It should have been a mismatch. In one lane you had Big Daddy Don Garlits driving his revolutionary rear-engine Top Fuel Dragster and in the other lane you had Steve Carbone in his conventional front-engine car. Big had qualified #1 in the field with a stunning 6.21 while Steve had qualified second with a 6.39 almost two tenths of a second behind the leader. Don has won his first four rounds effortlessly and spectacularly, clocking times of 6.28, 6.32, 6.25 and 6.31 while beating Al Friedman, Kansas John Wiebe, Arnie Behling and Carl Olson, while Steve had managed to go four rounds with the help of three red light starts by his opponents Chuck Kurzawa, Kenny Safford and Gary Cochran to go along with a 6.39 win over the only driver who got a green light against him, Tom Kaiser (in round two). Garlits had already won the Nationals three times while Steve had a grand total of one national event win to his credit. Yep, it should have been a mismatch&and it was. Steve Carbone won the 1971 U.S. Nationals championship by beating the seemingly invincible Don Garlits 6.48 to a losing 6.65. Poor Don, he never had a chance!!
The Top Fuel final round at Indy in 1971 will forever be remembered as the great burn-down race, the one where Steve Carbone outlasted Don Garlits in a battle of nerves and then won the biggest race in the sport. Once I got past the semi-finals I knew I had the race won, Carbone would say after the race. We knew what Don was doing and we planned accordingly. What Don was doing was running a new Keith Black motor with aluminum heads, and what Carbone knew was that the car would build up a lot of heat and power the longer it sat there. I wasnt going to stage first even if the headers melted off, Carbone said prior to the final round, and he was true to his word. What did he have to lose?, Don would lament after the race. I was running 6.20's and they were running 6.60's.
The stage for the great burn-down may have been set three years earlier when Don beat Steve in the Indy final round, a round in which Steve thought that Don had taken a little too long to stage. Now, at a seemingly insurmountable disadvantage, Steve decided to do whatever it took to win the race. Consider that Don was running a 1,260 pound, rear-engine car with a big wing and a 473 cubic inch stroker motor with those new aluminum heads while Steve was running a front-engine car that weighed 1,550 pounds, had a stock 426 cubic inch engine with cast iron heads and side mounted air foils. On paper it looked like a mismatch. On the track&it was. Bob Frey
