Finally, Gary Dyer Gets the Drag-Racing Recognition He Deserves

Gary Dyer nimbly ascended the three steps leading to a stage in the ballroom of a Gainesville, Florida, hotel. As he stepped onto the stage, an audience of drag racers, promoters, and auto industry execs erupted in spontaneous applause. This 90-year-old pioneer of drag racing’s most popular professional series, the oddly named Funny Car class, was in town to receive a long-overdue honor: induction in the International Drag Racing Hall of Fame (HOF).

The HOF was founded by Don Garlits in 1981 and is now the organization charged with honoring the heroes of the motorsport that loudly celebrates pure acceleration and massive power. As Dyer reached the stage, I was leaving, having delivered a brief summary of what is arguably the most significant of this particular hero’s accomplishments—a singular quarter-mile run on November 6, 1965, in a Dodge Coronet at California’s long-gone Lions Dragstrip—a run that as much as any other 1320-foot sprint ever recorded helped shape the sport as we know it today.

We met at the top of the stairs and shook hands, and this man who had long shunned the limelight allowed a slight smile to cross his face. As I left, he embraced his daughter, Kim, whom I had last seen half a century ago when she was a cheerful teen roaming a happy place of garages and race cars on the banks of Interstate 294, southwest of Chicago. Both she and Garlits had already introduced her dad to the assemblage and now she hugged him and presented the trophy that acknowledged his HOF induction.

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This honor was a long time coming. In 2014, I wrote a lengthy bio of Dyer for a drag racing nostalgia magazine called Elapsed Times. In researching the article, I interviewed Dyer’s longtime friend and high-school buddy, Pat Minick, the now-deceased former driver of the “Chi-Town Hustler.” Minick had been inducted into the HOF in 1994, and as we talked about Dyer’s achievements, he said, “Did you know that Gary isn’t in the hall of fame? [John] Farkonas, [Austin] Coil, and I are in there. [Kenny] Safford is in; [Arnie] Beswick, too. But Gary still hasn’t been inducted, despite his huge contribution to early Funny Car development and his amazing match-racing record. He’s not an egotistical guy, and I don’t know if he’d want to be in there, but dammit, he should be.”

I thought mentioning this sorry situation in a publication that was a favorite of many veteran racers would be enough to correct what was likely an oversight. It wasn’t enough, apparently, and it was only through the recent work of Ms. Dyer and others in calling attention to the omission that Gary Dyer was finally honored.

Why it took so long is anyone’s guess, although some attribute this error to the fact that throughout his pro racing career, Dyer usually match-raced for guaranteed cash put up by the respective track owners in lieu of attending the NHRA’s national events—a necessary business plan at the time for a guy whose race earnings had to support a growing family. But the omission was also partly the result of the relationship he had with his partner and sponsor, Norm Kraus of Chicago’s Grand Spaulding Dodge.

Kraus, or Mr. Norm, as he is known to drag racing enthusiasts, promoted the car Dyer built, tuned, and drove to record-setting performance. Kraus was no villain, and Dyer has always counted the now-deceased car dealer as a friend, but Kraus had partnered with Dyer to promote his Dodge dealership, so when he advertised the appearance of Dyer’s race car at drag strips, it was always about Mr. Norm: Mr. Norm vs. Arnie Beswick or Mr. Norm vs. the Ramchargers. And he celebrated their race wins similarly, heralding the Mr. Norm Grand Spaulding Dodge Coronet as the fastest full-bodied car in drag-racing history. Consequently, Dyer, the guy who made it all happen, achieved great success in relative obscurity.

Dyer’s pal Minick helped give rise to the Dyer/Kraus partnership when he caused Kraus to go apoplectic at the U.S. Nationals near the end of the 1964 racing season. Minick and John Farkonas, another Dyer high school pal, had campaigned a Super Stock Dodge under the banner of Grand Spaulding Dodge during the ’64 season. For reasons too complex to delve into here, the NHRA had disqualified the car at this headline-making event. Kraus, who was hoping for the good press a Nationals win would bring, told Minick to ignore the disqualification edict and pull the car onto line for the first round of competition. In his inimitable style, Minick said that would have been a boondoggle and flatly refused. That was the end of the Grand Spaulding sponsorship deal.

Dyer, who had been campaigning a record-setting Mercury Comet Super Stock with sponsorship from Chicago’s Lincoln/Mercury dealers, was on hand, too. His car wasn’t NHRA legal for Super Stock, either, but at the urging of his sponsors, Dyer was displaying it at the Nationals just for promotional purposes. His sponsorship deal was likely not as lucrative as the Minick and Farkonas/Grand Spaulding deal, so when he saw their sponsorship agreement dissolve, this savvy businessman asked his old pals if he could approach Kraus about sponsorship for 1965. Of course he could, they responded.

At about the same time Minick and Kraus were having it out at Indianapolis, Chrysler was preparing Dodge and Plymouth two-door sedans for drag racing, probably hoping they would be legal for the popular Super Stock class. Facing heavy competition from Ford’s shorter-wheelbase cars and Chevrolet’s new big-block engines, the Mopar guys were looking for an advantage. Their new Hemi engine made gobs of power, but their long-wheelbase two-doors were nose heavy and consequently had traction problems. To compensate, Chrysler asked ambulance builder Amblewagon of Troy, Michigan, to construct 11 heavily modified cars. At the instruction of Chrysler engineers, they moved the front wheels forward as much as possible and relocated the rear wheels forward a full 15 inches. They cut plenty of metal out of the unibody and dipped what was left in metal-eating acid. They also installed lightweight components, including Lexan windshields and Plexiglas side windows. The result was a relatively light front-engine sedan with a weight distribution ratio comparable to that of mid-engine GTs. In an effort to preserve the factory-stock sanctity of its Super Stock class, the NHRA said no way and created a new class for these machines and other rule-breaking factory efforts from Detroit. They called it “Factory Experimental” or FX.

Although competition for the FX cars was tightly controlled at NHRA national events, it was the Wild West everywhere else. Track owners across the country began booking eight-car shows and two-car match races of these wheel-standing 150-mph beasts, and the fans filled the grandstands. So, when Dyer went to Kraus to talk about a sponsorship, he said, “Forget Super Stock. Let’s build an exhibition racer, an FX car for match racing. You won’t have to deal with the factory, and the car will be a money maker.” Kraus was sold, and he gave Dyer a showroom stock two-door post Coronet, some factory engine parts, and his blessings.

Dyer dug right into that Coronet. He moved the rear wheels forward 15 inches but left the front wheels in stock position. He stripped as much weight out of the car as he could and built a modified, supercharged version of the 426 Hemi. A longtime amateur racer, Dyer had raced supercharged cars for years and had learned much about powerplant modification from his friend, Farkonas, who was a mechanical engineer.

Dyer’s new “Mr. Norm Grand Spaulding Dodge Coronet” was an immediate success, running 9-second elapsed times at nearly 150 mph and beating other touring pros, including Arnie Beswick, the factory-backed Ramchargers, and many more. His car was still a good 300 pounds heavier than the factory-supplied FX Coronets, but his tuning and engineering skills more than compensated for those extra pounds. Mid-season, Roger Lindamood, who had been given one of the lightweight Coronet FX cars, decided to sell it. The car had been raced hard, running an injected Hemi and pulling giant wheelstands to the delight of fans and the dismay of Chrysler, which had grown weary of warrantying front-end parts for its FX racers. Dyer bought the car, stripped out the factory front end, installed a lightweight tube axle in place of the A-frame control arms, added reinforcements where needed to handle more horsepower, and planted his supercharged Hemi under the hood. That gave him a couple of tenths over the post car, which had recorded a best ET of 9.10 seconds at 156 mph. Soon, Dyer and his Dodge were dipping into the 8-second ET range. Kraus advertised its performance in the drag racing tabloid, Drag News.

As summer wore on, the match-race FX cars were becoming a great show and filling the stands at dragstrips around the country. And the odd look of the short-wheelbase Mopars inspired a new moniker: “Funny Car.”

“I think we ran over 100 dates in 1965,” Dyer said. “We’d run the UDRA Funny Car circuit race on Wednesday at (Gary, Indiana’s) U.S. 30, Friday and Saturday we raced in Wisconsin, Sunday in Minnesota, and in Canada on Monday.” The car won consistently, recording high 8-second ETs vs. the largely 9-second-plus efforts of the competition. And Kraus continued to advertise the results, along with the availability of Hemi-equipped Dodges at his dealership: “The Mr. Norm Dodge proved dominant once again, defeating a stellar field of the nation’s best Funny Cars.” Late in the summer, Dyer recorded an 8.70 ET vs. the Ramchargers at a little dragstrip in Michigan’s thumb called Ubly. Kraus pronounced it a new Funny Car record in Drag News and boasted that the Mr. Norm Dodge could beat any car in the nation.

West Coast racers thought that Kraus’ claim was a knee slapper. Laughing loudest of all perhaps was Tom McEwen, a celebrated hero of top-fuel dragster racing who himself had recorded some high 8-second ETs in a modified Plymouth Barracuda sporting one of his supercharged top-fuel engines. “If you’re gonna race on the West Coast, you better bring your Midwest clocks,” they chortled, well aware of the fact that some Midwest tracks used inferior timing equipment.

Dyer and Norm decided that the pissing match could only be settled on a West Coast dragstrip, so Dyer towed the Mr. Norm Dodge over the mountains on a little car trailer, arriving in Long Beach just in time for a big show at the storied Lions Drag Strip. After announcing the Mr. Norm California appearance in another bombastic Drag News ad, Kraus flew to LA. Dyer and Kraus didn’t bring Midwest clocks, but they did bring a full dose of the showmanship they had honed on the match-race circuit. That involved an elaborate show of spreading resin on the starting line, firing the raucous Hemi, and doing wheel-lifting warm-up sprints through the resin. In the other lane was Don Gay, a Texas Pontiac racer who had also been irritated by the Kraus ads. The match was part of a multi-car show, and to that point, only McEwen had dipped into the eights, recording an 8.82-second pass in his Barracuda Funny Car. But it was Mr. Norm the fans had come to see.

With “weed burner–style” exhaust headers bellowing at the fans in the grandstands while spewing flames and nitromethane fumes, Dyer and Gay completed the preliminaries and pulled to the starting line. Gay red-lighted, leaving first by a good half-car length before the lights flashed green. Dyer waited for the green, hammered the throttle, and drove around Gay, recording an 8.63 elapsed time at 163 mph—by a wide margin the fastest ET ever recorded by a full-bodied car. And he did it in front of 9000 fans who had packed the grandstands, skipping Top Fuel shows at some neighboring drag strips. With two chutes blossoming at the end of the quarter mile, the announcer read the numbers on the clocks, and the crowd erupted.

Ten years later, when I was researching an article about the origins of the Funny Car class, the late veteran racer Frank Oglesby, said: “I gotta tell ya that our friend Gary Dyer’s run at Lions in November of ’65 was huge in making Funny Car racing what it is today. When near everyone was struggling to get out of the 10s, old Gary put down an 8.63, proving conclusively that a Funny Car has a blower and burns Nitro. It was the shot heard ’round the world.”

What happened that night 60 years ago was undoubtedly a shot heard ’round the drag racing world. Dyer would go on to record many more wins in the Mr. Norm cars and would make substantial improvements to the basic Roots-type supercharger used in drag racing. Soon, racers across the country wanted a Dyer blower. He obliged, working long hours to both maintain the race car and build blowers. He would eventually retire from active competition when, after introducing a version of the big Roots supercharger as a viable modification for street-driven muscle cars and hot rods, he decided to focus all his efforts on his growing supercharger business. To this day, he still rises early and checks in at Dyer Machine Service to assemble the superchargers that will be shipped. After a few hours of building blowers, he heads home, where he relaxes until returning to the shop late in the day to handle West Coast phone calls.

Dyer may be of the generation that preceded the Boomers, but he’s not stuck in the past. He’s already owned an electric vehicle, but sold it after he had trouble finding charging stations that could accommodate his long stints behind the wheel. I thought it would be fun to introduce him to the spiritual descendant of that powerful Dodge he drove to glory so many years ago, and I asked Stellantis to loan us a new Dodge Charger EV for a couple of days. They responded with a loaded 670-horsepower dual-motor Charger in arrest-me red.

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On the morning after the HOF induction ceremony, Dyer literally sprinted down the driveway of the house where he was staying to greet me and the Charger. We gave it the once over, and I pushed the start button, causing a sound generator to produce a powerful rumble that accurately mimicked the piston-engine Chargers of yore. That brought out several neighbors who asked for repeated startups so they could record the artificial exhaust note. Dyer smiled with amusement, dismissing the sound effects but delighting in the fat tires at all four corners and the Brembo brake calipers seen through the wheel spokes.

On a fairly long drive on the busy roads surrounding this residential neighborhood, Dyer was able to poke the throttle occasionally, pushing me back firmly in the passenger’s seat and breaking the tires loose momentarily. The car wiggled a bit on the rough pavement, and the seasoned race car pilot deftly steered it back on course before turning sharply into another street in case our shenanigans were noted by the wrong people.

He’s still got it.

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