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Rocket Man

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Motorland
Published on Aug 15, 2014







Tether car racing began in the late 1930's when some people decided to put a model airplane engine on a board with four wheels. Within a year, there was racing of beautifully built cars that resembled the oval track cars of the period. Engines especially designed for cars soon pushed the speeds to over 100 miles per hour. By the early 1950's, they were going over 150 mph using the legendary Dooling 61 engine in a car that had ceased to look like anything on a big car track. Today, they are going over 200 mph with Italian and American engines in cars that look more like a bullet with the wheels inside the slim body. The Eagle Engine by John Ellis has set numerous records over the past several years. An international competition is held with cars in four different classes, depending upon engine size. Running on alcohol-oil fuel and using tuned exhaust pipes, the engines peak out at over 44,000 rpm in the smallest class. The cars run on a special circular track held to the center post by a wire tether. The person running the car stays on the outside of the track and the helper in the center assists the car off the line, stabilizing it until it reaches about 80 mph and then steps onto a small platform on the center pole until the car is shut off at the end of the run.