Bill “Tiger” Destefani – enough said?

By Paul T. Glessner, M.S., Assoc. Editor & Publisher

I recently connected with Bill “Tiger” Destefani in the last several months via FB and a friend of his. I hadn’t seen that smiling face of Bill’s since sitting across from him at the Reno Awards banquet in 2008. I was just another racing plane enthusiast since my first Reno Air Races in 1988. Meeting at Mojave Air & Spaceport Rutan Field’s “Plane Crazy Saturday (PCS)” on the 16th of August was a halfway point for us both and a – no-brainer regarding airplanes.

The Bill 'Tiger' Destefani - 7 Time Unlimited Reno Air Race Champion (Photog courtesy of Paul T. Glessner)

Bill had a something on his hands that morning and got to the terminal a little while before me. He was taking advantage of Voyager Restaurant’s delicious food and view of the airport. I approached him, said our greetings, and my first thought was, as I see some 20 people enjoying the morning in the restaurant, - “Has anyone come up to you and said ‘hello?’ “No one,” he replied and then added, “Nah, I don’t expect that when I am out and about at an airport.” We laughed about it. Seven-time Reno Unlimited Air Race Champion. Wow. I was coming to attend PCS, see a good overview of flying the C-17 by USAF Capt. Warren Tichenor and see a good friend that I connected with as of late. I went into the conference room, briefly leaving Bill at his booth, to ensure we would have two seats. I apprised Mrs. Cathy Hansen, who is the airport’s treasurer and president of the Mojave Transportation Museum, who is present in the building – Tiger Destefani. She dropped what she was doing preparing for the talk and motivated herself over to the Voyager restaurant to rekindle a many decades long aviation friendship with Tiger perpetuated by Al, her pilot extraordinaire deceased husband. They talked, reminisced and laughed for 20 minutes and then we headed over for the presentation. Bill was pointed out at the presentation. I came prepared to capture a good overview of Bill and his life at 500mph and here it is…

IFUSA PTG: Please tell us, Bill, how did you got started in aviation?

Bill 'Tiger' Destefani and Cathy Hansen catching up in MHV's Voyager Restaurant (Photog courtesy of Paul T. Glessner)

TIGER: Well, we got to go back when I was a little. One of my uncles had a Luscombe and there are a few more farmers around in that close area of Bakersfield that all had Luscombes. So, they'd all go to Pismo Beach and land on the beach and climb the hills and such back in those days anyway. So, that's kind of how I got my first taste of aviation. And then, I always wanted to get a P-51 Mustang. But, you know, that is always just down the street; one of these days I'll get one.

IFUSA PTG: How old were you, 10?

TIGER: Oh, I might have been 6-7 years old.

IFUSA PTG: And that's what got you bitten?

TIGER: Super young. Yeah. Well, I remember flying around the ranch and my granny out there with a handkerchief waving. Oh yeah, all of my family members right now and then and in those days had - crop dusters. They were all doing all of their work with PT-17 Stearmans. And you know, there were no Turboprop Thrushes or any of that that had come along yet anyway. So, I'd hide out in the cotton field when they were coming, and you see those two wheels coming and they’d spray right over the top of my head. We didn't give a darn about chemicals; it killed all the bugs that were in you.

I can't remember the year; I think I was 34 years old when I got spinal meningitis and I was in the hospital for 15 days. Damn near died and figured, “You know, when I get out of here, I'm going to buy a Mustang. Whatever it takes.” So, I did and then got to - flying it. As you know, the Reno deal, of course, had been going for a while. This was 1980. The first year went up there with Ron Hevli flying the Mustang. I didn't have that much time, and I wasn't going to do it till I was plenty proficient. At any rate, you know I got the bug.

IFUSA PTG: What it your farming income that let you buy this?

TIGER: Yeah, actually, yeah. What happened was, when I found the airplane, it was $100,000. I did not have $100,000, but back in those days, there was a bank president in every bank. Right? Not like it is today. OK. So, there was an aviation banker in our town, Bank of America. He financed guys with airplanes, so I went in there and talked to him. He was going to give me the money right then. I said, “Nah, let me bring you the paperwork first.” Alright, well, he gave me the $100,000. So, every time I'd go in there, he'd jump on me and I'd bring him another $10,000 until I eventually got it paid off.

IFUSA PTG: And what did you sell him on that you were going to use the plane for, that he thought this was a good business decision?

TIGER: I did not have to sell him on anything. He just liked Mustangs. (It was just another deal.) I remember his name; it was George Horst. When he retired from the bank, he became an undertaker for a few years. At any rate, the guy that took his spot, I had made a connection with. I had a P-40 that came out of Harrah’s Car Collection. To get it, I went to see that guy. I paid $135,000 for that thing; at that time, I needed to borrow about $100,000 and so at any rate, he wouldn't give me the loan. But I'm sitting there and I had this belt buckle on with a $20 gold piece in it, OK? The banker said, “I like that belt buckle.” I told him, “You give me that loan and you'll have one.” What he didn't know is that I had two of those belt buckles. So, I gave him the belt buckle, and I got the loan anyway. Well, I have owned five Mustangs. Besides the P-40 and I think I had already had two or three Mustangs already. You know, in fact, I had three of them flying. It was Ron Hevle in one, I'm in one and Delbert Williams in the third one. Two crop duster pilots and me. So, we're flying formation out there at Shafter-Minter Field and I own them all.

I have really only flown World War II stuff: Mk 9 and 14 Spitfires and the Russian Yak 11. That other Yak 11, Czech Mate, that Sherman Smoot got killed in with the P&W 2800 in front, I flew it 17 times. Sherman was still flying for the airlines so he couldn't do the test work. I was doing it. After the 17th time, I was never going to get in that aircraft again. I was a ‘pile.’ The biggest problem was – it was Russian made! What a pile of ****.

IFUSA PTG: So, all the while, you are moving to your desire to race planes, uh?

TIGER: Yeah, so, in 1980, I asked Hevle, “You want to go (racing)? You're the pilot.” So, we went up there and I think we finished about second or third. I think we won 15,000 bucks. I'm just the owner. I'm not flying yet. He flew my stuff up there three years before I ever got in the seat. I wanted plenty of time. I used to go flying every day in that Mustang, you know? And you'd go solo. It's not a two-seater that you can take a friend at least. Yeah, I had the seat in the back, but most of the time I was by myself. But I put a lot of time in that thing. I wanted to get so proficient before I ever went and – did that (Reno).

IFUSA PTG: That none of these Mustangs were tuned by taking out the OEM angles on the (flying) surfaces?

TIGER: No, no, these were – stockers. So, we went up there, we did pretty good and with the prize money, I bought us a race trailer. I don't remember what they did with the rest [PTG: This reminds me of a W.C. Fields quote.], but it was $15,000 and in 1980 that wasn't bad money. Then then it just kept going well; thought we were doing really good till we got the **** beat out of us by the highly modifieds. We got to cut that sucker up. You know, we got to start cutting the plane up. We wanted to go fast.

IFUSA PTG: Who was beating you at the time?

(Photog courtesy of Mustangs Mustangs)

TIGER: John Crocker in a Wiley Sanders Racing Team's P-51D Mustang #69 -"Jeannie" (N79111). The Sanders family had shown up with Dreadnought, but they hadn't won anything. They were, you know, learning along the way, too.

I ended up making a deal with Gordon Plaskett; he was a crop duster over on the coast; I can't remember the name of the town. Anyway, I knew him pretty well; he had an original TF Mustang and then he got this other TF Mustang. It was a factory TF; North American made 10 of them. Anyway, I did a trade with him. I traded him for a Mercedes 350 and some of this and that and the other for one of his other non-TF Mustangs, but it was all apart. That's what we Frankensteined to make - Dago Red. So, we took it up there. We won that first year; I think it was 1983. (**Seem to be finding some of the Reno Air Racing archived results not 100% correct regarding placement, per Tiger.) And then I sold it the next day because I had Strega coming out of Australia. I wanted to make one even better. They made 200 of them over there under license. We sent 300 of them over there. This was one of the 300, so it came back. It wasn't Australian built. There is only one Strega, and it is currently being curated at the Planes of Fame Museum.

Hevle flew it for a year or so, 1984/85. Damn good stick and rudder pilot but just didn't have the ‘kill (attitude/mentality).’ So, I said, “You got to go” and I jumped in it in 1986 and raced it from then on. I didn't win till 1987. It took me a handful of years of experience before I actually won having first flown in the races in 1982.

IFUSA PTG: What was the winning speed then? 

TIGER: Oh, let's see that particular year (1987), I broke every record that they had; qualifying record(466.7mph), race record every day and won the race(452.6mph). We were doing so good, Dreadnought was the big deal. So, I've got the pole. Dreadnought is next to me; we come down to shoot, you know? I got him by quite a ways; it's like I'm having no fun. So, I backed that thing (Strega) down to 100 inches (of manifold pressure). Well, I let him go by me. Alright, so eventually I put it back up to 120 inches. OK? And pretty quickly, I looked down and I've got 125 inches going and I haven't touched the throttle anymore! We were getting ram air! Anyway, it took me a lap. I caught him, went around him and won the race. But it was fun having something for the crowd. My crew went bat-****. They couldn't believe I did that, but I did it. And I already knew what I had.

It took me a couple of years before we got it, but we finally got that engine I had so much incredible power. They didn't know what I had. I mean, I broke the qualifying record like 466 miles an hour. The record before that was 450. The Merlin was a better engine than Allison because it had a two-stage blower. Then we learned a lot more. Remember the P-82? Well, they started out with Dash 20 and Dash 21 Merlins. They were the cats’ meow, the latest in evolution. Their blower was worth 10 more inches, so we found this one engine. Is worth 10 more inches than what we had then, an A-9. Put A-21 blower on there, pick up 10 more inches. Most average we saw was 152 inches! That's a lot. We used to run it at 34 turns, and it would make, with 420 gears in the nose, 132 inches. So we had what I call war emergency. That was an extra 100 RPM. Put that on. You'd go to 152 inches with airplane going no faster. Whatever more power it was making, it was eating it up in the blower just to run the damn thing. Yeah, so that didn't work out. We were always modifying that engine, you know.

IFUSA PTG: What was done to the physical outer mold line of the airplane?

TIGER: We started off building a whole new underneath scoop. We tucked the radiator up as far as you could get it. It hung down. I think we ended up moving it up four or five inches. OK. And then we built the scoop to fit that. Yeah, so that alone made us more aerodynamic. It would come up and you could put it in trail. So it cleaned up the area real nice. You could even close it more. But we would run it in trail. We had an indicator in the cockpit to tell us where it was all the time. After a couple of years, we extended it 15 inches, built a new one. We added 15 inches to it just done to do test work.

In a stock Mustang, you can flip that ramp in auto and then it would do what it wanted depending on the coolant temp.  Well, now you've lost all control. We did away with that and on our stick we had a Cooley hat; up and down on for the ramp and if you pushed it to the left - it washed the windshield.  We had a little tube; it was just a quarter inch aluminum tube kind of smashed flat at the end. We had it tied to a little tank with a pump from an 18-wheeler. We had that tank in behind the seat. At the speed you are going, it would go from zero visibility to clean in seconds. We put solvent in there. It did the job. Back to the ramp. We extended that ramp a total of 18 inches and we went up to 18 mph faster. Then once we did that, everybody seen that, so they had to do it. Everybody always copied.

We clipped our wings prior to our first race. On the get go, yeah, we cut the ailerons and took 33 inches off each side. There was a production break there. So, you undo those panels. Build a new wing tip, cut the aileron. Bingo, you got it.

We changed the angle of the engine; it was put in there like one or two degrees off center. We straightened that up, as I recall. OK. The spinner up front, we made these close outs. You couldn't see if they were located inside the spinner, but they kept the air from going in there. It was like a scoop, you know, grating cheese or something. Yeah, it was like an air pump. OK. Yeah, well, that was wow. That worked great right off the bat. North American had the vertical offset; I think a half a degree to the right. We straighten that. Why would you want the SOB out a half degree off dragging? I could never figure that one out. We changed the incidence of the horizontal. That's about all we did back there. But when we took that half a degree out of the vertical, you didn't need trim anymore to take off. The stock Mustangs needed seven degrees right rudder on the vertical trim for takeoff to correct all. After that, we left the trim at zero.  Only reason I left it on there and didn't just get rid of it was because if you if we were going to Reno, we would be carrying spray bar water on the left-hand side, the main tank, and the outer tank was ADI. The right-hand side tanks were all fuel. So, we'd only put three or four gallons of ADI out there. That was all I needed for one take off. All right? The point is, if you filled the two outboards, by the time you get to Reno, the right side is not full anymore and if the left-hand tanks were needlessly over filled, you’d have one hell of a lateral imbalance. I left that rudder trim in there in case you had engine problems. I had to come back around and land. Now your caddy-wampus on the right, crank in a bunch of trim to help you keep that sucker level. Makes sense?

Crew Chief Kerchenfaut was with me for quite a while. Then I got rid of him, LD, Little Dave. Big Dave worked for me for quite a while. That was his dad. Well, he came to work for me on the farms. He started baling hay for me at 16. Well, eventually, you know, he'd come out to the hangar. We taught him a lot. And, you know, he really picked up on all that stuff.  He became the best crew chief ever. He was very good and meticulous. I got him flying; he flew a Mustang two or three times and then, well, then he didn't have the money for gasoline and that was the end of it. But he did do it. He was no race pilot. He was too cautious, too meticulous. We made a good offset to each other. But everything had to be perfect, because when that thing was on the ground, it was his airplane. It had to be perfect before he gave it to me.

Well, back to that ADI tank. I think it held 40 gallons of ADI. And so we do a six-lap race. We got no gauge on there. We don't know how much there is. How much did it burn? I don't know, so what we did, it's got the line coming to the pump, sucking and blowing and going to the motor, right, blah, blah, blah in between. So, we put a T in there with a cap on it. So now, we are in the pits. We had a 5 gallon can. We had a short hose. Take that cap off and we'd pump that tank dry till it was out of ADI. Then we would attempt to put 20 gallons back in …. now we knew what we burned and so forth and so on. When we're racing, we're full on both sides. So, we're even on takeoff, right? If you have to come back and land, you're still even.

So one of the guys was in charge of defueling. He got distracted and left the cap for the T on the tire. LD sees it. So, he waits a while, pretty soon he puts it in his pocket. LD asked the guy in charge of defueling if everything was good to go? “Everything's good,” the guy replied. “What about this?” LD offered. “Yeah, you're out of here.” You put the cap on first because if that cap got lost and you turn that pump on; it's pumping ADI overboard. It isn't going to that motor where it is needed, and you lose a race. Yeah, you're out of here. But that's the kind of guy LD was. It had to be perfect.

IFUSA PTG: Didn’t you have an IndyCar connection, per se, to better your plane’s speed?

TIGER: Yeah, I knew Paul Morgan of ILMOR Engines. He built me a special set of cams for Strega. Morgan liked WWII airplanes and bought himself a Sea Fury.  Paul would be at the car races with Roger Penske. I attended the races as well. That is how I met Paul Morgan. He was a good guy. He was just old boy like the rest of us, right, but very smart. Anyway, ends up getting killed in that Sea Fury. Just a note about Paul, he built the cams for me. He gave me four of them and wouldn't take a penny. All because of his love of WWII airplanes. And, I never even asked him to build them. He just designed them.

Fontana, Jack Roush, good friend of mine. Yeah, you know how they got the trailers parked? There's an aisle in between Roush and Penske, so I'm sitting there on a chair. I see Penske over there and he's talking to somebody. Nobody else around him, just that guy. OK. I don't know where Roush was, he was off somewhere. So I walked across there. I'm just waiting for that guy to finish up; I go over and I introduce myself to Roger and I tell him, “We had a mutual friend.” He said, “Who's that?” I am told him - Paul Morgan. “Oh, my Gosh,” Roger quips. So, I chatted for a bit and I said, “I'm leaving you alone. Just wanted to say, Hi.” Pretty cool. Well, that's the only time. Yeah, and why would he know me? He wouldn't. At the races, when I'd run across Paul Morgan, he was never with Penske, so I never got to be introduced, you know. And of course, I'm not that kind of guy anyway. I wanted to at least say – Hi. Well, on the way here I passed a Penske rental truck, haha.

Well, you know, you know. I had some mini endplates on Strega. The only thing I could ever tell about was that on landing, it would give you a little more authority at slow speed other than that. I don't think it did anything except look good.

Now let's go to the wing change. North American put one degree positive on that wing on a stock Mustang. Well, I wanted to take it to zero degrees. How did you do that? Well, here's what I did. If we had, if this table was a wing, you could do it two ways. You could leave the leading edge where it is and you could change the trailing edge a whole bunch. Or, you could split it in half, per se. So that's what we did, all right. That meant you had to change the front brackets and the rear brackets. We remade the brackets. The rear ones were a little bit longer out of aluminum, so we made them out of steel. I didn't trust aluminum. I mean it's good, but steel I trust. It's only two pieces of steel. The wing’s cross-section stayed the same. All of that stayed the same. It just now had zero instead of one degree positive. It's now zero. Another thing I wanted to do was do the dihedral. Go back the early race planes when they had floats(pontoons) and they’d have no dihedral. Then we would have to change the landing gear, which we didn't do but - I thought about it.

Once we did the incidence change, the only thing you could tell is. The airplane wanted the three-point off it just wanted to three-point off. Well, I don't want it to three-point off because 3 pointing off if anything happens, I'm barely flying. I'd roll in about four degrees nose down, all right. So, it would help me get that tail up because I wanted some more speed before I actually go flying. And then as I'm rotating, I could always pull the trim out of it a little bit. That's what I would do. But, at speed with race power, the trim was running about zero degrees on the marker. We would check the trim marker to make sure the trim tabs are on zero degrees.

So, we were pretty much riding the wave. Everything's been done to the plane. And now you're just riding the wave. Our motto was – “If the red rocket is running, ain't nobody beating us.”

IFUSA PTG: What did you think of Rare Bear piloted by Lyle Shelton and who was your biggest nemesis? Remember, Lyle’s team had a whiteboard with the magnetic cartoons of “Big, ugly thing” chasing “Little slender red thing” and cartoon of the ‘Speed Juice’ container inside the mold lines of the Bearcat.

Note the author’s name on Rare Bear’s wheel pant. (Photog courtesy of Paul T. Glessner)

TIGER: Well, they were till we really got that thing going good and then the Bearcat couldn't run with us no more. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Lyle, you know, we come out of the pilot brief and he'd always be sitting over by himself. We'd come out there, make sure I'd get close to him and whisper, “Lyle, I'm going to thrash you today like a stepchild” and keep on walking. Yeah, well, I loved whipping him. Oh, he's a damn good pilot. Yeah, he's a good pilot. No doubt about that, he is a good sticking rudder guy.

But there were 10 years there when he won five and I won five. But then we started. Once I got this engine builder, Jose, “that guy could build an engine.” We started making that sumbitch live. Prior to that, I told you 10 years in a row – MAYDAY! It got so good we'd come down and shoot and there were some high ranking RARA officials that had a motor home over there. We come this way. They'd be right there. One official’s wife was already pouring me a Jack Daniels on the rocks as I was coming down the shoot and it wasn't very long, I was – MAYDAY’ing! I'd coast right up to the trailer and jump out and have a Jack Daniels! Oh, yeah. They had the radios going.

IFUSA PTG: What were some of your highs and lows? You may have already mentioned them earlier today, but what was scariest? What was the funniest?

TIGER: Never had scary. Never had fire in the cockpit. But we had a fire system and yeah, one time, I blowed that engine up, man, I done blow that sucker up. It had coolant, oil and fire. And, yeah, that windshield solvent washer worked like champ. Worked off 24V and so – it was always there for me. Work perfect for us, right?

I never got scared and one thing that I did when I used to teach that MAYDAY class, I would tell these newbies, I said, “Here's the deal. When you got the runway made, the MAYDAYs is over. All you got to do now is - land. So that's a comforting fact, when you're in that cockpit all alone, with altitude, even if she's rattling and shaking and all that ****, you got the runway made. So once you got the runway made? The MAYDAY is over now. We just do what we do. What do you do? Land.

The funniest or best time for me was that 1987 year when I backed off to 100 inches and let Dreadnought go around me and then I waited for a little while before I put the power back up. So caught his ***, went around him and won the race. He made it for three or four laps before I went around. That was fun. Racing. You know, if you just went out and got in front and you went there eight laps and you never seen anybody. How much fun is that? I did that a few times.

The only other time was 2008. My last race. That big Sea Fury (September Fury) with the 3350 on the front, he had the pole, Dago Red had second and I had third. Now remember, on Friday and Saturday, I didn't run it too hard. I had blown up 10 years in a row prior to that. So, in the mean time, I'm watching these two Ding Dongs and how they fly. That Sea Fury would go around Pylon 6, and the airplane is so heavy, he’d slow up! He had to really go out there, you know, to unload the Gs, to get around there.  Well, I'm over here on the inside of him. I got a G meter on board. I had it right in the center. OK, so we’d come down the chute and around, let's say, Pylon 4 or 5 or 6, I see it and just pass him on the straight, all right. I lay into the turn now and I got Diego Red in front of me. I passed him; I passed them both within one lap and I'm leading. Well, that that was fun, beating both of them cats. I let them win on Friday and Saturday, so I'm sandbagging and watching them fly. Alright, figuring out how I'm going to do this on Sunday. Because Sunday I am not holding back, we're going for it. Blow up or no blow up. Well, it didn't blow up and I won.

That's the only two I really remember. The rest of them were - I went for it and won. I won seven times, OK. But of course, every time is a little different, you know, and I do remember this coming down the chute back in, let’s take 1987, …here’s Hoover (pace plane).  We're coming down to shoot, all right? And we're all staying aligned but we're heading down and we're so clean and I got the power back and we're still and pretty soon I can't see him (Hoover). I got to look back and he said, “That’s all I got boys. Gentleman, you have a race!” He is way back there, right? Hoover was in a stock Mustang.

IFUSA PTG: What are you doing now with your life and how are you keeping involved with aviation and then we'll end on the current state of Roswell.

TIGER: Here's what I'm doing now on aviation, not a gosh darn thing. I sold all my parts. Sold all that ****; called up Stevo. Gave him my tug, APU, tow bars; whatever. You come get it - all. Gave it to him. Well, it's not even on loan there at the Planes of Fame Museum. It's just there. It's there, gentlemen's agreement. It needs a carburetor. I think a carburetor, and I know it needs mags, so I don't know if they're turning it over. I frankly don't give a ****. I'm done with aviation unless I get me a - jet. See, I just don't want it cut up. I don't want it changed. I want it to be kept as is. I want it to be in a museum. I told Stevo, “When I get the money, I'll build an air race museum over there where you guys are at.” We'll put that in there. We will put the Bearcat side by side with Strega. Then we will have an actual air race museum.

IFUSA PTG: What's your thoughts on their (R(oswell)ARA) decision making and what you know today that both the Sport Class and the Unlimiteds are not going and here we are August 16th? At the time of printing, “RARA remains committed to working with both classes for the 2026 races.” 

TIGER: First of all, they screwed up just selecting that place in the place. All right? That's the first screw up. Second of all, now the Unlimiteds aren't going. There is not gonna be anybody there. Some 500 hotel rooms, no significant infrastructure; Yeah, people are driving like, an hour and a half to their hotel.I was talking to Matt Jackson and he says, “I have been there before. That wind blows hard in the afternoon. It’ll 60 mph blowing dust and all that.” Not fun. It blew enough at Reno. It's like, you know – dumb. Whatever.

They had six places. Out of those, there had to be one that was pretty good compared to where they're at. I mean, you know, the airport there will do the air race just fine, I think. I've never been there. You know,  and it's like you got to go somewhere where you got hotel rooms, people, a pretty good airport and space to do the racecourse. That's what you got to have. And they got space to do the racecourse, but they got no people and no hotel rooms. They have already lost their *****.

IFUSA PTG: What can you say to your past fans?

TIGER: Hope you enjoyed me. I always tried to give them a hell of a race. Because you aren’t going to see it no more. It's history, and unless somebody came along, a multimillionaire and wanted to start them up again someplace ideal. I figure Strega’s last trip is from Chino to the place they’re moving to. And do I care? I don’t care if I ever fly again. I just don’t care. I have flown so much. Regarding my logbook time you asked earlier, I guess I got about 3000 hrs in P-51s, but it might be less. It might be more. I never cared much about logbooks. I remember making this entry. It was before 2000. I entered in the book – “The year 2000's coming, we may not be alive. And then after it comes and goes, I said. “We're still alive. 2000 never materialized.” It's in my logbook. As far as the logbook. What do I give a ****? I don't make a living doing that ****. I just do it because - I like it. So, do I care about a logbook? Hell no. Only reason I ever got a pilot's license was because I was - going to Reno!