There’s this thing called the land speed record. You can build planes that go really fast, jet- and rocket-powered planes that go really, really fast, and spacecraft that go even faster than that. That’s all pretty cool. But you don’t delve into the realm of the completely batshit insane until you start trying to see how fast you can go with wheels on the ground.
The one thing every car built to challenge the land speed record has in common is that it is, appropriately, completely batshit insane.
When I was a kid, this impossibly cool car driven by a guy named Craig Breedlove, took the record. At (what turned out to be a paltry) 407 MPH. It didn’t hold the record long.
I’m told, though, that it does still hold the unofficial record for the world’s longest skid mark. Seems both its drogue chutes failed on its final run.
This is the ThrustSSC, the current record holder, which makes the car above look like a streamlined, ’60’s style Peewee Herman. This is that car on some really ugly performance-enhancing drugs.
Imagine the kind of lunatic it would take to get in the cockpit of that thing. Jet planes have ejection seats: Jet cars don’t. What would be the point? Your first clue that something had gone wrong would be your meeting with St. Peter.
Yes, it went faster than sound. Easily within my lifetime people assumed that was impossible. It’s not. It’s just crazy.
You know, I find it quite cheering that there are still Englishmen willing to do things like this. Don’t you?
Naturally it doesn’t stop there. There’s still that pesky fact that the current record is a sniveling 763 MPH, and everybody knows there are lots of numbers bigger than that. Enter these guys, who hope to push the record up into four figures. At speed like that they’re reduced to literally reinventing the wheel. Nothing that currently exists will survive it.
I dunno – it’s apropos of nothing in particular. It’s just that, with all the crazy shit going on all around us, it cheers me up to know that there are still some people out there with the right kind of crazy.
Craig Breedlove is awesome, as is one of my childhood “heroes” Big Daddy Don Garlits of drag racing fame. Both of these men built go-fast machines, from their own sweat, blood, and innovation. Garlits is the father of the modern rear engine dragster, which came to him in the hospital after severe burns and the loss of half a foot in a clutch explosion. Breedlove, well he just has balls of steel : ).
You know, Joel, there are new tires and wheels and stuff being invented all the time, so I think they will break 999.999 soon. It’s an awesome number to contemplate for ground speed junkies. And I thought I was nuts for scrambling around in scree! I am definitely sane. That’s a very funny commentary of yours, by the way. I laughed and laughed! Thank you!
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135,000 horsepower! Oh man, love, love, love. This is so much more cool that football or guns. OK, maybe in a tie w/a bank of Patriot missiles. I’m a rocket gal!
Henry Ford allegedly remarked that going over 60 mph would liquify your insides. LOL.