Ron Scrima, the chassis builder behind some of drag racing’s most iconic cars has passed away at age 76. Scrima’s career can really be broken into two sections. The first was as a successful and innovative drag racing chassis man and the second as a successful motorcycle racing engine builder in Texas. Most of us struggle to master one skill, but Scrima rose to the top in both of these field of endeavor. His “Exhibition Engineering” chassis business was not a one man show. He worked next to Pat Foster at the shop. The two of them made for a heck of a tandem.
Scrima’s earliest success came as part of the famed Albertson Olds dragster team. Scrima built the car by starting with a Scotty Fenn Chassis Research K-88 dragster frame (the first commercially available chassis). Employing his own ideas he highly modified the kit (apparently to the dismay of the mercurial Fenn who wanted no association with the car) by removing the top frame rail and tweaking other parts to allow the chassis to flex, something that virtually no cars did in the early 1960s. Proof being in the pudding, this car won Top Eliminator at Lions Drag Strip 12 weeks in a row, went on the road for a month and then came back to bag another six in a row. This was unheard of domination. The fire breathing Gene Adams Olds engine helped, too.
His next notable piece of work was the so-called Scrima-liner dragster, one of the earliest attempts to streamline a slingshot dragster for enhanced performance. The car was beautiful and the construction was virtually flawless, but like nearly all streamlining attempts in drag racing, the added weight of the body could not be overcome with the potentially added aero benefits of the body.
He built “Fearless” Fred Goeske’s 1968 Barracuda funny car that hit the ground running hard and became a dominant car in California and at match races across the country. The company produced several funny cars during this time as well as a string of dragsters.
We think the most notable and famous car Scrima produced as Don Prudhomme’s 1970 ‘Cuda flopper that became one half of the most famous drag racing tandem of all time, the “Snake and Mongoose” Hot Wheels traveling extravaganza. This was the first flopper that Snake ever had and is one of the most famous and valuable of all time. Prudhomme raced the car with great success and eventually sold it, but regained possession of the machine and has restored it to as raced condition. The machine is as much a tribute to Snake as it is to the man who constructed it, Ron Scrima.
Ron Scrima’s name may not be on the tip of every drag racing fan’s tongue, but his contributions to the sport, like all the men who advanced the technology during drag racing’s heyday, is important. It is important to recognize and remember the guys like Scrima who did the “dirty work” and existed in the shadows of the men who drove their creations. Like a wise man once told us, “If you want impress others, grab the steering wheel. If you want to impress yourself, grab a wrench.”
Here are some photos of a few Scrima cars and one of Ron himself.
Ron Scrima also built the Mondello and Matsubara Fuel Altered, one of the best fuel altereds ever built before or since.