One weekend the engine in the fuel altered
got dropped into the Engine Masters' digger frame. With Beebe
spinning the wrenches, Moe qualified the car for the card at
8.72 at Fontana. Before the car could be moved off the far end
of the strip, another dragster was sent down, and it collided
with the MulIigan-Beebe entry. No one was hurt, but two dragsters
got scratched from the program and Beebe and Mulligan's initial
outing in a dragster is perhaps the shortest on record.
Mulligan then began driving for Ward and Wayre.
The team later evolved into Adams, Wayre, and Mulligan. For a
time there were two dragsters, one with a Chrysler and the other
with a Chevy. Upon occasion, Mulligan drove both. "It was
a bad deal; the cars were just too different." Just how
different was learned the hard way at Lions one weekend when
the Chrysler was put into the Chevy rail, which was shorter and
lighter. The car went singing through the lights at 199 mph.
In Moe's effort to stop, the parachute ripped, the brakes burned
out, and a rod broke. Mulligan left the strip and went into the
sand at an estimated 170 mph. Lucky to be alive, Moe nursed a
broken back in a huge plaster cast for 45 days. On a Tuesday,
the cast was replaced by a steel brace. By Saturday, Mulligan
had figured out that by being lifted in and out of a digger,
he could drive just fine.
While Mulligan was doing his thing with two
cars, a broken back, and some very |
successful drag racing, Tim Beebe
was working with Lee Sixt and Dave Beebe campaigning a fueler.
Just to keep things interesting, a feud "developed"
between the team of Beebe Brothers and Sixt and the team of Adams,
Wayre and Mulligan. This was known far and wide in drag racing
circles as the "feud of Garden Grove." Both teams were
claiming to be the fastest and quickest in Garden Grove (California).
"We would never race each other. If they
went to Lions we'd go to Irwindale, and we played it back and
forth like that for weeks."
"Was
the feud friendly?"
"Well,
it wasn't supposed to be, but it was. All we had to do to get
to their garage was jump a fence and walk up an alley. Finally
we had a big match race at Irwindale. Mulligan outran Dave two
straight to put an end to the feud."
Despite the defeat at the hands of Mulligan,
the Beebe Brothers and Sixth car moved down the quarter-mile
to the tune of $30,000 in winnings in 1966. With a full-time
job as service manager for a Chevy agency, and a full-size family
to care for, Dave Beebe found the schedule particularly demanding
and begged off when out-of-state appearances began coming in.
Dave suggested that the talents of bachelor Mulligan could be
utilized, and the current team of Beebe and Mulligan was formed.
continued on page 3 |
