A cackle, a vision of front wheels dancing in the air, a driver exposed in his nitro chariot and fighting a butterfly steering wheel, fumes stinging the eyes and the ground shaking. Drag racing dreams are made of these – and fulfilled by the fuel altered.
Psycho III made hearts race across the country in its original form and again since its resurrection. The owner is Australian drag racing legend Graeme Cowin. The speed shop mogul heads Rocket Industries and Aeroflow, two of the biggest names in the Australian automotive industry.
Cowin wheeled Funny Cars and Top Fuel dragsters around the world and has built the Aeroflow Outlaw Nitro Funny Car Series which is currently thrilling crowds around the country. But the nitro-breathing Psycho III fuel altered was his first love.
“When we built Psycho III in 1973 we had no money,” Cowin remembered, resting back into an office chair in his Aeroflow Outlaw Nitro Funny Car workshop.
“I was a truck driver and Wendy (Cowin, nee Johns) was a clerk. We put all our available money into Psycho III and built it out of second hand parts. When I mean all of my money, we didn’t do anything else except build that car. If we wanted to go out somewhere we would go and sit by the water and stuff like that that didn’t require any money.
“It was what we both wanted to do and we had the passion to go drag racing on nitro. We didn’t know what we were doing but we had a ball.”
Graeme, Wendy and their new creation travelled the country from Surfers Paradise in the east to Ravenswood in the west.
“We couldn’t afford it but we did it, I don’t even know how we did it.”
The Australia of 40 years ago was a more wild, more rugged place. The road to Western Australia was unsealed and wound its way through the desert, dangerous in its isolation. Cowin recalled having to drive through a roadblock of men armed with rocks and bottles ready to rob the unwary – it was indeed the wild west. It was at the now defunct Ravenswood Raceway that Cowin has some of his strongest memories of racing Psycho III. Then just three years old, Ravenswood was a party track fuelled by alcohol (not of the racing kind) and had yet to experience nitro. That would change with the arrival of Psycho III – once it was let into the pit area.
“We had to fight the (promoter’s) mother to get through the gate because she wouldn’t let us in. The track was all sandy and stuff and they had never seen nitro cars before.
“Wendy and I were in the pits and we were mixing the fuel and all these people were around us. I heard a guy standing behind me saying to his mate ‘let’s get the f*ck out of here – these idiots are f*cking around with nitro!’ They thought it was nitro glycerine.”
Cowin made a tyre smoking run down the strip and was subsequently mobbed on the return road
“People jumped over the fence and they were going nuts. There was people rolling around on the burnout marks in their t-shirts and it was sort of cool, but a bit scary.”
Safety was an afterthought in those days and Cowin considers himself lucky to have made it through alive. Match racing against a local dragster in Western Australia, Cowin forgets who exactly, he remembered just how dangerous every race was.
“We did a run and the blower came off the car, I literally saw the end plate of the blower go whoosh, straight over the top of my helmet – I was lucky it didn’t hit me in the face but it dented the wing. There was a bit of a fire and I got the car stopped and there was still a fire in the manifold. They had a safety truck with about 20 people in the back of it. I thought they were going to come and put the fire out – they went straight past me, it was like the Keystone cops. They went down to the other guy who couldn’t stop and went down to the end of the braking area.
“We found out that they got to the dragster and they couldn’t find the guy, he’d come out of the seat belt and slid down in between the chassis rails and got caught in the ‘v’ at the end. They were trying to find him because they could hear him yelling for help.”
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To Cowin though the scariest thing was how simply the car was built.
“(Psycho III) was welded out of mild steel tubing, had a tailshaft out of a Customline with no protection under your butt, welded up axles. All the things you wouldn’t do now, that thing had. Lucky there was no traction because it needed to spin the tyres to get down the track safely.”
As passionate as Cowin was about drag racing, he knew he needed the funds to make his ambitions a reality. Nitro was neither safe nor cheap. Wendy found out that a performance parts business was going belly up and made mention to Graeme. The pair approached the owner and became involved in a partnership at first, before completely buying out the business. But it would come at the cost of their beloved Psycho III.
“We knew we had to do something if we wanted to continue drag racing, because it was not going to just come to us. We sold Psycho III to Bob Shepherd (another legendary Australian drag racer who would later compete in Top Fuel) for $3500. The buy in was $5000 for the business so we didn’t get paid any wages to make up the deficit.
“We loved the car so much that it killed us to get rid of it, we were both literally in tears over it, we felt really bad. But everything turned out to be successful and we worked hard. We worked for five years straight, not taking a day off, to put everything back into the business.”
While his competitive streak drove Cowin to achieve tremendous feats including Australia’s first four second run, national championships and even NHRA final round appearances, his more recent racing involvement has been focused around fun. A Psycho III rebirth was imminent.
A shiny new version was soon in Graeme and Wendy’s hands, originally intended just for cacklefest appearances (a cacklefest is where nitro-fuelled race cars gather and start up simultaneously, with the object to produce a sharp idle note and pleasing flames).
“We cackled it and it sounded really good, it hurt your hears and stuff, but I said to Wendy, we never did this. There was no cacklefest back then. I wanted to race it.”
The original Psycho III achieved a best time of 7.53 seconds and 207mph. Newcomers to the sport may note how high the speed is compared to the elapsed time, but this was in a time when passes that spun the tyres the length of the track were the norm. With the Donovan cackle motor put into race mode and Graeme’s son Andrew at the wheel, a 6.99/200mph was achieved, but the Cowin need for speed was still there in spades.
“You see that motor sitting over there?” Cowin points at a hat-to-pan supercharged V8 sitting in the corner of his office. “We ran a 6.7 something and put a rod out of the thing. It wasn’t really a race motor, it was built as a cackle motor.
“I said to Wendy, how about we put a nostalgia rules motor in it with a little pump and Mallory magneto. We loved it that much we built another one so we could race against it and now we call them Nitro Hot Rods and it will be a part of our future plan (for the Aeroflow Outlaw Nitro Funny Car Series).
“We will hopefully have four of them to enhance our show or put on a show at smaller tracks – it will be affordable and entertaining.”
There is a genuine sense of affection in Cowin for Psycho III, his original hot rod.
“It’s our baby and it’s the car we love the most. That car started everything that we are today and if we didn’t sell it we wouldn’t be here, because that opportunity wouldn’t have happened. That car is really important to us.”
Shane Olive is the man entrusted to the driving duties of Psycho III in its modern incarnation. As one of the winningest pilots in the Aeroflow Outlaw Nitro Funny Car Series, Olive is no stranger to fast nitro vehicles, but Psycho III requires a different kind of respect.
“Psycho III is one of the scariest cars to drive, not because of the fact that it is scary to steer as such, but because of the prestige and what it is,” he said. “It has a lot of history with the car, it is a real privilege to drive and you don’t want to scratch it, that is for sure. “I can jump in any of the Funny Cars no problem and drive it, but that car is always daunting.”
Fuel altereds carried the class designation AA/FA in their heyday, an abbreviation that has often been expanded to ‘Awful Awfuls’ for their evil handling. It’s a combination of excessive horsepower (Psycho III probably carries about 3000 of them) and short wheelbase that makes fuel altereds one of drag racing’s most challenging drives.
“We changed it from the Donovan and put a Brad Anderson in it and it has woken it up,” Olive said. “There is not much weight over the front end so it tends to carry the front wheels way out to the 300 foot mark before it looks like putting them down.”
The team has recently moved the motor down and forward a little in an effort to shift the centre of gravity of the car and hopefully improve on a 6.01 best.
So for a guy who gets to drive nitro drag cars on weekends as part of his job description, does Psycho III take the spot as Olive’s favourite too?
“It’s a tough question. I like driving the altered because it is way different. You are out there in the open and the engine is right in front of you, it is louder than the Funny Car and it is very unpredictable. It’s much more of a handful to drive.”
– Written by Luke Nieuwhof, photos by Luke Nieuwhof, dragphotos.com.au and cacklingpipes.com.
