He was one of the first to successfully run a high-gear-only trans in a Top Fueler, and that was at the NHRA U.S. Nationals (maybe earlier) in the mid-1980s. Today, the setup is de rigueur for both fuel classes, but Mullins had the mechanics of it in his fueler down pat a few seasons before everyone else followed suit.
His first dragster was one that he made out of exhaust tubing, with an Olds engine fed by six carburetors and a high-gear-only setup. It was truly a car of the times, in the early 1960s. Mullins had a set of Goodyear 7.60x15 whitewall slicks on the back, and it ran 9.90 at 141 mph. Ed Garlits, brother to “Big Daddy” Don Garlits, Bill remembers, had set the speed record at Helena Drag Strip near Birmingham the week before he ran his Olds digger, and Mullins broke his speed record right off the bat. The car didn’t last long. “It went out in the field at the end of the track and collapsed when it hit a couple of bumps. But it was light. I always liked (the late) Pete Robinson’s ideas. Pete said if you throw something off the car up in the air and it comes down, you either need to drill a lot of holes in it or throw it away and don’t use it, 'cause it’s too heavy,” Mullins said.
His most interesting car was the double-engine hemi dragster on racing gad, and surprisingly, after all these years (40 or so), a guy from West Virginia, Scott Mason, found the car and now he's putting it back together. He called Bill the other day and asked if he would put the hemi engines together. “He has all real nice stuff and going first class in this new nostalgia stuff, and he wants me to drive it too,” Mullins said
That was another innovation that earned Mullins kudos from the drag racing community. “I knew the ‘Freight Train’ was successful with the two Chevrolets, and I had a good-running single-engine Chrysler and I never had any problems with Chevrolets, so I figured two Chryslers could outdo two Chevrolets easy, and they did. I didn’t know until this year that the ‘Train’ had two Chryslers. When I ran the ‘Train’ at Dallas at the 1971 Springnationals, I won, and I thought he had two Chevrolets in it,” he said.
In his “dragster” career, Mullins won national titles in Top Gas, Top Alcohol and Top Fuel. He drove for John Carey of Delaware for awhile in 1985 and ’86, and he won Top Fuel at the Springnationals at Columbus, Ohio, in one of his cars. Then he joined with another Birminghamian, Ray Riha, for their own fuel effort, then Mullins raced the fueler by himself through 1989, crewing by himself or with anyone in the pits who knew one end of a wrench from another.
“I couldn’t afford to feed that thing. It’s like somebody gave me a 19-year-old beauty queen. She could be yours but she eats a million dollars of food a year. You couldn’t afford to keep her. When we had the Top Fuel car, we tried to make a few meets and qualify. If it
held up, we’d be all right, but I didn’t have a crew; I couldn’t pay six or seven guys like they do now. I’d take David (his oldest son), and we’d go to New Jersey to race in a national event and I’d have to keep up with him and make one qualifying run and make sure it was good enough to get in, and then go try and find David. I’d tear the engine and trans down and have it back together again to try and make first round. If I stayed in there, I did. If I didn’t, I’d go home,” Mullins said.
Ten-five racing caught his eye about a year-and-a-half ago, through reading about the whole thing in a racing magazine. His only crewman is Charles “Charlie Brown” Defnall, a grandson of one of Bill’s early racing partners, Donald “Speedy” Ball of Anniston, Alabama, a man who has been racing non-stop since the mid-1950s. “Crew chief? He’s my whole damn crew,” Mullins said with a laugh. “I told Speedy Ball, ‘If you go to sleep too early one night, I’m gonna kidnap Charlie Brown and bring him down here and make him live with me.’ He has the right attitude, he’s smart and eager to learn. He’s like a sponge. You make a suggestion and he’s already off and done it,” Bill said.
Now dragsters and the old A/Gas Supercharged Prefect that Mullins and Speedy Ball partnered up on in the mid-1960s have given way to the 10.5 stuff and Limited Street. Mullins the innovator and do-it-yourselfer is on the track again, as competitive as ever. He expects a lot out of his 2,580-pound turbo Mustang (less his weight) with the tiny but super-efficient engine -- once he figures out what’s what. “I’ll be surprised and disappointed if it doesn’t run in the 7s at 175 to 185 in the quarter-mile,” he says.
“I like this racing better. It’s different, and I just have to adapt to it. The car is coming around. We made 1,225 horsepower on my own dyno, and it was rich on the air-fuel ratio, so I knew there was a lot of room for improvement. In fact, we were real rich up there at Huntsville when I ran the 5.20.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever be competitive, but I’ll be trying. This is a big thing in my life right now,” Mullins said. “I think about it all the time when I’m working on a customer’s car. If tenacity will do it … I don’t have any brains, but I am tenacious and I WILL give it everything I’ve got. I’ve got the best stuff that money can buy. Even if I had money I couldn’t buy much better stuff that what I have. John Mihovetz has helped me a lot. He has an engine that is very similar to mine. John is very innovative, very smart, the kind of person like Warren Johnson, who does the detail stuff to get the car right.”
 wilson@dragracingonline.com |
