As I am announcing at the 2014 NHRA Gatornationals this weekend I thought it only fitting to re-run our big interview with Dale Armstrong, the genius crew chief who tuned Kenny Bernstein to the first 300mph run in NHRA history at this very race in 1992. This is one of the neater stories we have ever run. Enjoy!
There’s no doubt that Dale Armstrong is the single most influential crew chief in modern drag racing history. His innovations and accomplishments rank him among the greatest in the sport of any era. From his days in the late 1960s of upsetting some of the most prominent funny cars in the country to his all conquering dominance of the NHRA alcohol ranks in the 1970s, along with his successful career as a nitro funny car driver into the early 1980s, he was on the bleeding edge of performance with respect to nitro drag racing. When Kenny Bernstein hired him in 1982, few people could predict what was to come in the following years. The pair racked up five titles combined in Funny Car and Top Fuel, they demolished virtually every standing record, they broke the 300mph barrier, and they also had more experiments, tests, and developmental projects going on as most of the other teams combined.
Dale Armstrong’s career was a study in methodical experimentation. In our eyes his brilliance was never in trying to reinvent the wheel, but rather in looking at said wheel and figuring out how to make it more round. It was an intricate understanding of what was currently working and then analysis on how to make it work better, a little at a time. 8,000hp race cars respond to the most subtle of changes and that was Armstrong’s specialty, often to the chagrin of the NHRA and other racers.
We wanted to talk with “AA/Dale” Armstrong and get some more of the inside scoop on those drag racing legends he is associated with. Was he really the first guy to bolt beadlock wheels on a Top Fuel dragster? How the hell did the famous 1987 LeSabre “Batmobile” Funny Car, get accepted and then banned by NHRA? Did he really use nitrous with nitromethane? What about the stories of an engine combo so violent that it blew engine blocks apart like cardboard boxes? We asked these questions and a bunch more…
Read on to hear some great stories in inside info from the man we consider the Babe Ruth of modern nitro crew chiefs, Dale Armstrong.
B
eadlock wheels are standard equipment on everything from Top Fuel Dragsters and Funny Cars, to Pro Mods and small tire drag cars all across the world now but such was not the case in the 1980s. At that point in time nitro cars ran an inner-liner inside the slick. After battling hellacious tire shake during winter testing, Armstrong started to think that using a beadlock and ditching the liner would help this problem and eliminate some weight as well. We’ll let him tell the rest -
“I was thinking that a beadlock style wheel would help us with the major tire shake that we were running into with Kenny’s car, so I contacted a company that made wheels for Sprint Cars and had them make a set to fit the car. I thought that if we could get rid of the inner liner and run 5-5.5psi of air pressure in the slick that it would help with the tire shake and make the car act better. We tested with them at Phoenix before Pomona and as it turned out, I was right. The car worked great and my theory was correct. We also saved about 3lbs per wheel by getting rid of the inner liner, which was a bonus. In then had the wheels taken off the car and x-rayed to make sure there were no concerns for safety, cracking, etc. I brought the x-rays and all of the testing documentation with me to Pomona. As soon as we got there we were informed that the wheels would not be allowed on the car and that we wouldn’t be able to run them at the race as the NHRA was not going to approve them.”
(Editor’s note: as you will see through this story, the above occurrence is fairly common. The difference here is that Armstrong was very angry because he felt (correctly) that this decision was politically based and he was getting a screwjob (my words…not his).
“I was very disappointed at the time because I felt as though this wasn’t a technical decision or one that was directly racing related. I can understand not wanting to obsolete someone’s parts but this was not that type of situation. Later on, a wheel company which was a major NHRA sponsor at the time came out with a beadlock wheel and they were then allowed on nitro cars.”
Dale beating the NHRA and other competitors to the punch will be a reoccurring theme here.
F
unding is always something that comes up when talk of testing and innovation with race teams is the subject. We asked Armstrong if the Bernstein team was on a totally different funding level than the other teams of the era or if they were just more dedicated to doing special projects and experimentation than others.
“I think there was a perception back then that we were the most highly funded team but our budgets and sponsor deals were in line with the top 4-5 teams of the era. There were certainly teams out there spending more than we were. I think Kenny is such a good business person that he knew spending some money on development and testing was important. When I wanted to do something or try something I always had a plan and had thought it out well before we actually did it so it wasn’t about throwing money at these things. We’d make a plan and carry it out to see the potential benefits. I was at a point in my life back then where I was just so full of ideas, vigor, and vim. I was always someone who had to go try stuff. Lots of people sit around talking about things, but that wasn’t who I was or who I have ever been. If I had a good idea, we chased after it.
C
omputers on race cars are as important as steering wheels in the current era. Every form of competition vehicle has some data acquisition device on it. Dale Armstrong, along with another Armstrong, that one named Ron (and no relation!) were the two men responsible for bringing this technology to drag racing. The birth of the RacePak computer did more to accelerate the performance of modern nitro cars than any other single advancement, and here’s what Armstrong had to say about the earliest days of drag racing’s computer age -
“The problem with the computers, when we first started working on them wasn’t so much a question of if we needed them, it was a question of making them work. Jim Foust, who I drove a couple of cars for during my career was in the computer industry at that time in the 1980s. We came up with one that was about one foot by one foot in size. We put it on the car and tried to make it work for a couple of months, but the vibrations and electronic noise from the magnetos would kill it. We simply could not make that design live.”
“I then learned about a guy named Ron Armstrong who was a hydroplane racer and he had developed a small computer for use on his boat. Ron was an engineer at a van conversion company at the time and he was interested in working with me on adapting his computer to drag racing. It took us six months to actually get it working good enough to produce usable data, but we did it. When we got it working right, it was like unlocking the door to an entirely different world. All of these things that we took for being the truth were not that at all. We first saw that the clutch never once locked up during a run, that the fuel system wasn’t acting like we thought it was, and on and on.”
(Editor’s note – at this point we asked Dale how the hell the computer didn’t get banned. After all, they busted his chops about beadlocks…but not a computer?! The beadlocks were after the computer FYI)
“At the time that Ron and I were working on the RacePak, Ram clutches was working on a computer as well. Gary Beck was their test car. The thing about the unit they were developing was that it had a fifth wheel that ran behind the car, so everyone kind of knew what was going on. I think that the NHRA didn’t have a problem with us because we were not the only ones out there doing it. After we had dialed the thing in and were using it to the best level that we could, the results started showing and we got faster. The NHRA came to us at that point and said that unless it was made available to everyone, they would ban it. Armstrong had intended on selling it the whole time, so that was good news for him. He had product on the shelf and made it available immediately. We were six months ahead of everyone and since Armstrong was trying to teach everyone how to use it, he was one hell of a busy guy. There were some hard line old school guys who resisted it, but that’s typical of any technological advancement.”
T
he McGee quad cam engine was probably the last great shot at a true “clean sheet” design for the ultimate nitro burning V8 power plant. Dale Armstrong was deeply involved in the on-track portion of developing that engine. We were interested in hearing the straight dope about how he found the motor to work, what potential it had, and how it came to be banned by the NHRA. His answers were both informative and a little surprising -
“We intensively worked on and ran the McGee engine for about six months before ending the program. I found it as a base engine to be very good. Like anything, there were some inherent problems to work through initially. One of the first things was regarding exhaust valves. Because the McGee engine was a four valve design, the smaller exhaust valves would get extremely hot and fail. It took some thinking, but after adding a stainless steel valve seat, and actually directing some cooling water around the stems and valve seats we got past that and the engine would go like hell to 1000′ or better. When we had it running the best the engine was about a tenth of a second and five MPH quicker to the eighth mile than any of the cars with the standard two valve hemi. Kenny Bernstein always said that it was the smoothest running engine he had ever felt, it ran very nicely. We had four of the engines that we were using in the car to test with, learn how to service, etc. Once we got them to where they would turn competitive numbers, NHRA took notice and it was not long before I had a conversation with Graham Light. Graham came to me at Phoenix and essentially said that if we got this thing working to the point that we were beating the standard Hemi engines with it, the NHRA would start hanging weight all over us because they couldn’t allow all of the current designs and parts to be obsoleted like that. Weight is a killer in those cars so I told Kenny that we may as well stop because there would be no real positive outcome for us. I felt really bad for the McGee boys because they had done a nice job with that engine. I could understand the NHRA’s point of view on this one as well. I didn’t have really hard feelings over that regarding NHRA because I was developing someone else’s design. If it had been my engine, I may have felt differently, but I understood their viewpoint. 
I
nfamous cars are the stuff that hot rodding legends are made of and the 1987 Buick LeSabre “batmobile” that Dale Armstrong and Kenny Bernstein campaigned ranks among the most infamous drag race cars of all time. The back story of how it was first approved for competition by the NHRA and then limited to a single year (1987) after being seen in Pomona is one of the best stories in the history of straight line competition. It is important to note that nothing on the car was illegal or against the rules at the time and the development of the body was totally in line with what the rule book allowed. Now, the rules were certainly not what one would consider “tight”.
Perhaps one of the reasons that there was such an uproar about this car was fact that Armstrong and Bernstein had whipped everyone’s ass in 1985 and 1986, so when this spaceship looking car rolled around the corner at Pomona, the race was nearly won as quickly as it started. They won 7 of the 14 races that season and were in the finals for 10 of them, as best we can tell. They were the number one qualifier at 8 races, five on them in a row. They won the title by a margin of THREE THOUSAND points. Complete domination. Here’s the story of how that body was born, straight from Dale Armstrong -
“At the end of 1986 we had been working with an aerodynamic engineer and he was making suggestions about what we could do with our body to go faster and make the thing more slippery. He went ahead and built a model of the car he thought we should build, which was about 2′ long, then he tested it in a scale wind tunnel. That scale model testing proved all of his ideas and we decided that we would go in that direction with our full sized body. We joked that it looked like the Batmobile because of the long nose and the huge spoiler on the car. We used the same company to build the LeSabre as the previous year’s Ford Tempo. Once we commissioned the body company to build the buck, we called NHRA and told them what we were doing. Once the buck was done, we called them again to come down and look at it for approval. A few tech guys came down and then left, telling us that they would give a call when they had an answer. Then a few more tech guys came back with Steve Gibbs, and they left without an answer. We were getting really close to Pomona, so we put some pressure on them to get us a answer. Then more tech guys came back with Steve Gibbs and the NHRA president Dallas Gardner. They were getting ready to leave when Gardner told them that they had to give us an answer before they left the building and finally after some discussion they green lighted the car with a couple of minor changes. The car was 100% legal by the rule book at that point, but once it rolled out in Pomona it was a heck of a shocking thing for a lot of people and we were told that they would only allow us to run that body for 1987. It was a great car and we had a lot of success with it in both NHRA and IHRA at the time. That car looks like a current day funny car, but you have to remember…that was 1987!”
N
ot every idea is a winner, even for a guy like Armstrong. One of his more violently failed experiments was with an engine combo he thought would produce more power. Remember, when he was in the game it was still about making more power than the other guys, not just managing the power better. Hot rodding and engine building were still important pieces of the puzzle. As such, Armstrong was good for some hot rod tricks, like messing with the bore and stroke of engines to effect the piston speed. The same kinds of stuff that BangShifters still do with their hot rods and weekend warrior race cars. Here’s the difference. You’re not fire hosing nitromethane into your junk. We’ll let Dale tell the tale -
“I had an idea about changing the bore/stroke of the engine to slow the piston speed down and allow the nitro to burn a little longer in the chamber and make more power. We built a couple of 500ci short blocks with a 4 5/16 bore and a stroke that was shortened by about 1/4″. The thought of course is that the larger bore allows for better breathing, the piston doesn’t have to travel as far, and the slower piston speed will allow more pressure to be applied when the fuel burns. This worked great on dyno engines during my alcohol racing days, so I wanted to apply it to nitro. I built two short blocks to test with and we decided to stay on a Monday after Brainerd one year to give them a shot. We got the car fired, Kenny did the burnout and everything was looking good. The tree came down, he launched the car and it went about 100′ before blowing the right front corner of the block basically off. The #2 cylinder is the hardest working one in these engines and that’s where the trouble was. We kind of thought that was a fluke and maybe we had some bad parts so we swapped the second one in there and it did the same exact thing at the same exact 100′ distance, so that idea went back on the shelf. It did prove my theory though.”
E
ven in the 1980s, burning the large quantities of fuel being loaded into the engine was one of the main battles crew chiefs fought in nitro drag racing. Armstrong developed a solution that was quickly banned for this problem, a cylinder head that could accept three plugs per cylinder and a drive to mount three magnetos on the engine -
“With the twin plug heads I thought that there was a cold area at the bottom of the cylinder. We developed a magneto drive to run three mags and did the heads to accept three plugs. What we found was that when we were running a single magneto we needed to have 65-degrees of lead in the engine, when we went to two mags we had to have 55-degrees in it, and when we put the third mag and plug in there were put 45-degress to it. When we did that, it ran exactly like the two plug engine at 55-degrees and we hadn’t even really started tuning it up yet. When we pulled the plugs the two in the normal position had their electrodes burned about half way off as usual, but the third one at the bottom of the cylinder looked brand new. It turns out that there was a cold area there and given the time we could have really honed in on how to use that area where the combustion was not happening evenly. The NHRA banned the three plug heads before we had a chance to go much further with them. I did work on some Hemi heads with a quench area in them to try and force that “wasted” fuel into the hotter parts of the cylinder to burn it but those didn’t do much for us.”
N
itro drag racing is literally all about the fuel. That gloriously energetic liquid that leaves a yellow haze in the air, a sting in your eyes, and snots running out of your nose is the most exotic juice in all of racing. As we have talked about, igniting it and keeping it lit are the two most important functions of the engines in these cars. Today there are fuel nozzles everywhere in a Top Fuel engine, but in the days of yesteryear, not so much. In fact, cars would often have consistency issues on the hit of the throttle because the rearward cylinders, not being as “hot” as the holes toward the front of the engine would lose fire and the pipes would go wet at idle. When the driver romped the throttle, sometimes they would come back to life and other times, they wouldn’t, resulting in either a slow car or a nuclear bomb-like hydraulicing episode that shot blowers skyward and chunks of the block into low Earth orbit. Armstrong had an interesting and entirely legal solution for this in the early 1980s…nitrous oxide. It isn’t as crazy as you think -
“I never saw nitrous as a power adder in a nitro engine. I used it to help with cylinder temps at idle to make the car more consistent and repeatable. Basically, back then, before we had lots of fuel nozzles and the type of management available today, the engine was not getting even fueling at idle so the cylinder temperatures would vary a lot. Those back two holes would go out a lot and cause us problems, so I thought of using nitrous to help us at idle. Basically we installed the bottle in the car with a pressure regulator set to 28-30lbs of pressure, there was no switch. When the bottle was open, it was flowing through all of the nozzles I had installed in the intake manifold. What we found was that by putting different size nozzles in different places we could get all of them to idle at almost the exact same temperature. There were no wet pipes and everything looked good. Because we had the pressure set at about 30lbs and the blower was making 35lbs or more when the throttle was hit, the nitrous would effectively be “shut off” by the manifold pressure produced by the supercharger when the throttle was hit. This was totally legal at the time and it worked pretty well. When the NHRA banned nitrous on nitro cars we stopped it.”
He didn’t stop thinking though, and two years later he had another flash of brilliance -
“We were looking for a larger fuel pump and there simply wasn’t one, we were running the biggest pump on the market at that point. The manufacturer told us to try running two pumps and initially I didn’t want to do that but once I thought about having two barrel valves and the increased control over the idle nozzles, port nozzles, and (eventually) down nozzles, I went for it. As it turns out, the idea worked great and it gave us the ability to fine tune the engine, make more power by introducing more fuel, and make the car more repeatable and consistent. At the time, Tim Richards came over to me and said, ‘Armstrong, why do you want to hang all that shit on your car?’ Of course once it started working, he was more than happy to do the same thing. 
W
e’ll leave you on an electrifying note. The first 300mph run in nitro drag racing was the result of some hot rodded magnetos. Not surprisingly, that hot rodding was done by Armstrong himself after a lot of trying and vexing experiments. Rightfully, Armstrong is most proud of that 300mph run because his name will forever be attached to it. Race wins and championships fade over time, but barrier smashing lives forever. Here’s the quick tale of how condensers turned Kenny Bernstein into a bonafide drag racing immortal and the end of our conversation with Dale Armstrong -
“Back in 1992 I was talking with Ron Armstrong (remember him?) about magnetos and how we would have to send the magnets back to the manufacturer after each race to get recharged. I was frustrated because I thought the weak magnets were hurting us on the track and that there had to be some way to improve them. Ron told me about rare Earth magnets and how they were a lot stronger than regular magnets. I thought that could be the ticket so we got some of the correct size and installed them into the magnetos. I put the rare Earth equipped magneto on the test stand and it was so powerful it completely fried the points in less than three seconds. I brought an electrical engineer in to work with for the day and we spent hours trying all different things. I really thought that a condenser would help save the points but even after installing them it didn’t. I asked the engineer if moving the condenser closer to the points (it was on about a one inch wire at the time) would help and he didn’t think so. Later, he left because we were getting nowhere and he thought he was wasting our money by being there. After he left, I soldered the condenser right next to the points and stuck a new magnet in the magneto, it made all the difference in the world. I could simulate a run and the points would live. I was able to run the test stand for 5-6 seconds at 8,000RPM and it worked. I literally put those magnetos into my carry on bag and flew to Gainesville. We made the first run with our regular magnetos and went like 299mph or something and then we installed the ones with the condensers on them and it went 301. The only problem with the whole thing was that there was no way to hide the condensers as they were installed on the outside of the magnetos so it didn’t take long for people to figure out what was going on. On the 301mph run, I had actually turned around to walk away and heard all the screaming. I was scared to look!”
D
ale Armstrong is one of the classiest and most brilliant men to ever devote his energies to the sport of drag racing and specifically into the nitro ranks. There’s not much more to be said. He was voted the 10th greatest driver in NHRA history and is ranked almost universally as the greatest crew chief of modern times and perhaps ever. We’re honored and very thankful for the time he spent with us for this interview.
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