Before tire companies made tires for drag racing, drag racers had to get creative – Jalopnik

In 1952, the brilliant Rod & Custom magazine writer Roger Huntington did some math to figure out the fastest quarter-mile time drag racers would ever achieve: just 9.1 seconds at 166 mph. Of course, he has since been proven wrong, but as a member of the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), it’s not like Huntington couldn’t understand the capabilities of drag cars and the technology involved. His prediction was based on a thorough understanding of one of the most essential ingredients for maximizing acceleration: tires.

At the time, it made perfect sense to assume a traction coefficient of 1.0 G, because that was all the tires could do. There was no PJ1 Trackbite, no Goodyear slicks with sidewalls that rippled like Shar Pei skin, and certainly no tires wide enough to wrap an average home’s boiler from top to bottom. At the time, tires were skinny and hard and had a zigzag tread pattern that hindered traction on the strip.

The real mistake Huntington made wasn’t that he didn’t take into account the then-nonexistent sticky tires, but that he underestimated the effort people would put into achieving ultimate speed. A popular tactic in the early 1950s was simply to cut away the tire treads to create a flat, even surface. However, this led to incredibly uneven thicknesses of hard rubber around the cords, so drag racers turned to retreading, or ‘recovering’ the tires. An early source for recapped tires was Arizona’s Bite By Bruce or Inglewood Tire Sales, which would wrap tires in more uniform, smoother, higher quality rubber. But even without sipes or grooves in the gripping section, there was still the problem of unyielding tire compounds.

Then along came Marvin Rifchin, a stock car racing enthusiast who believed that underperforming retreaded tires should become extinct. He worked for Denman Rubber in the mid-1950s and managed to convince his boss to take a passenger car tire mold, remove the treads from it and pour soft oval racing rubber into it. The result was so effective that Marvin teamed up with his father, Harry, to develop M&H ties. Starting in 1957, the M&H Racemaster was the first custom drag racing tire with properly soft rubber.

However, there were still several problems. The first was the width. Even M&H’s specialty drag racing tire only had a tread width of 6.5 inches when they first appeared. Drag racers like Top Gas’ Eddie Hill and his twin-engine Double Dragon doubled up on the rear tires for extra traction, so M&H and other manufacturers like Firestone responded with a tread width of more than 10 inches. Hoosier even debuted a 12-incher. Secondly, the tires slipped on the wheels, so sandblasting the inner rims and/or gluing the tire beads became common. Clamping tires to rims with beadlocks also solved that.

When introduced, the Goodyear racing slicks were just 10 inches wide, but the way they responded when the power flowed through them was a revelation. By using strategically placed nylon layers ranging from two to six, Goodyear’s slicks were able to deform the sidewalls to flatten the tread and create a huge contact patch, especially at low pressures (as low as six psi), yet still be strong enough to withstand the enormous turning forces for multiple races.

Once the tires became the inflated gumballs they were supposed to be, racers turned their attention to the track itself. The first substance they tried to apply was rosin, which means “who needs rosin?” circles of violinists, baseball pitchers and drag racers from the 1960s form the thinnest overlap of any Venn diagram ever. Throwing resin in front of the tires and then doing a burnout or dry hop would heat up the resin and make the tires stick. Plus, dry-hopping looked absolutely sick:

The quest for stickiness wouldn’t end with resin, however. Somehow, someone discovered that NASA’s high-temperature coating, manufactured by Sperex, was perfect for making drag strips so viscous that they could take your shoes off. So in 1972, Sperex’s VHT label began production of PJ1 Track Bite, and the acceleration puzzle was complete. With wide, soft, grippy tires and glue-coated tracks, the acceleration war began, and now Brittany Force can reach 541.85 miles per hour at the drag strip. Roger Huntington would be proud.