under construction at Race Car Specialties, including one to be driven by Larry Dixon Sr. as part of the Real Don Steele team. Southern California-based RCS, of course, was the San Fernando Valley workshop of ace chassis builder Frank Huszar. Wonder whatever became of these "subframe" cars.

The Miller note I found talked about that car's construction and offered that the wheelbase was to be 195 inches and, of true interest, that the engine was going to be 58 inches out (from the rear end), which is more like Funny Car territory, which dovetails with what Scott Weney told us about how Miller, a flopper veteran, wanted a familiar setup.

Back to the monocoque car -- thanks to a reader, I was able to contact Teckenoff by e-mail. He said he has a "rather detailed series of photos taken when the car was being built," that the car's initial runs were made at Lions Drag Strip and not Orange County Int’l Raceway, and other interesting tidbits that he asked not be disclosed before he can flesh them out. Rest assured, I'll be back in touch with him.

OK, that's it for today. I'll see ya later this week.