I figured it wouldn’t have taken long to identify the streamlined dragster that we plucked from the Hemmings Nation Flickr pool recently, and I was correct: It’s the Silver Bullet, which ran mostly out of Wisconsin in the mid-1960s, and as we quickly found out, it’s still around, though not in any presentable form.
Stan Johnson, now of Brookfield, Wisconsin, wrote in to tell us that he was the one who designed and built (with a couple friends) the Silver Bullet, back in 1964-1965 in his own garage using a 273-cu.in. Dodge V-8 fitted with a homemade fuel injection setup. “As an industrial designer by trade, I intended to create a dragster that was a design study,” Stan said. “The areo did create an immeasurable effect.” Running in the CG/MR class, Stan and his team captured a national record at 142 MPH with the aerodynamics, but after they removed the bodywork and switched to running fuel through the engine, they ran in the 160 MPH range.
With the bodywork, Stan also ran the Silver Bullet on the ICSA show circuit, where – according to Rick Proctor, the current owner of the Silver Bullet – he sold the dragster in 1969 to a man from Ontario who repainted it and continued showing it under a different name across North American and Europe. Rick found the Silver Bullet about 10 years ago and since then has been slowly piecing together its complete history as well as the car itself.
The pictures here come from H.A.M.B. member Curt R. If anybody has any more photos of the Silver Bullet, let us know and we’ll forward them on to Stan and Rick.
