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Detroit Dragway was one of those drag strips that had most of the top drivers & cars making their way to the Brownstown Township Michigan track. South Eastern Michigan locals were treated to lots of great racing back then. One such racer was Eddie “Fast Eddie” Schartman. Eddie was a racer from Ohio and got his "Fast Eddie" nickname from kicking ass on the dragstrip. The 60's were a great time for drag racing in America, the new Funny Cars were real crowd favorites. From an interview with Eddie, he talks about how hard the funny cars were to drive. “I remember in 1967, we were running Maple Grove [Raceway], and the car was going sideways in the lights because the back end was almost coming off the ground. We figured we had to get some weight on the back end, so one of the guys went to a hardware store and came back with some angle iron that we bolted onto the trunk of the car. It went straight and picked up 5 mph. We’d invented the [rear-deck] spoiler and didn’t even know it. We were going 190, and ‘Dyno’ Don was still in the 180s, and believe me, he heard about it.” Schartman went on to win Orange County Int’l Raceway’s prestigious Manufacturers Funny Car Championship that year and also won Irwindale’s Grand Prix and Fremont Dragway’s Northern California Championship. Major wins in 1968 with the Air Lift Rattler Cougar – which had a pedestal-style rear spoiler – included the AHRA Winternationals and Great Lakes Dragaway’s Night FC Championships, and he posted a runner-up behind Dyno Don Nicholson at the Stardust National Open. As the speeds increased in the class, so did the accidents and fatalities, especially because anyone could buy a Funny Car chassis. Mercury and Ford, which had merged their racing efforts by this time, informed the factory teams late in 1968 that they were dropping their backing of the Funny Car class. Schartman, who already had sponsor and match race commitments for 1969 for two cars – with Arnie Behling in his ‘68 car – worked out a low-six-figure settlement that allowed him to run the 1969 season. Schartman was part of the inaugural Winternationals Funny Car field in 1969 with an 8.32 and lost on a holeshot to Rich Siroonian, 8.45 to 8.39, in the first round. Although he was still tearing up the match race scene, he also lost in the first round at the Springnationals and the U.S. Nationals. After fouling against Bruce Larson in Indy, he finished the year with some match racing, then retired from the class. In 2012 Eddie Schartman was inducted into the International Drag Racing Hall of Fame.
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