Dan Knapp
Dan Knapp was one of the original members of the Ramchargers drag racing team.
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Family Facts
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Education
As a high school dropout, Dan brought a different type of resume to the Ramchargers' roundtable. Hailing from Detroit's tough Downriver area, he developed a wealth of hard-won fabrication skills from working in gas stations and the garage behind his house. By the age of 22, he had built three dragsters, including the #2 Drag News-ranked Top Gas Dragster in the country. It would be the first of three, twin-engine dragsters he and driver Don Westerdale would use to rule the Midwest, regularly defeating racers on the caliber of Connie Kalitta.
But, late in 1962, Dan was hired to work in the now-famed Woodward Garage, where he befriended several Ramchargers while extolling the virtues of racing a dragster. His responsibilities and accomplishments included the fabrication of too many vehicles to list here, but suffice to say they involved nearly every drag, exhibition, NASCAR, and muscle car prototype produced by Chrysler during the 1960s. This would even include cars like the Hurst Hemi Under Glass and the Little Red Wagon. But, his greatest contribution undoubtedly came from rescuing a scrapped prototype 426 Hemi and building a Top Fuel chassis to put around it. Having convinced Ramchargers members on the merits of folding the dragster into the team, they proceeded to introduce the 426 Hemi to Top Fuel drag racing.
Persevering through monumental frustrations, Dan and company gradually unlocked the secrets of the 426 Top Fuel Hemi with record-setting results. Evidence of this in 1965 (its first full year of competition) was: setting track records at 93-percent of the tracks raced at, the NHRA Top Fuel National Record, and recording the first of three Low E.T. 's of the Meet at the U.S. Nationals.
Accomplishments
Epilogue
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