Don Garlit’s Museum of Drag Racing

Don ‘Big Daddy’ Garlits is considered to be the ‘Father’ of drag racing & is an inductee in the International Drag Racing Hall of Fame. Not only was he the first drag racer to officially pass 170, 180, 200, 240, 250, 260, & 270 mph (terminal speed at the end of the 1/4 mile), but he was also the first racer to top 200 mph 1/8 mile. Also, thanks to racing accidents and near misses, he pioneered numerous safety improvements. These included the rear engine top fuel dragster after Garlits lost part of his foot when his transmission exploded. He moved the engine behind the driver so that the driver was no longer sitting on the transmission & if the engine catastrophically failed, the driver was no longer engulfed in the ensuing fire. He retired from racing in 1992 due to a separated retina (caused by the 4g deceleration forces generated when stopping Top Fuel dragsters).

The museum is located on the grounds of Don Garlits’ Ocala home (which you can see from the highway). Although Big Daddy is often at the museum we had probably passed him on the way down since he was attending the Musclecar Reunion at Gateway Raceway across the river from St Louis in Illinois!

The museum is split into two, with the main building containing about 100 racecars & Garlits’ engine collection (including the late Smokey Yunick’s engine dynamometer – very cool). The second building contains a number of vintage and musclecars, motoring memorabilia and antiques. The museum is somewhere I have wanted to visit since the first time I visited Florida back in the early 1990s & I had a great time looking at all the race cars (including a number that I had seen in US magazines as a child), and although I don’t think that it was Cheryl’s & Beth’s idea of fun, I think that they found it interesting to see some of the crazy machines that people strapped themselves into to go as fast as possible in a 1/4 mile!