TRIBUTE
Tom McEwen
1937-2018
D
on Prudhomme still recalls the very day he first
met Tom McEwen. “He had a swagger to him,” Prudhomme
says. “He was wearing his Ray-Ban sunglasses and he
was cool.” McEwen, who passed away June 10 at 81, was
certainly cool, and according to “The Snake”, he, in turn, made drag
racing cool.
From his development of the “Snake” and “Mongoose” rivalry to the
Mattel Hot Wheels sponsorship that took the duo to unimaginable
heights, “the Mongoose” was a true drag racing promotion mastermind.
McEwen won only five NHRA national events, but his uncanny ability
to promote helped him become one of the sport’s most iconic figures.
“I just can’t say enough good about Tom,” Prudhomme says. “He was
amazing. We were like brothers. It wasn’t all a gravy train, though. We
fought and argued and didn’t speak to each other from time to time.
I’d blow the engine out of the car to beat him.”
In 1964, after McEwen in the Donovan Engineering Special front-
engine Top Fuel dragster defeated Prudhomme in the Greer-Black-
Prudhomme dragster twice, McEwen gave himself the “Mongoose”
Dr ag Illustr ated
nickname. Prudhomme had already acquired the “Snake” nickname
because of his quick reaction times, but he’d never thought to play it
up. That all changed when McEwen had a cartoon mongoose painted
on the front of his helmet.
“Of course, I had to get the ‘Snake’ painted on my helmet, then the
fans wanted to see us run each other,” Prudhomme says. “When it came
down to the two of us at Lions Dragstrip, it drew a pretty good crowd.
We became pretty popular at the local drag strips, and drag strips
around the country would want to book us in. Then Tom got the idea
to go to Mattel, and from there it really took off.”
The Mattel deal, which ran from 1970 through 1972, included spon-
sorship for the two Wildlife Racing Funny Cars and a line of Hot Wheel
replicas. The Hot Wheels brand had launched only two years prior, but
the Snake and Mongoose toys quickly flew off toy stores shelves across
the car-crazed country.
“Those Hot Wheels cars touched the lives of so many people, so many
young kids,” Prudhomme says. “That was a time when automobiles were
a big thing. Cars were everything in our generation. The Hot Wheel
28
D r a g Il l u s t r a t e d . c o m
Don “the Snake” Prudhomme remembers “the Mongoose”