How do you drive a race car the full length of the quarter mile on its rear wheels? As you can guess, there are some tricks to it. This video demonstrates how Bob Riggle makes the Hemi Under Glass Barracuda do its thing. 

Already known to gearheads the world over, Bob Riggle’s Hemi Under Glass wheelstand exhibition car became famous all over again recently when Jay Leno took a ride in the passenger seat for his CNBC television show, Jay Leno’s Garage. Unfortunately, Leno and Riggle went for a tumble when the Barracuda lost control and rolled over several times at the end of a lengthy wheelie. Luckily, neither was injured.

Riggle has campaigned an entire series of Hemi Under Glass Barracudas over the years, starting with the original built by the Hurst Performance engineering shop in Detroit back in 1965. And naturally, over that time Riggle has refined and perfected the mechanical combination that allows the car to travel virtually any distance on its rear wheels alone. In this great little video, recorded some years back at Huntsville Dragway, he reveals a few of the tricks.

+    The iron-block 426 Chrysler is mounted behind the driver’s seat, concentrating its hefty mass over the rear wheels. There’s no driveshaft; torque is fed through the automatic transmission to a conventional live axle turned around backward so the pinion faces to the rear, coupled through a Casale marine-type V-drive.

+   To provide rear suspension, the complete drivetrain assembly is mounted on a tubing subframe, which pivots on the main chassis at the front and is supported by conventional springs and shocks at the rear.

+   For directional control when the front wheels are six feet in the air, a lever-operated split hydraulic system allows Riggle to apply braking force to the rear wheels individually.

The novel setup allows the Hemi Under Glass to do its track-length wheelies and to handle reasonably well in a straight line. However, if you’ve viewed the Jay Leno’s Garage crash video, you can see the package might not be quite optimal for turning in a small radius, especially on a bumpy surface. Still, the Hemi Under Glass is quite effective at the job it was designed to do—which includes entertaining untold thousands of race fans for more than half a century. Video below.