What possesses a person to attempt to break the world land-speed record? To raise the backing, build the team, engineer the car—and risk their lives for bragging rights to having motored across the face of the planet faster than anyone in history?
“This is about creating a sensation around science and technology,” says Andy Green, current holder of the world land-speed record. “This is about bringing engineering to roaring life for a global generation of young would-be engineers.”
Green, a fighter pilot in the Royal Air Force, is the only person ever to travel at supersonic speed on wheels, something he accomplished in 1997. But he's only the latest champion in an elite club of record-holding speedsters, almost all of whom have hailed from the U.S. or Great Britain.
Humanity’s defining ambition is to harness power, and the journey to supersonic speed on wheels has been a treacherous ride. Some record-seekers drove on sand, others on salt. Some also sought to break speed records on water, and gave their lives in the quest. Here’s a look in the rearview at the cars, drivers, triumphs and tragedies of world-record land-speed racing.
Speed Record: 156.046 mph
Driver: Tommy Milton
Date: April 27, 1920
The scene: Daytona Beach, Florida
The car: A 16-cylinder Duesenberg
Motoring down the hard-packed sand of Daytona before crowds of spectators and reporters, Tommy Milton became the first man to crack 150 mph on wheels, in a Duesenberg powered by a pair of 8-cylinder engines. Nearing the end of his run, flames burst from under the hood, and Milton, who was blind in one eye, steered the car into the ocean to put out the fire before the gas tank exploded.
In most American towns in 1920, the motorcar had not yet fully replaced the horse as a means of quotidian travel, and Milton’s feat shocked the nation. The Los Angeles Times headline screamed: “Milton Drives at Awful Rate.” His record of 156.046 mph would stand for six years. A year after setting the record, Milton won the Indianapolis 500 in a car owned by Louis Chevrolet himself.
Speed record: 203.793 mph
Driver: Henry Segrave of Great Britain
Date: March 29, 1927
The scene: Daytona Beach, Florida
The car: A 1,000-horsepower Sunbeam
The vehicle awed anyone who saw it. Nicknamed Mystery, it required a sprawling nose to house two 22.4-liter aircraft engines. (In terms of displacement—the standard measurement of an engine’s size—that’s the equivalent of 12 base-model Ford Mustangs today.) But what awed audiences more was the idea that a man would have the courage to climb inside and unleash the vehicle’s 1,000 horsepower, which Henry Segrave did successfully on the Daytona sand in 1927, becoming the first man to crack 200 mph on land.
Segrave was also the first to hold world speed records on land and by boat, simultaneously. In 1930, he crashed while trying to set a new record on water. Rescuers reached the scene in time for a shattered Segrave to speak his last words: “Have I broken the record?” He had. The Irish Times offered this in his obituary: “Swift death in a moment of triumph is probably the end that he would desire.”
Speed record: 301.129 mph
Driver: Sir Malcolm Campbell of Kent, Britain
Date: September 3, 1935
The scene: Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah
The car: The 2,500-horsepower Bluebird
The “human bullet” Malcolm Campbell had risked life and limb in attempts to snap the 300-mph barrier. He set records of 246.088 in 1931; 253.968 in 1932; and 276.710 in 1935, winning worldwide fame along the way. But 300-mph remained elusive, until September 3, 1935.
At sunrise, Campbell climbed into his Bluebird, which was more than 28 feet long with an insect-like exoskeleton and an outlandish tail. A thousand spectators stood in the Utah desert as he roared over the salt flats; as he finished a run, he blew a tire at 300 mph, the sound “like a rifle crack,” according to one man present. The driver swerved hard, his life hanging in the balance of a split-second correction with the steering wheel, which he performed magically.
Later in the day, the timers made it official: Over two runs (the rules now stated that a car had to drive two “flying miles”—beginning each mile already at speed—within an hour, and the final speed would be an average of the two), Malcolm Campbell had accomplished 301.129 mph. “I’m a happy man,” Sir Malcolm said. “For years I have dreamed of driving 300 miles per hour. Well, boys, I made it.”
Speed record: 350.194 mph
Driver: John Cobb of Surrey, England
Date: September 15, 1938
The scene: Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah
The car: The Railton
In the mid 1930s, a group of British engineers dreamed up a land-speed car like no other, in an attempt to break the 350-mph barrier. The Railton’s bizarre design put the cockpit in the nose, ahead of the front axle, and the body looked like a flattened submarine. Two aircraft engines totaling 2,500-horsepower would power all four wheels, and blocks of ice were mounted on the engines to keep them cool. On September 15, 1938, racer John Cobb hammered the throttle and the Railton “shot forward like a comet” across the desert salt flats, according to one man present. The driver sat up front shifting the three-speed transmission and gripping the wheel.
When the new world land-speed record driver climbed out of the car that day, reporters wanted to know: What does it feel like to travel over 350 mph? “The car just went faster and faster until it seemed it couldn’t stand any more speed,” Cobb told them breathlessly. “My vision was blurred. I could hardly see anything at all.” Cobb was later killed attempting to break a speed-boating record, when he crashed at over 200 mph.
Speed record: 407.447 mph
Driver: Craig Breedlove of Los Angeles, California
Date: August 5, 1963
The scene: Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah
The car: Spirit of America
What goes through a man’s mind when he’s alone in a cramped cockpit, rocketing across the desert floor at over 400 mph? “When I’m strapped in and the engine’s lit, I’m too busy keeping my eyes on the course to worry about anything else,” said the 26-year-old hot-rodder Craig Breedlove, after setting a new mark of 407.477 mph in August 1963.
Breedlove had done more than crack the 400-mph barrier; he’d ushered in the golden age of land-speed racing, with velocities set to rise at astonishing rates. Breedlove was a $96-a-week fireman who had improbably convinced Shell Oil to fund the building of a nearly 40-foot-long vehicle called Spirit of America. It had no car motor, no valves or thumping pistons, but rather a jet engine, the same used in the Air Force’s B-45 bomber. The vehicle accelerated so fast, it required a parachute to slow its progress. The car’s name was telling; its patriotic driver aimed to take the land-speed record back from the British, who had held it since the 1920s.
When Breedlove made his record runs on August 5, a camera plane followed above, capturing the historic moment. (The Beach Boys later recorded a hit song in tribute to the feat, called “Spirit of America.”) When told he was now the fastest man on earth, Breedlove said he had not used all the car’s power, that he could go faster. Seems he was going to need it, since his new record would not last for long.
Speed record: 536.710 mph
Driver: Art Arfons of Akron, Ohio
Date: October 27, 1964
The scene: Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah
The car: Green Monster
In October 1964, Art Arfons throttled a jet engine and thundered across the Utah desert at a record-breaking 536.710 mph in a radically styled racer he dubbed the "Green Monster." He had built it in his backyard “mostly from junk, used parts and government surplus,” he told the Washington Post in 1965. Previously, land-speed records had stood for years; Arfons’ new mark was the fifth time in October alone that the record had fallen. That's because fierce rivalries had formed among three speedsters: Arfons in his Green Monster, Breedlove in his Spirit of America and Tom Green in his Wingfoot Express.
After setting the new mark, Arfons told reporters that his car “will go faster than I want to go—faster than sound… But right now I’m hungry—I haven’t eaten since five this morning. I’m going to go out and get a big cheeseburger.”
Speed record: 600.601 mph
Driver: Craig Breedlove
Date: November 15, 1965
The scene: Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah
The car: Spirit of America Sonic 1
The land-speed feud between Breedlove and Arfons climaxed in November 1965. Breedlove cracked 550 mph on the 2nd (555.485); Arfons topped him with 576.553 five days later.
When Breedlove returned to Bonneville on the 15th, all eyes were on him and his Goodyear-sponsored Spirit of America Sonic 1. The car looked as much like a rocket as anything ever designed to travel across the earth, and its driver—Breedlove—was hailed as the “Astronaut on Wheels.” He claimed the top prize that day: 600.601 mph, his last land-speed record. Three years earlier, no one had heard the name Breedlove. “Now he has a custom tailor, and he’s the Arnold Palmer and the Roger Maris of the Bonneville speed set,” chronicled The New York Times. “He’s Mr. Hollywood and Mr. Show Biz and life—at 600 miles an hour—is his dish.”
Speed record: 633.468 mph
Driver: Richard Noble of Edinburgh, Scotland
Date: October 4, 1983
The scene: Black Rock Desert, Nevada
The car: Thrust 2
“The job of driving a car like this must have no emotion in it at all,” Richard Noble said in a filmed interview, looking back at his record 1983 run. “Because if you’re stimulated by emotion...you’re going to get into trouble.”
Noble had been inspired as a kid reading about the life and death struggles of fellow Briton John Cobb—the first man to surpass 350 mph on land. Starting with a budget of £175, Noble built a team and the Thrust 2 car, which packed a Rolls-Royce fighter-jet engine capable of 35,000 horsepower. When the Thrust 2 motored across the desert, it moved so fast that the human eye struggled to focus on the fuselage; all that could be seen was the 30-foot-high dust trail. When the driver pulled his parachute, he experienced what he later described as “a huge deceleration spike,” as the car slowed at roughly 130-mph per second. You feel “as if you’re driving straight down into the center of the earth,” Noble explained.
His mark of 633.468 mph would hold for the next 14 years, until another Briton could top him—the current land-speed record holder Andy Green.
Speed record: 763.035 mph
Driver: Andy Green of Britain
Date: October 15, 1997
The scene: Black Rock Desert, Nevada
The car: Thrust SSC
At world-record speed, Andy Green’s flying mile went by in just under 4.7 seconds. Stop and think about that. In the time it took you to read these words, a mile just went by.
A lot was happening in the cockpit, Green explains.
“The car is all manually controlled,” he says. “Manual steering, manual throttle control, manual brakes, manual parachute.” The reason for manual control, he said, is to minimize things that can fail: “There’s no computer glitches. Monitoring the power and speed of the car, winding the jet engines up at a fixed rate, then getting the engines up to full power. Big flames are now coming out of the back. That light-up process takes all of five seconds, but I have to do it at the right point. Then I’m keeping the car straight.”
Green remembers a dicey moment when his car drifted away from the safety line painted across the desert. He began to fight the car hard, muscling the steering wheel. The safety line was disappearing from his view as he was nearing the speed of sound. He lifted off the throttle for a split second to tweak the aerodynamic balance of the car, just enough so he could steer back in line. Then he put his foot down hard on the accelerator.
What happens when a car hits the speed of sound? Journalists present on the scene reported hearing the sonic boom. But the driver inside the car, ironically, does not experience it. “On the plus side,” Green says, “where I was sitting, I had quite an interesting view.”
