He might not have the name recognition of most other professional drag racers, but Funny Car racer Elliott Platt – who died this weekend at the age of 75 – notched up enough victories to be considered one of the top black drag racers in the country for a short time in the early 1970s and probably more importantly showed that black racers could obtain major national sponsorships.
Platt, who grew up in the Boston area and worked for Eastern Airlines at Logan Airport as a jet engine mechanic after his time in the Air Force, began drag racing in the early 1960s, according to his cousin and later racing mechanic Charles Roberts Sr. Though also interested in motorcycle racing, he remained focused on drag racing, even after opening his own auto repair shop in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston.
Not until the early 1970s did he transition to Funny Cars when he bought his Camaro-bodied car from a group of racers in Stoughton, Massachusetts, and powered it with a fuel-injected 454-cu.in. Chevrolet big-block V-8 running on nitro and putting out a claimed 1,200 horsepower. He called it the American Eagle and took it up and down the East Coast, reportedly running a best time of 7.03 seconds at 170 MPH.
Though Roberts was more of an electronics specialist, Platt taught him how to build and rebuild an engine and took Roberts along on his drag racing exploits. “I’m not a mechanic, but I did learn a lot from him about auto repairs,” Roberts said. “He was a very creative guy and we worked well together.”
An undated photo of the members of the BAR race team, including Len Miller (far left), Elliott Platt (standing, center) and Benny Scott (seated).
Roberts recalls Platt going up against the biggest names in drag racing of the day, including Don Prudhomme, but perhaps the most influential meeting on the track came between Platt and Malcolm Durham, at the time a representative for the fledgling Black American Racers Association, a group founded by a number of black racers – including Ron Hines, Benny Scott, and Len Miller – with the goal of getting more blacks into all forms of motorsport. Specifically, the group wanted to highlight forgotten black racers (including Bill “Bullet” Scott and Sumner “Red” Oliver), get more blacks into the stands at races, and bring more sponsorship opportunities to black drivers.
While Roberts didn’t point to any examples of outright discrimination, he said that even in the early 1970s “it wasn’t expected for black people to have a Funny Car – they were more expected to be in stock cars. When we appeared with it at some tracks, it was probably the first time a minority showed up there.”
Platt likely leveraged his status as an Air Force veteran to land his first major sponsorship with the U.S. Navy recruitment office. The BAR thought so highly of that accomplishment that it highlighted the sponsorship in its newsletter as a model for how black racers should go about funding their racing exploits. BAR’s racing team later went on to get sponsorship from Viceroy cigarettes.
Even with that success, though, Platt found it difficult to continue racing. In around 1973, he and Roberts approached Polaroid for a sponsorship, but got turned down. With no other source of funding, Platt retired from Funny Car racing and went back to running his shop full time, Roberts said. He worked there until not long before he died on Sunday.
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