Flying High: Harry Schmidt and the Blue Max
Surprise. Bet you didn’t expect to see me this week, let alone on Thursday. Then again, I didn’t expect us to lose another great name from our sport earlier this week, and even though I told you I’d be incommunicado during this time — traveling to both the Houston (last weekend) and Atlanta (starting today) events — I couldn’t let another day go by without writing about the passing of Harry Schmidt, the original owner of the famed Blue Max Funny Car.
We had just landed in Dallas Monday on the way home from Houston, and, checking my email on my phone, I saw the sad message from Fred Miller, a key member of the mid-1970s Blue Max posse, that the 67-year-old Schmidt had died earlier that morning after a battle with cancer. Within a few minutes, former Blue Max pilot Richard Tharp was lighting up…
Sad News: Original Blue Max Owner Harry Schmidt Passes
Harry Schmidt, the original owner of the Blue Max Funny Car that rose to worldwide fame in the 1970s has passed away. The Texan was on the vanguard of the Funny Car revolution in the middle 1960s and gradually moved from injected nitro burning cars into blown nitro machines. He was teamed with such well known names as Mike Burkhart and Mart Higgenbotham during that period before really stepping up his program in 1969 when he commissioned Don Hardy to build him a 1969 Mustang bodied flopper and the Ramchargers to build him a top shelf 426ci nitro burning Hemi to power it. Schmidt then brought on Jake Johnson to drive and Gene Snow to turn the wrenches on a car he decided to name The Blue Max.
The name for the car came from a movie of the same name starring George Peppard as a German pilot in WWI trying to earn the German war medal known as the Blue Max. The movie has…
