With the explosion in popularity of nostalgia drag racing and historic drag racing machinery in recent years, it is no surprise that some of the greatest cars from the past have been brought back to their former glory. The catch is that most of those cars are not reunited with the people who originally raced them. The King & Marshall Top Fuel Dragster is a different case.
There was no more fearsome Top Fuel team in the Northeastern part of the country in the late 1960s and early 1970s as that of Jimmy King and Don Marshall. One man who can vouch for that is BangShift.com forum member, Don Roberts (TopFuel169 on the board) who was the driver of the team’s Funny Car and who also made laps in the dragster (he’s boiling the hides in the lead photo of this blog item in said dragster).
The team campaigned its Don Long built El Diablo dragster and won races up and down the eastern seaboard. Like all things, though, their time came to an end and the Fuel car went off into the vapors, seemingly gone forever. Then something, or rather somebody, happened. New England drag racing legend and founding father Eldon “Sy” Sidebotham brought the car back to life. Sy towed the car all over the country, cackling it, and wowing crowds with its sheer beauty. When Sy began to slow down, he decided to sell the dragster and another chapter in its storied history began when Rhode Islander Ray Helger bought the car.
Helger, a noted nostalgia drag racing guy in the New England area, jumped at the chance to own the car and bring it back to its home state of Rhode Island. King and Marshall were Rhode Island guys, and it is only right that the car get back to its roots, and even more importantly, back to exist with the hands of Jimmy King playing a role in its life. That’s right, the nearly 80-year-old King is back to wrenching on the car with Helger.
EastBayRI.com recently ran a story on the car and it picks up at the point where Helger purchases the car. Ray is a neat guy and frankly, there may not be a better and more appreciative steward of this neat piece of history than Ray.
