The Ditmars Brothers Dragster

There’s a lot to see in the Museum of American Speed. There are some super-famous cars that were on magazine covers and won trophies at all the big shows and races. Cars that are lettered with names like Garlits, Unser, and Landy. But there are also cars that didn’t get all the magazine ink or track championships. Cars that were campaigned by hometown heroes from all over the country on the dirt ovals, dry lakes, and dragstrips of long ago. And just because these cars weren’t famous in their day doesn’t make them any less important to the Museum’s mission to tell the story of the American automobile. They add depth to the collection and make it that much better and more colorful.

This is the story of one of those cars. The Ditmars Brothers Dragster was campaigned all over the Midwest by Bob, Skip, and Phil Ditmars in the early 70’s. They were regular working guys from West Liberty, Iowa who pooled their money, time, and skill to build a top-flight dragster in their mom’s one-car garage.

This is actually the third car campaigned by the brothers. The car before this one was another FED, this one with an injected small block Chevy. The Ditmars wanted to move up to the more illustrious Top Gas class, so they built up a blown 426 Hemi and widened the chassis of the SBC car to make it fit. Realizing that they would need a chassis that was designed to work with the Elephant, they ordered this car from Frank Huszar’s Race Car Specialties in Tarzana, California. It was supposed to be ready by October of ’69, but in fact wasn’t done until January of ’70. Undeterred, our heroes loaded up their Hemi in the back of a pickup and headed for California. They installed the engine in the parking lot at RCS and had the fresh, bare-metal car ready to compete at the Winternationals in Pomona at the end of January.

The fresh car failed to qualify at Pomona, and the reason for the poor performance wasn’t found until the brothers returned home. When the car was disassembled for paint and plating, it was discovered that the input shaft had been improperly machined and was only engaging one disc of the two-disc clutch. Once that issue was corrected and the car was put back together, the Ditmars had a competitive car for the ’70 season.

They ran the car all over the Midwest and qualified mid-pack for the ’70 US Nationals at Indy. A huge wheelstand during the first round of competition knocked them out of the running, but also provided the car’s only real moment in the sun. The car was photographed with the front wheels reaching for the sky, and that photograph would appear in Hot Rod Magazine as well as Super Stock and Drag Illustrated. The best finish for the Ditmars Brothers came later that season when they were runner-up at the 1970 NHRA regional National Dragster Open in Columbus.

There are pictures of this car from the Ditmars era that show it in the cool red, white, and blue candy paint job that you see on the restoration, but there are also some that show it in black with a little psychedelic squiggle panel. Why the color change? Well, when you run a Top Gas dragster out of your mom’s one car garage, you have to make clever use of your space. At the end of the ’70 season, the brothers pulled the engine and components to be freshened up over the winter while the car was rolled into the trailer for storage. When the trailer doors were opened back up in the spring, most of the Del Star Auto Body candy paint job was laying on the floor. The body had been made by Kenny Ellis, So Cal master of the magnesium dragster body. Turns out you have to do some special prep on mag panels, and the paint just didn’t stick, necessitating the black paint job that followed.

After the ’70 season, brother Phil moved to California to work for Ed Pink Racing Engines. Bob and Skip continued to run the car with driver John Madson until ’74, running with the short-lived Mid-West All Stars after NHRA discontinued the Top Gas class in ’72. The car was subsequently sold to Larry Bollman in Mankato, Minnesota. Bollman ran the car for a few years until the Hemi was hurt worse than he could afford to fix. The car was then sold to a bracket racer who installed a 440 Chrysler. It was then sold a few more times and ended up almost unrecognizable and running an SBC and a Powerglide.

We’ve told stories before about historic racecars that would have disappeared if not for the heroic effort of one person to rescue them. This is another one of those stories, and Shawn Dill is the man responsible for the car you see in these pictures. And his story with the car is a good one, too.

This chapter of the story starts around 1993 when Shawn was working part-time at an engineering firm in Minnesota while attending college. Wait, it actually started before that. Even as a little kid when he started tagging along with his neighbor’s alcohol funny car and dragster operation, Shawn was hooked on drag racing. In particular, he was interested in the early days of the sport, when wild slingshot dragsters and unruly gassers ruled the strip. He carried that love with him into college and that part-time engineering job. One of his coworkers, aware of his love for mid-century mechanical mayhem, clipped a classified ad and placed it on his desk. It cryptically read “180 FED Roller.” Meaningless to most, but Shawn knew what he was looking at and a short time later made the trip toward the Twin Cities to claim his new-old front-engine dragster chassis.

Shawn started to do some research, and this led him down a path that not only confirmed that he had indeed purchased the Ditmars Brothers car, but also would lead him to many of the guys originally involved with the car. After college, Shawn went on to work with some of the top NHRA teams in the country, and through his travels he was able to meet Bob and Phil Ditmars, Larry Bollmann, and Bruce Reilly. Reilly was the man behind Reilly's Speed Service and he sold the Ditmars most of their parts. These guys had kept a ton of documentation that went with the car and were happy to share it with Shawn.

Another fortuitous event would introduce Shawn the the car's original body builder. Remember the beautifully formed magnesium panels that sluffed off all that candy paint? Well, Shawn knew that Kenny Ellis had made the body, but knew nothing of his whereabouts or if he was even still around. Then, one year at the Goodguys event at Bakersfield, Shawn, ever the scholar of early drag car construction, spotted another dragster with a tank that he knew just had to be the work of Kenny Ellis. Upon talking with the owner, it was confirmed that not only was Ellis the craftsman behind the tank, he was also the car owner's neighbor! This lucky break not only led to Ken helping with the restoration of the Ditmars, car, it also became the basis for a friendship between Shawn and Ken Ellis that last until Ellis's passing.

After a 10-year restoration (protracted because he was always on the road racing), Shawn kept the car for another 10 years. When he decided it was time for the Ditmars Brothers dragster to find a new home, he thought first of the Museum of American Speed. Not only would it be on display for the world to see, it would also stay in the car’s Midwest stomping ground.

The Ditmars Brothers may not have won the Winternationals. Their car was never given a magazine feature or cast in a movie. But, thanks to the dedication and love of Shawn Dill, it gets to stand next to some of the greats in its retirement, proudly telling the story of three brothers from a small town in Iowa who fought valiantly in the dragster wars.