Center Conversation: The battle for Land Speed Records (George Webster)

This episode is part of our HISTORY OF MOTORSPORTS SERIES and is sponsored in part by: The International Motor Racing Research Center (IMRRC), The Society of Automotive Historians (SAH), The Watkins Glen Area Chamber of Commerce, and the Argetsinger Family – and was recorded in front of a live studio audience.

[00:00:00] BreakFix’s History of Motorsports series is brought to you in part by the International Motor Racing Research Center, as well as the Society of Automotive Historians, the Watkins Glen Area Chamber of Commerce, and the Argettsinger family.

We have a very professional speaker here who is used to commanding a classroom. George Webster was a teacher for many years, and I think this is going to be a very scholarly presentation. He’s from Oakville, Ontario. And he has been a friend of the center since the day it opened in 1999. He’s been here at all of our activities and been a big supporter of ours and we’re delighted he’s going to speak.

Now George has been coming to Watkins Glen since 1959. I think you were about four that year, weren’t you? He also was present at every U. S. Grand Prix. You might wonder how George got into this and he’ll probably tell you. Land speed records are something that we all like in motorsport, but many of us…

Have been to road races, and we’re aware of land [00:01:00] speed. George was originally interested in road racing. Since he retired from teaching, since the 70s, he’s been a motoring journalist. A number of magazines he’s written for, Auto Week Canada. He’s covered NASCAR and car for other publications. PRN Ignition, National Speed Sport News, the website Go Racing Inc.

He’s also been a photographer. He’s very, very knowledgeable in this field. I asked George, now how did you get interested in land speed? He got interested in model cars, but realizing there were thousands and thousands of model cars, his interest turned to, uh, land speed cars, because there weren’t so many.

It wasn’t gonna clutter up his house, and he wanted to keep his wife happy, and I know some guys, though, I say, my God, you got 1, 200 model cars. How does your wife tolerate it? Well, you know, those model cars are worth 800 to 500. So, the wives say, fine, keep those, I’ll have them when you pass on. He started to read more about land speed.

So, when we talked about this presentation, I said, Oh, that’s such a great [00:02:00] field. What aspect are you going to talk about? He said, well, If you give me four days, I can start at 1900 and George is going to concentrate on what happened after world war II and quickly go on to the sixties. And there’s been so much in that area and I know all of us are interested in it and I don’t know how many are experts in it.

George said, you know, I’m not an expert. But the guy is thorough. He is a great researcher. It brings to mind what an expert is. An expert is somebody that nobody can question. I had to talk to a hundred judges who came to town, and we went up around the race course in two school buses at great speed, and then I went up to the press room and I talked to these 100 judges about the history of road racing in America and Watkins Glen, and I did not have one.

contradiction from them. Now, I would never go before that group and talk to them about how to run their courtroom, or the rule of law, or the constitution. So, there may be one or two of you who may have a question or two, George, and he’s expecting it, and he’ll be very glad to hear from you. Thank you.

This is the [00:03:00] poster they put together for my speech, and it’s based on a picture that I sent to them, and it kind of tells you a bit about the evolution of the presentation. As JC said, my original idea was to do the land speed records. Quickly, within a moment, I realized that that would never work and I thought, well, maybe you could split it into three parts.

Two before World War II and one after World War II. And that was my idea that Most relevant to us would be the part that many of us lived through, the post World War II part. So, originally that was my plan and the original publicity for this gave that as the title of the presentation. I realized once I got into it that I could never do that justice.

I trimmed it down to what the title you see there, the Battle for the Landspeed Record in the 60s, Campbell, the Irfons, and Breedlove. But the picture is Gary G’s car, which is from 1970 approximately. That’s from an earlier version of the speech. Now I’m Watkins Glen. I don’t think I can do a [00:04:00] talk about the land speed record without at least mentioning Glen Curtis from Hamport.

I assume everybody knows where Hamport is. It’s over towards the three 90, but it’s not very far from here. And he started the Curtis Aircraft Company from here. In 1907, there was a speed week at Ormond Beach, which is just up the north end of Daytona Beach. And he had this V8 motorcycle with a aircraft engine in it.

And he was timed at a speed of 136. 364 mile per hour in the mile. Unfortunately, it wasn’t an official timing. So, it’s an unofficial land speed record and whenever you get these unofficial records, they’re controversial whether you should recognize them or not. Come daylight the next day when the official timers were there, he broke something in the engine, and he got that repaired, and then the chassis, the frame of the bike got bent, and he wasn’t ever able to do an official run.

So, this was considered to be the fastest speed of anything at [00:05:00] that time in 1907. Car, boat, airplane. And it has a motorcycle record as such. It’s not official. It stood for about over ten years. Anyway, that’s the local reference to the land speed record. And a reproduction of that bike is in the museum here.

And the original is in the Smithsonian. This period, post war to 66, involves the Bonneville Salt Flats, and I’m sure you all know that the Bonneville Salt Flats is, uh, the remains of an old salt lake to the west of Salt Lake City. 1949, there had been runs on the Bonneville Salt Flats pre war. The most notable was when Malcolm Campbell decided that Daytona Beach was not suitable for him to try to go any faster.

One of the big problems, if you’ve been to Daytona, there’s piers that go out and he had to shoot through the eye of the needle underneath the piers to get enough distance. The beach is sometimes good, sometimes not so good because every time the tide goes out, you get a new beach. Sometimes [00:06:00] it’s good, sometimes it’s not, and you need a long run.

Bonneville had been used before that so he went out to Bonneville in 35 and at Bonneville was able to break 300 miles an hour. For that, there were a number of other speed runs, particularly Easton and Cobb on the Bonneville salt flats in the 30s. After the war, and actually I guess it precedes the war, what we call now, we’d call hot rodders, in California who were running on Lake Muroc.

Which is Edwards Air Force Base now. So it’s the same thing, it’s just the government took it over, so it’s now called Edwards Air Force Base. So they ran there, and then they decided to come out to Bonneville in 49. And they ran a week, a speed week, late August. And they’ve been running a speed week there ever since.

And so they were making runs at that time. Other people made runs over the years as well. But those are two kind of separate things. The next thing I want to talk about is the question of official landspeed records. I’ve already mentioned that Curtis’s record wasn’t official. It wasn’t official, his wasn’t official because it wasn’t [00:07:00] officially timed.

It was timed by a buddy of his with a stopwatch. It wasn’t officially observed. So the FIA, and I assume you all recognize the FIA, is considered to be the ultimate authority in automobile racing. Particularly in the United States here, not all automobile racing comes under the FIA, but FIA considers itself to be the ultimate authority.

We’re talking about superlatives here. The fastest. And you have to have rules, so that everybody’s on the same playing field. If, for example, I said, Who is the oldest person in this room? Well, we know what the rule there is, right? The rule is birth date, and if we go and pass birth date, it would be the minute of birth.

We wouldn’t have to be in a big debate about what the rule is. However, if I said to you, What is the fastest drag racing record? What is the rule? Could somebody tell me what the rule is? Standing start over a quarter of a mile. Standing start over a [00:08:00] quarter of a mile. How many agree with that? Anybody know why that’s wrong?

No, I don’t think so. There are eighths in a mile. But standing start quarter mile used to be the standard.

So now it’s a thousand feet. So you can’t compare the old quarter mile with the current thousand. Not every class is a thousand feet. It’s just the fastest ones. And it’s a safety question. They don’t go as fast at the end of 1, 000 feet instead of 1, 320, right? It’s to get the speeds under control. So the current NHRA records for those fastest classes are based on 1, 000 feet.

Well, that’s the rule. There’s nothing magic about the rule. NHRA is the authority. They set the rule. And it used to be a quarter mile. But those old quarter mile records can’t be compared to… That’s an example of how you have to have a rule and you have to know what the rule is, and everybody has to run to the same rule.

If you’re in another place where they’re running eighth of a mile, then that’s the rule. So here’s the [00:09:00] FIA rules, and the first one is the most important in this discussion. A car has four wheels or more. And it’s driven by at least two of those wheels, transmits the power to the ground. It also has to be steered by two wheels.

It has to be timed over a measured mile or a kilometer. And this is a funny thing that you can have one mile distance or a kilometer distance and there doesn’t seem to be a hard and fast rule which one, you sort of take whatever you want. England and the U. S. has been at the forefront of land speed records.

In both countries, you still talk in terms of miles. So the focus is on the mile distance rather than the kilometer distance. But you can set a speed record over a kilometer and claim that as a land speed record. The speed is based on the average of two runs in opposite directions. And you have to complete both the runs within an hour.

Now, if you go to the SCTA speed week in August, they do two runs. I think they do them in the same direction. They [00:10:00] do the second one the next day. So there’s no way those runs can count as FIA records. from the SCTA Speed Week. In addition to that, they average the two speeds. The speed of the first run, the speed of the second run.

And most of you probably did high school physics. And no, that’s not the way you calculate average speed. You have to take the total time, and divide it by the total distance, not the average of the two speeds. So, here you have an organization that is blissfully using an incorrect method to average the speeds.

But that’s their rule! And it doesn’t matter that they’re wrong, that’s their rule. The FIA uses the correct method of averaging the speeds, but they have another thing that I stumbled on, that they have a cockamamie way of rounding off their numbers. So, that’s the way they do it. That’s their rule.

Everybody has to work to that rule. Pre war, John Cobb set the fastest time. He was convinced that he could go over 400 miles an hour any time the clock had kind of run out on him before the war. So he [00:11:00] reconditioned the car, got some mobile sponsorship, came back to Bonneville in 1947, was aiming for 400.

He did one run over 400, but the average ended up at 394. So, that. became the new goal. And so for the rest of this, land speed record, 400 miles an hour is the goal. You gotta beat 400 miles an hour, basically. In those days, you had to do 1 percent better to get a new record. So I think 1 percent would actually be over the 400.

Now, in 1952, he was trying to set a water speed record, uh, on Loch Ness, and was killed. During the fifties, all these SCTA speed weeks, other people making runs, other independent people, so BMC came over three or four times, Donald Healy, Phil Hills, Sterling Moss, those of us who are Canadians probably remember Ed Levins, Ed Levins was involved in that.

We get into the 60s, and finally, people start challenging that 400 mile [00:12:00] an hour mark. Art Arfon said, this is like playing Russian Roulette. I set a new time to breed love, and you’ll come back and set a higher time. And I guess then I’ll have to come back, and then you’ll have to come back, until one of us gets killed.

And it kind of played out like that. The whole thing is playing Russian Roulette, where one guy is topping the next guy. They’re all at risk, and you’ll see that some fatalities along the way. These are the eight players. Donald Campbell, the classic. He’s the son of Malcolm Campbell, who set the records in the 30s.

He went the classic route. He read the rule book and followed it to the letter. Thought if I use a turbine engine instead of a piston engine, I’ll get a lot more power, 4, 000 horsepower. But it’s a four wheel drive. Tremendous amount of effort. Kind of the same people who did the BRM 16 cylinder project.

You remember how well that went in F1, right? Tremendous amount of industry involved, tremendous amount of money involved, tremendous amount of everything involved. Mickey Thompson, the classic American hot rodder. I’m sure you all know Mickey Thompson’s name. Hot [00:13:00] rodder, drag racing, speed runs at Lake Muroc and at Bonneville.

Had a lot of experience in that. He built the car he called the Challenger 1. He tried for Chryslers, because he thought the Hemi’s were the best way to go. And he got Pontiac to give him four big engines. Probably not quite as good a choice, but that’s what he had. Four wheel drive again. Very low, very streamlined car.

Craig Breedlove, one of the biggest names in there. Another hot rodder from L. A. He built a car up called the Spirit of America which had a J47 jet engine. In those days, the late 60s, they were scrapping the early generation of jet aircraft and these were available at the scrapyards. Didn’t know this, but these guys knew where they could find them at scrapyards and they would go to the scrapyards and they would get these engines for 500 bucks.

Driving onto Erie on the I 90, you see a jet fighter up on the pylon there. Well, there was one being installed in Oregon. One of these guys found that out and he says, you [00:14:00] know, it’ll be very heavy to mount that plane up there with the engine in it. I’ll do you a big favor. I’ll take the engine out of there and I’ll take it away for you even.

You won’t have to build a strong pylon to build on. So he got a complete engine, undamaged, all the ancillaries, basically for doing him a favor to take this scrap away. The J 47 had a lot of power. It’s 5, 000 pounds thrust and it’s a three wheeler. So on two counts, there’s no way he can get an FIA record.

It’s thrust, not wheel driven, and it’s only three wheels. Later, in 65, he built up a second generation car, which had three times more powerful engine than a J79, and it was a four wheeler, and he set a record in that. Now, Walt Arfons from Cleveland, from Akron, he and his brother Art, they actually had a feed mill.

You’d take in your grain, and they would grind it up into chop to feed your animals, and they’d mix in supplements. And that was their business. They also had a hardware side to it. Well, they got into drag racing with [00:15:00] the V 12 aircraft engines like the Allison and we’re doing demonstration runs with the Allison engine.

That’s about a thousand fifteen hundred horsepower engine and we’re doing that and then they got into doing it with jet engines. Just demonstration runs basically. I think they would go, they get paid money by the promoter. And they would go and do it. These involved him taking the salt flats and seeing how far they could go if they could really let them out.

So, Arfons had two different versions. He had the Wingfoot Express, which was an evolution of the drag strip car. And Tom Green drove that. Arfons had a heart attack, or supposedly had. He had some kind of problem and decided he shouldn’t drive. So he had Tom Green drive the Wingfoot Express. Later on, he went to a rocket powered car, and it’s Bobby Totro, you see in the photo here.

Ardar Franz’s younger brother was working with him, and they were building these drag strip cars. Because it was a promotional thing, the fix was in, of course. And the fix was supposed to be that Walt won. However, they were staging this [00:16:00] supposed competition, that once Walt had won… Art was supposed to back off.

Well, I guess art didn’t buy into the fix. And so art kept competing with him. At any rate, there was a falling out. So even though their houses were side by side in Akron, they basically never spoke again and they just went and did their own thing. I think that’s part of what fueled their rivalry on the assault.

Now he started out with what he called the anteater, which was clearly a drag racing evolution. It had the V12 Allison, 28 liters supercharged somewhere between a thousand 1600 horsepower. But that was really a drag racing car. And then he went from there to, uh, another drag racing car with a J 47 jet. He was the first to get the J 79 jet, which was much more powerful.

All the series just has green monster number 17. Actually, they were all called green monster. That was in the era of the fastest car. Then there were the Summers brothers, Bob and Bill classic hot rodders, classic Bonneville speed merchants. Bob was the driver and they built. [00:17:00] Four engined car with seven liter Chrysler Hemi’s.

So they showed up in the middle of it and created some excitement because they were quite different. They were in the middle of all these jet cars. A fellow by the name of Ethel Graham, a mechanic in Salt Lake City. I think his wife’s name was Zelda. He had a car similar to the Anteater with a V12 Allison.

Dr. Nathan Austy is a physician from L. A. He had a J47 jet, the flying Caduceus. Caduceus is the doctor’s symbol with the snakes around it. A driver by the name of Glenn Leasher, shown on the right here. The owner in the center, Romeo Paladimes. He had a J47 jet car called the Infinity. It looks pretty crude.

Notice he had the wheels fared in. And that’s the cockpit right out the front. That’s the drag racing style. 1959. Mickey Thompson shows up with this really pretty car, the Challenger. They got up to 363. Remember, 400 is the goal. So the fact that it’s only one way doesn’t matter. He’s not fast enough. Athol Graham shows up.

[00:18:00] He does 344 with the Alice edition. Pretty crude looking car. 1960. Athol Graham comes back. He had the car painted red, but you wouldn’t know it there. That’s what was left of it after he flipped it a number of times. And he really didn’t have any proper roll cage or seat belts or anything. That was the end of the line for Athol Graham, but not for the car.

Here’s Ostich. He showed up 237. Nowhere near 400. Arfon shows up in his anteater, open cockpit, 223. Again, nowhere near 400. Other than that funny seat out at the front, it looks good, but it doesn’t get enough speed out of it. Thompson comes back. It was speed week at the end of August 1960. He shows up, he did a 354.

I think it was one way. Again, nowhere near 400. The next week, Ostiches comes back, 259. Nowhere near 400. But Thompson, basically the same week, four days later, he’s back and he hits 406. 6 miles [00:19:00] per hour. Better than 400. Meets the FIA rules. Wheel driven car. Four wheels. Unfortunately, when he turned around and came back, he never completed the run.

So he gets out of the car and he says, Uh, I broke a driveshaft. Every book but one reports it that way. I broke a driveshaft. Well, if he just broke a driveshaft, why didn’t he fix it and run the next week? Well, he didn’t. One author, most recent author, and the one I think has done the best job, says that he actually blew an engine, and that he just told the reporters that he broke a driveshaft not to embarrass Pontiac.

And Pontiac, I don’t think we’re giving them any more support, and that was kind of the end of it. He didn’t have another engine to drop in there, and I think that’s the reason why he only did it one way. Goodyear blows all the trumpets for this 406. 6, but it’s not an FIA record. It’s not a two way record.

So, it’s nothing. Campbell shows up, 50 vehicles, huge entourage like an invading army. He goes out on the [00:20:00] salt. They think he got up to about 300 miles per hour. The car lost control, flipped over. Car was written off. He was lucky to survive. Project was done. All that BRM style money, all those British companies.

And it was embarrassing because you’ve got Thompson, he’s there with a station wagon and a trailer. And you’ve got Campbell with a whole entourage. Military people, you know, from everything. And he just goes out and wrecks the car. It was really embarrassing. Even though Thompson didn’t beat the old record, he kinda did.

So, 61, the orphan shows up at speed week, he does 313, and the old anteater, nothing special. That year the salt was bad, in the winter time it rains, and the water comes up, then the water evaporates, and it comes down, it gives you a new, flat surface come summer. And that’s why the speed week’s in August, once you get to August, then you’ve got the surface, and the surface will last until the rains come.

This time, the rains came… early September, and that was it. The [00:21:00] salt went soft and rough, and they just couldn’t do any more runs. So that year, basically, 61, the thing got rained out. I think 2013, the thing called the Bonneville Nationals in October were just wiped out for the same reason. At any rate, 61 was the last year.

So we come to 62. Thompson decided he’s coming back. He’s got another engine, I guess. In the meantime, he’s been doing some drag racing on the water. He’s had a crash. He’s broken his back. He’s had a whole bunch of vertebrae fused. So we don’t know quite why. Whether it was the rough course or his broken back.

Or something wrong with the car. He tried to blame it on the car, but he couldn’t get up to speed. That’s the end of the line for Thompson and speed records. I’m sure y’all know that there’s a lot more story to Thompson after that, but not here in the salt flats. Hostage is back. He gets up over 300 miles an hour, we think.

Wheel was torn off. That’s the end of it. He’s got to go back [00:22:00] and fix the car. Here’s Arfonz in his Cyclops. This is a drag strip car. Look at that fake rocket on the side. That’s not for speed. That’s just for you guys at the drag race to say, wow, look at that. But it’s just a fake rocket on the side, open cockpit at the front.

Cyclops, cause he had a headlight in the front because the shutdown areas of the drag strip sometimes weren’t very well lit. And he’s just brought it out. He got 330, which isn’t anything special, but it is the fastest ever for an open cockpit car. In speed records, people claim all kinds of speed records.

We’re trying to talk about the absolute here. Breedlove shows up. He’s got his car ready, 62. The car’s undriveable. He can’t control the car. He can’t keep it on course. He can’t steer it. They were steering it by having two brake pedals, one for each of the back wheels. That was basically the method of steering it.

After that, there’s a little fin at the front that was supposed to steer it. It just didn’t work. And Brelav went out, didn’t get going very fast at all, and said, I, that car’s [00:23:00] undriveable. Well, the designer, Ron Schapel, said, The problem isn’t the car, it’s you! You’re chicken. And a tremendous conflict arose between Breelove and Schaepel.

And Schaepel got all the volunteers, it was all volunteers, who were working on the car, on side with him, and you read about it now and you think, I don’t know why the project didn’t just fold at that point. I think the reason it didn’t fold was that at the very end of the week, they found that there was a bad problem with the bearing, and the front wheel was kind of flopping this way, and there was another problem with the steering, the way the steering was set up, it didn’t, the wheel didn’t turn as much as they thought it was, and so they demonstrated at the very end of the week that they could go faster, but remember, you rent the salt for a week, end of your week, somebody else gets the salt, the weather can come in, and you can get chopped off, so he ran out of time.

But now Goodyear had seen the potential and Goodyear really got on side. Breedlove spent about three months sitting in boardrooms meeting with engineers from Goodyear and they worked out a [00:24:00] redesign of the car. The fin at the back and made that front wheel steering, abandoned that the rear wheel brake, getting ready for next year.

Glen Leashier had Infinity, a fatal crash. So, that’s two fatal crashes. People seem kind of incensed about this. I guess they towed this up by the highway, dropped it there, and may still be there. Every time you come in to do a speed run, you see the wreckage of this car from this fatal accident. Good way to start off your week at the Sol.

Now, in November, Art Arfons, who had that Cyclops drag strip car, Found a J 79 jet engine. This has three times the thrust of those J 47s. Power’s the name of the game, isn’t it? He was working on it, and he discovered that it was scrap. It had ingested something, maybe a bolt, or a wrench, or a rock. Anyway, it had ingested something, and a bunch of the blades had been broken.

So he took it apart, took out the damaged blades, sort of moved them around so they were balanced. Not all the blades were there, but he [00:25:00] put them in balanced. So I’d run, he calls GE, it says You got a manual for that engine? I got a J79. You got a manual for that? Next day he gets a call from the government saying, What do you do with this engine?

This is a classified engine. Nobody outside the government, outside the military is supposed to have one of these. We’re sending a truck up there to pick it up right now. So he kind of just ignored them and… Anyway, he managed, he built the engine, got it going, and eventually other seals, you’ll see some other J79s trickled onto the market from various scrap dealers, but he was the first.

I guess what had happened was they had written it off as un air, not airworthy, so they just scrapped it. And he got it for 500 bucks from a dealer, and I think eventually he got two others. I think he actually had a total of three that he used to cannibalize for parts. He said he had 5, 000 total in the three inches in cost, obviously not in time.

Now we’re over into 63. The season is in Australia and Campbell after his bad experience in Bonneville said, Oh, the salt’s no good. And that’s true. The [00:26:00] salt is degrading. The length of the salt run gets less. And as I’ve already told you, if it rains, then you can lose a season like they did in 61. So he said, I’m going to do a search around the world.

And he ended up in Australia. Remember, this is a Commonwealth country, so I think that was probably another incentive for them to go to Australia. So they went to this place called Lake Eyre, or Lake Ear, which was way, way out in the middle of the wilderness of the Outback. He went out to Australia in 1963.

Despite this Lake Ear supposedly not having had any rain in human memory, it rained. And the whole season was rained out. It was flooded so much, they were lucky that the car didn’t get flooded. They only just barely… Got it loaded onto a trailer and got it out on a high ground before the floods came.

Later July is a bit early in Bonneville, but there’s Walt Arfons. Now he’s got his drag strip car. He used a J46. I’m not an expert on these aircraft engines, but that’s a Westinghouse engine. Similar in power, maybe a little bit more power than a J47G. He, for whatever reason, probably because that’s what the scrap [00:27:00] dealer had, had this J46.

And he enclosed the cockpit, which seems like a good idea to me, and he closed the front wheels. So he got over 300 miles an hour, but what good is that? Breedlove, now he’s back, new rear fin and the front wheel steering, and he did some test runs on the Salt in July. August 5th, 63. This is an important turning point.

Remember, land speed record has stood since Cobbs in 47, just under 400 miles an hour. He does one run at 388. He does the other run at 428. 37, which gives him a 407. 45 mile per hour average, over 400 miles per hour. This is a big event, a really big event in this chronology. But it’s not an FIA land speed record.

Three wheels, Thrust engine, it’s not FIA. However, the FIM, the motorcycle equivalent, said, You got three wheels, you’re a motorcycle. You belong to us. We don’t have a problem with thrust engines. We’ll give you the land speed record. Question is, who cares [00:28:00] whether it’s FIA or not, right? Particularly those of you Americans.

In Canada, I kind of feel caught in the middle of this, but You Americans. Who cares? He beat Cobb. He’s the fastest in the world. And so they’re saying, in the eyes of the world, he had the land speed record. There’s Campbell back in Australia, fighting away, struggling on Lake Erie, not getting any speed run, having spent millions and millions.

Now Breedlove has beat that record. And I remember the feeling like, what a loser that Campbell is. That’s it. You know, Breedlove’s done it. This car is so beautiful on top of everything else. At least in my opinion, it’s the most beautiful of all the cars. Well, later on, a guy by the name of Henry Malbach had rebuilt the city of Salt Lake.

It’s now named the Graham Special. It only reached 293 miles per hour, so that’s kind of useless. I think that was more had to do with his relationship with, uh, Graham’s widow than anything else, but that’s probably for another time and place. Osty shows up with his car. He can only get it [00:29:00] up to 350 miles per hour, even though Breedlove with the same engine had gone over 400.

Ostrich can only get up to 350 miles per hour. Perhaps the open wheels were creating more drag. Perhaps this junk engine wasn’t as good as Breedlove’s junk engine. Whatever, he couldn’t come close to Breedlove’s speed. And I should at this point say, I think most of you realize that when you’re talking about top speed, to increase speed, the drag increases exponentially, not linearly.

So if you go twice as fast, you have sort of four times the drag. So, it increases exponentially. So, as you get going faster and faster, you hit a wall. So, the difference between 350 and 407 is huge. It’s huge. It’s not just, like, that percentage difference in the speed. Huge difference. So, he’s just nowhere near.

And that’s why these cars, with the big, huge thrust engines, were good cars, because they had a lot of power. But this one never worked and he gave up. So, Maulbach comes back. He crashes at about 300 miles per hour. That was it. [00:30:00] Give up. So 64 is the first of the two big years. Campbell’s goes back to Lake Erie, try again.

Once again, rain. How unlucky can this guy be? Course is soft. Now April’s the season for him. And they frig around, frig around. And they’re basically on the verge of giving up. The season is pretty well run out. Again, look at all the logistics there. Season is basically given out. And he says, I’m gonna do one last run.

Gonna make one last attempt. So he goes out and he does 403. 1 mile per hour. Breedlove was not FIA recognized. This is faster than Cobb’s speed. So he’s got the FIA land speed record. Well, as they say, that buck might buy him a cup of coffee. Interesting thing at that time was in the U. S. That was like, ho hum, who really cares?

And whereas in Britain, they were waving the flag like crazy. Woo hoo hoo! Over this 403. And Breedlove doesn’t [00:31:00] exist. Walt Arfons comes back with that Wingfoot Express. This time he gets up faster than Breedlove. Thrust engine, remember. It’s not an FIA record, but he sets a new speed record. That’s recognized, well…

What, by the American public, by USAC, but who’s going to quibble? Our Fonz comes back, now he’s there with his J79. This is the powerhouse. This is just a monster engine with four wheels strapped onto it. That’s it. And a little cockpit on the side. So he gets up, remember Walt got 413 and got this unofficial LSR.

Art gets to 434, again thrust, so nobody’s recognizing it. Nobody but everybody, but the eyes of the world, he’s the lead speed record. Two days later, he has a blown tire, as you see, and so that ended his season. Car didn’t crash. There’s October the 7th. His week on the salt ends, Breedalove gets the salt. On October the 13th, he does a 4.

68 mile per hour [00:32:00] average speed. That is a FIM because it’s three wheeler land speed record. The next day he goes out and on the second run, he loses his chutes. He can’t break, he ends up in a dike of salt water. But he had a recorded speed, so he said it’s… time, speed of average 526, which was an F I M motorcycle land speed record.

The car is destroyed. Now, if you go to Chicago, the science technology museum, you’ll see the car there because Goodyear paid them to rebuild it enough to put it on display. And it’s still there in Chicago. At about the same time, the FIA each year has an annual meeting of all the member clubs. ACUS is the U.

S. club. And they set the rules for the next year. And at that time, they recognized reality that they were looking like fools. And said, okay, what we’re going to do is we’re not going to change the rules, we’re going to add to the rules. So we still have the rules, as they always were. But we’re going to add another [00:33:00] category called special vehicles.

So thrust driven. So that could be rocket, it could be jet. Otto Anzon, who was a young kid, a protege of Athol Graham, worked on rebuilding the city of Salt Lake. He rebuilt it, and he did a speed, but not a very good speed. And then he died of leukemia. I think in Salt Lake City, this was a big one of those ongoing newspaper stories.

But other than that, he didn’t do much. So, we’re in 64. October 14, Breedlove has set a land speed record over 500 miles per hour. Whoop de do, whoop de do. You’ll see over there, there’s a great big model of the car. Goodyear commissioned this model, and the idea was they’re going to sell it in all the Goodyear stores across America.

The box says, Breedlove has set the new land speed record 526. 277 miles per hour, fastest man in the world. October the 14th, rush it into production. Those days we made things in the U. S. They get it into production and I’ve got one of them. October 25, [00:34:00] two weeks later. Art comes back with his green monster, with the big J 76 jet, see how it’s just a jet edge with four wheels.

He comes back with that, he hits 536. And now FIA recognizes the thrust, so it is an FIA record. So where’s Breedlove’s record? Breedlove overcomes. So they supposedly they abandoned plans to sell that model and I bought that my model paid a premium price for on the basis that this is going to be worth a lot of money one day.

Well, I think they’re rare. Nobody cares. I paid 200 for it about 20 years ago. I saw one on eBay that sold for about 100 this year. There’s a handful of them out there, but there’s not very many. And in general, my experience with models is, I think that my model collection, which I thought was going to be worth a fortune by now, and be an inheritance for my grandchildren, they’re worth about what they were retail originally.

But, I’ve given up on that. I’m just gonna donate them to the center when I die. So, Walt Arfons comes back. He was having trouble getting up [00:35:00] to speed. This is the brother who doesn’t talk to Art. So he thought, I’ll fix it. Get some Jato rockets. He strapped some Jato rockets. USAC said, well you can’t control those from the cockpit, so we won’t allow that car.

They wouldn’t, it wouldn’t go through scrutineering in effect. He seemed like a good idea, but it didn’t work for him. And October, we’re getting late. The end of the season. So 65. Here he’s back. He’s built a new car. It looks like a torpedo. You can only see about a dozen JATOs in there. It actually holds 15.

Tremendous acceleration. Instead of using a few miles of run up, you only use 9 tenths of a mile run up. Well, there’s a reason for that. Because these rockets only lasted for 15 seconds. The problem was, he’d get up to a tremendous speed, and then the rockets had cut out, and then he was coasting for the rest of the way.

So, he claimed that he had got as fast as 500 miles an hour, but he only had a recorded speed of 247 for the mile. Now, one of the things is, a lot of these claimed top speeds were airspeed. And it seems like, at Bonneville, the [00:36:00] airspeed readings, and if you’re into aircraft, you probably understand this. are all 10 to 20 miles an hour high.

They’re just not reliable in the context of what we’re talking about. So only the timing from breaking timing lights is all that works. That’s September. And he didn’t get a decent speed. Breedlove shows up, he’s got a new car. Four wheeler. Now it’s FIA, for what that’s worth. And he’s got a J79 engine. So that’s the main thing.

He got up to 590 miles per hour. He claimed, but he timed to 518. Then the next time he got up to 534. But there was a lot of damage to the bodywork. This looked speed of sound, but it really wasn’t. There was, this was a really bad aerodynamic design. Took it over to Salt Lake City to an airbase that was National Guard.

They worked on it and they told the commanding officer some cock and bull story of what they were doing. And they worked on it and fixed the body, did a lot of fixing to the body work. Meanwhile, Waldorf Franz shows up and he’s strapped 10 more rockets. Somehow he’s satisfied [00:37:00] USAC this year. The rocket bottles started falling off.

At least one of them pointed in the wrong direction, burned the car and so on. But they were able to repair it. So on October 22nd, they had another run. And again, the rockets don’t go long enough. So even if you stage them, it just, it didn’t work. So we got up to 476, but now we’re over 500 is our target.

Walt says, leave it, go. Breedlove, now he’s got his car modified. In this picture, maybe you can see the louvers over the wheels, and there’s some dots, those are holes along the roof where he’s done it. You can see that the cowling at the jet engine’s been replaced because only half of his name is there.

So he got up to 555, a new land speed record in Sonic 1. Okay, we’re happy, right? It’s November the 2nd. Season’s over. We’ve got the salt for a week. Art is down in Las Vegas, just cooling his heels, ready to pounce. So I said, okay, well let’s get my wife in the car. Puts Lee in the car. Supposedly the PR said she’d never been over 75 miles an hour before in her life.

So she does [00:38:00] 308 miles per hour, what they claim is a women’s record. There’s no such official thing, of course, but that doesn’t use up all the time. So they called Shelby up and said, well, can we borrow one of your Daytona coupes? So he ships it up and Breedlove and Tatrold, those two different drivers for two different teams, right?

But they’re both Goodyear. So they get in the car. They ran around in circles, 12 hours, 24 hours. Well, you can imagine what this is doing to the salt. So Art shows up and says, what the hell have you guys been doing? You’ve been screwing me up. You wrecked the salt. What could I do? So anyway, he goes out. He claimed he did 625 by airspeed.

At any rate, he ends up with an average speed of 576, which is a new land speed record. So once again, Breedlove is screwed, right? Remember, this is November the 2nd, pretty late. He delays and delays. But November the 7th, Arfons is on, but Arfons, his time runs out, and if you’re not using it, then you lose [00:39:00] it.

Two days later, on November 7th, they didn’t have much Firestone on the car, but this is on Firestone’s time. Summer shows up with a Goldenrod. This is four Chrysler engines. Does 409 average, which is an official speed record for wheel driven cars. Again, it’s not the same kind of thing, but everybody recognizes that there is such a record.

Breedlove, November the 15th. That was really lucky that he could keep going. But he’s back on November the 15th. And he gets in the car and he averages 600. 601 miles per hour. That’s it. So he’s the first to have reached 400, 500, and 600 miles per hour. So that’s the end of the season finally. Breedlove’s got the record.

Art is out of luck. 66, Art comes back, he’s had problems with blowing the rear tires, too much loading on the rear, so he went to dual rear wheels, but that had added weight and drag, he was having trouble getting up to speed, November the 17th, he was probably doing well over 600 miles per hour, the right front wheel bearing broke, [00:40:00] there was a massive crash at over 600 miles per hour, car was destroyed as you can see, Arfon survives.

Amazingly, nobody thought there was going to be any ambulance needed. Firestone had lost, pretty much lost interest in supporting any more land speed record attempts. They weren’t going to sponsor our funds anymore. Goodyear was pretty happy with 600. They couldn’t see anything to be gained in setting a record of 650.

Particularly when there was, nobody else was attempting it. So, Goodyear said to Breedlove, that’s the end of the funding from us. Firestone, the same. And so that was the end of that era. There have only been three speed records set since that time, and the most recent one in 97. And that’ll be it for today.

Certainly.

He popped the [00:41:00] canopy, he, uh, he undid the belts, and he swam out. He was underwater. They didn’t play up how close the thing that was. They didn’t, but they didn’t play up how… Well, that’s Breedlove, I think, that he combed his hair. But it was under his helmet, right? Well,

it’s actually Andy Green again. Went to the website this morning, and found a list of seven different possible people who are attempting it. The most promising is the bloodhound. Which is really an extension of the British efforts from the Thrust II to the Thrust SSC. Andy Green is slated to be the driver of this.

It’s another one of those multi, multi million dollar British efforts in that style. George, there seemed to be a big boost in speed from 61 and then about 63 and 4. I think they finally got their act together. Those jet engines had so much power. Just had so much power. You figure, Thompson gets out [00:42:00] there and does 400.

With four Pontiacs. Jet engines had like, multiples, multiples of the power. Just seemed like a big boost. But it showed that Breedlove, if he could get the rest of the act together, there was so much power. And of course, with our Fonz, he had three times, again, as much power. Now they’ve got even more. Yes, sir.

What’s the current record? Where was it established? Was it a thrust motor? Two Jets. A car called Thrust SC, supersonic, driven by Andy Green at Black Rock. And it’s Speed of Sound. It’s west of Bonneville. So it’s over, sort of, near, uh, Reno. Somewhere over that direction. You know, Bad Day at Black Rock?

Didn’t you see the movie? It’s not salt. It’s a different kind, slightly different formation. But it’s Speed of Sound. About 720, I think. I’m just curious if Art Armstrong and Fred Breedlove were… Quoted earlier that Art said to Breedlove that this is Russian Roulette. You can see that for… Our fawns, it [00:43:00] came pretty damn close, and for breed love, in fact, even earlier, that they were playing with death, and they were pushing each other.

This is all second hand. My impression is, other than Walt and Art, where that was family, that was a personal family thing, I think these people, like competitors out here in the paddock at the Glen, They’re all competitors, they’re competitors, but they’re all in the same business. They all have common interests.

You get them a hundred meters away from the paddock and they’re friends. You get them down to the Seneca Lodge and they sit and have dinner together. I think it was very much that way with Breedlove and Art. Was Donald Campbell’s car thrust or wheel driven? It was a turbine. Was it wheel driven? Like the cars that ran in Indianapolis.

Like the turbine cars that ran in Indianapolis. It would be very similar to that. I’ve got to defend the, uh… But you were talking about the FIA. I grew up listening to them. Although

you talk about, you know, the amount of money they were spending, the difference was, they were [00:44:00] building cars to drive the wheels for the ladder speed record. A jet engine, or a fighter plane, when all you were basically trying to do was keep it on. Which I know is not the way it was. But that was the way it was reported in Britain.

That the original rules… Was to have a car, which was, and that was the land speed record. Now admittedly, they’ve now changed it, and of course the latest British car is, is also a thrust, but that’s why the money was involved. Plus also British industry. And remember, after the war, they didn’t have the money.

There is a comparison. I’m not taking anything at all away from breed level. It was a different type of race, different color. Yeah. I did try to say one against the other. This is an American audience. And I’m speaking to an American audience. I have been trying to remember how I felt in the 1960s. In the early 60s about this.

I think most of us got our start in road racing. As a Canadian in road racing, I read all the British magazines. [00:45:00] So I’m kind of an anglophile when it comes to racing. And I’m kind of on that anglophile side. I’m not trying to take anything away from what you said. But it’s interesting to hear the difference between…

To this day, the attitude towards the thrust projects and to the bloodhound project in Britain is much different than here. And it’s a much different approach, but I’ll tell ya, anytime some guy can haul his car, like Thompson did, out to the flats, behind his station wagon on a trailer, and, and Bess Campbell, who’s got 50 vehicles on the salt, It’s embarrassing.

Just like the BRM project was embarrassing. I’m not old enough to remember that from the day. But I certainly, I’m enough of a historian of Formula 1 to know how embarrassing that BRM project was. I just got to finish and say I was at Silverstone when they were trying to run the BRM and it never came by.

But it [00:46:00] was embarrassing. Had they not blown their horns so much? You saw the newsreel, like, man, the newsreel, you would never know that Bonneville ever existed. Was that the age 16? Yes. No, no, not the age 16. This was a V 16 from 1950. We just tried to match the old four and a half litre, one and a half litre and a half supercharger.

The BRM, the old BRM. Yeah, so this. Oh no, this was, it was the same as this. It was all, all those companies come in and poured in a tremendous amount of money. It’s also a matter of politics, the way you do things. And even though it’s industry, it’s kind of a government, socialistic kind of thing, what they did in Britain.

And here it’s free enterprise, the little guy. Uh, I’m in the middle of that. I, I see both sides of it myself. Alright, thank you very much. Thank you. Great, great storytelling.

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