Snake vs. Mongoose: How a Rivalry Changed Drag Racing Forever

Even before you open Snake vs. Mongoose, you know you re in for something special and fun. A protective plastic dustjacket with full color decals of the snake and mongoose figures grabs your attention and keeps your 160 page book in pristine condition. Nine Chapters and eight informative sidebars from Marv Rifchin, Gene Adams, Bob Brandt, Pete Ward, Billy Bones Miller, Randy Fish, Bob Shaffer and Waterbed Fred Miller document the story. Snake vs. Mongoose is a joyful quarter mile trip down a fast memory lane. It rates four out of five lug nuts. --Gregg Leary, SPEEDTV com...ONE day in 1964, Ed Donovan, a drag-racing pioneer who was known as the Mole, came up with a nickname for Tom McEwen, his lead-footed driver. There was not much money in drag racing then winners were often given a $100 savings bond, plus free parts and oil but every hotshot had a nickname.One of McEwen s top funny-car rivals was Don Prudhomme, a lanky driver from Southern California who was so cobra-quick off the starting line that he was known as the Snake. So Donovan tagged McEwen the Mongoose, a mammal that seizes and kills venomous snakes. Their match races became genuine showdowns. 'This wasn t rasslin or anything fake like that, and that s what made it so popular,' Prudhomme said in a recent telephone interview from his office in Vista, Calif. 'We just wanted to beat each other.'Because the rivalry grew between the two drivers McEwen in his Plymouth Duster, Prudhomme in his Plymouth Barracuda the sport changed. In 1970, McEwen talked Mattel into producing 1:64 scale Snake and Mongoose cars as part of its Hot Wheels die-cast toy line and into becoming drag racing s first sponsor outside the automobile industry.Today, the National Hot Rod Association is a multimillion-dollar organization. Drivers like Don Garlits, also known as Big Daddy, and Shirley Muldowney, or Cha-Cha, also pushed the sport into prominence, but the Snake-Mongoose rivalry acted as its spark plug.'The Snake and Mongoose Prudhomme and McEwen fed off each other, they really did. They were just a match made in heaven,' said Tom Madigan, a former drag racer who wrote a book about the rivalry, 'Snake vs. Mongoose: How a Rivalry Changed Drag Racing Forever.' Children collected the toy cars and, of course, raced them against each other. Once, McEwen recalled, two brothers showed up at an autograph session, one with a Snake tattoo, the other a Mongoose tattoo. The first asked Prudhomme to autograph his arm; the second asked McEwen to autograph his arm. Then they went to a tattoo parlor to have the autographs made permanent.But, for the most part, the rivalry sanitized and popularized a sport that had a greasy reputation. As Madigan said, 'A lot of these guys weren t public speakers they d throw in every profanity known to mankind in an interview.'McEwen, 72, retired as a driver in 1992, and Prudhomme, 68, retired in 1994 to start his own race team, but each says he is asked about the rivalry almost every day. Prudhomme said the rivalry might be the only topic he never gets tired of talking about. It changed their lives. 'At the time, all we were thinking about was having some extra money,' McEwen said from his home in Orange County, Calif. 'We never had money given to us before. You didn t have any idea that it would blossom into what it did.'Forty years ago, drag racers barnstormed from one town to another, hawking tickets by doing interviews with local radio stations and newspapers. The Snake and the Mongoose tended to draw most of the fans to the drag strip, if not all of them. Children drew pictures and made models.One of them was Ron Capps, a native of Carlsbad, Calif., who would pursue a career in the sport. In 1997, Prudhomme hired Capps to race a funny car for him. --New York Times, October, 2009

Brand new out this month and a must have for drag racing fans, is this historical account of the msot famous rivalry in all drag racing history. It's more than that, though, it's a book about how drag racing went from an amatuer sport to the big time. And it's all down to Tom 'Mongoose' McEwan and the massive sponsership deal he secured in 1970 with the toy company behind the then emerging Hot Wheels brand, Mattel. At a time when a major sponsership deal form the likes of Wynnes amounted to about $7,000 to get a $1,000,000 package out of a toy company was a masterstroke. Mattel initially wanted the two rivals to race Funny Cars because they appealed to the public more than rail dragsters and the rest,a s they say, is history. Aside from the fantastic photographs this book is littered with, it's an honest, funny, at times heart wrenching account of life at the top of the sport at the height of Funny Car fever. it comes at the story from both sides, punctuated by first-hand accounts from rivals, crew memebers, and others that knew the dynamic due, making for the msot enthralling book on the glory days of drag racing I personally have ever read. --Custom car, december, 2009

Of all the historical drag racing stories that needed to be told in depth, the saga of the fabled rivalry between Tom "The Mongoose" McEwen and Don "The Snake" Prudhomme probably sat on top of the heap. We speak in the past tense because Tom Madigan spills all the beans about the iconic pair in his new book, Snake Vs. Mongoose: How a Rivalry Changed Drag Racing Forever, and it totally rules. All sides of the story are told. Prudhomme and McEewn are profiled in depths that we've never seen or read before. Former executives and employees from Hot Wheels tell about how the deals were struck and just how successful the promotion was, and other racers, journalists, and friends all chime in along the way to share experiences. The photography in the book is outstanding as well. Hundreds of photos, both black and white and color, adorn the pages and serve as a neat guide to the evolution of the equipment that these men were piloting through their careers, both when they were racing together and when they were independantly competing before and after the Hot Wheels deal. So many people know the basic story yet know only a little about the players involved in it, but this book takes those slivers of knowledge and turns them into canyons. Madigan did a masterful job of interviewing the people involved with these men and their careers and getting more cool insights and stories than we've ever found collected on them in one place before. So your a drag geek like us that knows the story of the Snake and the Mongoose, do you need this book? Absolutely. Unless you were these with these two men through all of their careers, from start to finish, you don't know the half of it. --Bangshift dot com, November, 2009