History of Mickey Thompson

my dad went on vacation with his dad and mom and his sister and one of the places they stopped on this vacation was a Bonneville Salt Flats my dad decided that this this is what he wanted to do with his life he wanted to go to Bonneville now he was little he was only 7 or 8 years old but it was a start of a dream the start of a dream that that lasted basically an entire lifetime and now you're talking about a guy a working man working at the LA Times buying junkyard parts has a good buddy named Fritz Foy and Fritz Voigt that they come from they drag racing together and not the dry Lakes together and so these guys come together and they want to go fast now they go when out there and win oh I can't remember 207 miles an hour and had the fastest car at Bonneville now that really fueled the deals for 400 miles an hour they wanted to beat the Brits the Brits were the standard of land speed racing they had all the records all the fast records so now here's my dad and Fritz they're buying junkyard parts old engines Pontiac engines they take for Pontiac engines they set them on crates and two-by-fours in the middle of the floor they take chalk and they run a chalk line all the way around the all the way around these four engines they figure this is how long we want the wheelbase to be that's where the chalk line stopped and take all these components and now how do you make all those components work you have to take different transmissions you got one throttle pedal with 32 injectors hooked to it you got one shifter that's got a shift for transmissions and here's some guys that are basically I wouldn't say they're uneducated they were academically uneducated but they were absolutely practical geniuses they take this car blood sweat and tears making this thing work my dad's working at night at the LA Times so he can have day time to to work on this stuff my mom's doing valve jobs on the engines pulling engines out of the car from my dad so when he gets home from work he's got all the stuffs laying there and he can get right to work and not wasting your time so these guys intubated they take it they go up to Bonneville and they can't get to 400 miles an hour they have four fuel-injected Pontiac engines a nitromethane but they can't get to for them out in there what do we do now okay next year we're coming back we're putting four superchargers on this thing they come back 406 miles an hour fastest Americans ever 1962 was the first year that my dad Mickey Thompson went to Indianapolis now Indianapolis that's the epitome erasing and for California hot rodder to go to Indianapolis it's one thing to go and watch and maybe go work on a crew in something but go back there with your own car that you designed and built I mean that was pretty incredible for a hot-rodder to a California hot rodder to go do that and my dad was he went back there with the things that he came up with were just incredible their aerodynamic devices he was the first he had ground effects or maybe they were ground effects but ground effects that all the way back in in 1962 and 3 and came up with a wing had a rear wing on the car the aerodynamics of the flow of the bodywork on the flow of the radiators and how the air went to the brakes and he was so far ahead of his time with everything I mean he went back there with in in 1963 with a car that he built with our titanium chassis a magnesium engine the car weighed under a thousand pounds like 968 pounds all the other cars were over well over 2,000 pounds and they were all for an engine here's those rears and everything he did was completely different he went back there built a tire a low-profile tire that was only a 12 inch rim I mean this thing was like 12 inches wide only a 12 inch rim and everybody else had tires that were like 33 inches tall and four inches wide I mean it was it wasn't like a little bit different it was a radical departure from anything that went on it here's this California hot rodder ad Indianapolis or the radical departures and he didn't come through the USAC dirt car ranks and he was not really I think he was way way way too radical and he had had a really hard time in a tough time when he went back there with this car that weighed under a thousand pounds there was no weight limited in nablus that month they decided the cars had to weigh whatever was 2,500 pounds so now how do you take a car that you designed to weigh under a thousand and bolt another twelve or thirteen or fourteen hundred pounds on and make it go work now I'll said you're over stressing the tires that you built the little small 12-inch tires to work on a light car so everything he did was so innovative and so advanced in time but they kept messing back with him they being a USAC official so it was just the man was just incredibly ahead of his time and everything he did you think about the name Mickey time so I think about the name Mickey Thompson I think about it in all forms of racing but drag racing was certainly a really really big part of my dad's life and my dad became the Builder and manager of Long Beach drag strip or lion strike stir when he was only I'm not sure exactly 27 28 years old he got the job it was a start of organizing drag racing and starting to get the kids off the street and and come in now they had how they started the thing as they had a guy out there with a flag and he would look at both cars and then he would wave this flag well then my dad was figuring out what these guys had got the starter figured out and they can see just before he drops a flag that he flinches and they go right when he flinches and they get the advantage over the next guy so he came up with a Christmas tree lighting system first it was just a single light bulb out there when the light went on then you left a start line then it became multiple lights yellow yellow yellow green so that was another thing that came out of those first early drag racing days as a development of the Christmas tree which is still used today in drag racing and then the timing systems now guys were out there running cars and they were maybe they were spinning the tires on the start line or maybe they were spinning the tires at the other end but they couldn't quite tell where their car was working on middle only visually and all of his friends stone yeah the tires were smoking at mid track so my dad came up with segments and timing so at the 60 foot mark he put a timing light at the 330 foot mark he put a timing light now you could see how hard you launched off the start line to the 60-foot whether the middle of the track to the 330 foot you were on it or you were spinning the tires and then what you were at the finish line so you could actually sit there and study where your car was working and make it adjustments for it and then and then one of the things and this was when I was young and I really really enjoyed was a Funny Car days he took the funny car thing he says what can I do to get the factories ago what can I do to get Ford excited not just run a Ford engine but a Ford engine how many people really know what the engine took but a Mustang body they know what a Mustang body looks like they can associate that and so he got Ford involved in in 1968 and 69 in our funny car projects with Danny and I as driving form and that we call we call that particular funny car old blue or killer because it went out there in it won everything like all the National Invention and the Thompson and gaius combination was just very very potent so once again see so you go from building a purpose-built drag strip to Christmas tree lights two timing systems to the slingshot dragster two funny cars it's got Mickey Thompson written all over every single segment of that drag racing era Mickey Thompson off-road racing war did it all start started down in Baja my dad went down and ran a race with bills drop and when it stops multi-purpose I think strap had about ten vehicles down there that year now this is early on and off-road racing and my dad went down there and he drove a pickup truck danyoung guys was his co-driver and pickup truck had a six-cylinder in it and so they were down there and they were down there flying down these dirt roads and really really thought they were cutting a fat one and they they pretty much had the world just have that world and they were just going and they got to this smooth section and here comes four Mexican guys in a 64 Chevrolet and they passed my dad and Danny on the smooth section that that that that just my dad said okay from now on I'm building my own cars they're having big v8s in him and we're going to go fast so then it went on till he started building his own cars I became the co-driver with him made maps and you know did tire designs and I mean every single thing was an invention all the time what can we do different what can we do to make this happen what can we do to make that happen they got stuck that first year and he's going what can I do to get you know get this car unstuck and you got you know logs that you put under it or sand or you know whatever you're stuck in my dad comes up with this the sidewall of the tire if the thing stuck in the sand the sidewall of the tires got to be doing just as much good as the bottom of the tire so he came up with the side biter and I mean it actually would drive you out of the hole the side biter is still incorporated into Mickey Thompson tires today and that was from all the way back in the 60s so once again always thinking about you know what he could do and how he could do it so and then awesome that off-road racing deal was done now he comes in and he's telling us in the off-road shop we're going to make our own off-road race Association here we're gonna call it score and I mean this is just walking in off the street and it's like now what do you do I mean you got to come up with rules what you can and can't do you got to have rules for every single class you got to have tires for everybody you got all of these things and it was just Mickey Thompson sitting down talking but the one thing that Mickey Thompson could really do is make things happen he starts talking with so much enthusiasm unto people people just come in and horns and start building things we wrote the rulebook we set up all the pits and all the stop signs and all the checkpoints and all the things it was just another Mickey Thompson first and so there's so many things that can happen out there in the desert and that in deserts such an amazing things and the things that happen out there are incredible the stories that come back and you get these people talking about wow this happened and I played this 550 foot jump and dadada well everybody's got a pretty good story and about half of our lives but so what can we do to make it so people can actually see this I don't have to drive out in the middle of nowhere and be stuck for two or three days my dad comes up with this idea we need to take this concept and we need to bring it into an enclosed facility in closed facility what do you mean by that well like the LA Coliseum the LA Coliseum where they have the Olympics where the Rams used to play and now you want to do off-road racing in there how is that going to work well we're gonna come in there we're gonna bring 25 million pounds of dirt we're gonna take it in there we're gonna mold and form our own chunk of Baja and I'm sitting there listening with a bunch of other people I'm going my dad's lost it you know I mean how can you do this but once again here he is Mickey Thompson all sudden there's trucks rolling into the stadiums 25 million pounds of dirt and he got trucks jumping up and down he got people sitting in the stands drinking sodas drinking beer eating hot dogs going and getting up and going to the bathroom between races I mean he was so once again so innovative he takes and he does a tension span survey how long is the average person's attention span eight to ten minutes perfect that's how long we're going to make each race each race will be eight to ten minutes they can get a full adrenaline rush get up go to the bathroom come back and be ready for another one now we're gonna have six different classes and eighteen races in a two hour period and you can go home full of off-road racing

Channel: mickeythompsontire

Views: 57,302

Rating: 4.8785424 out of 5

Keywords: mickey, thompson, history, danny, tires, baja, atz, mtz, stz, claw, ttc, sportsman, sr, st, pro, et, drag, bonneville, race, indy, car, usac, christmas, tree, racing, snore, stadium, offroad, off-road, innovator, sidebiter, wheel, low, profile, lions, strip, classic

Id: mngq4uZlFXQ

Length: 13min 26sec (806 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 20 2012