By D. Brian Burghart
Day 1: Saturday, Oct. 4, 1997 Craig Breedlove knows speed. So do Britain's Richard Noble and Andy Green,
today's holder of the world's land speed record. At various times, they've all
been the fastest man on earth. They're on the Black Rock Desert to break the
World Land Speed Record and maybe even the sound barrier.
That's why I'm on this highway, Nevada State Route 447, long before dawn on
my day off—I want to know speed, too. I want to know what happens when
the speed of sound is not a barrier on land.
Albert Einstein, as a corollary to the theory of relativity, suggested that
time and mass are distorted as a consciousness approaches the speed of light.
I know he was right, although I would bring the threshold down from 186,000
miles per second— 90 mph is too slow when you have to be 50 miles away
at Breedlove's Media Center in Gerlach in 15 minutes. Ninety mph is too fast
when you crest the first hill past Nixon into a herd of open-range cattle. It
was the blink of an eye for the unfortunate jackrabbit I nailed 30 minutes later.
Cherie Danson is the media relations woman for Breedlove's Spirit of America
team. Spirit of America has been the name of Breedlove's cars since he started
breaking speed records in 1963. They are scheduled to make a run at the new
land speed record in an hour and a half. I sign a waiver, turn over a business
card and get my press credentials.
Cherie is impersonal to the point of seeming robotic. She can't tell me anything
about the chances for a run, except that at this moment it is too breezy and
I should stand by.
“If I was to have some breakfast at Bruno's, would anyone tell me the
car was going to run?”
“Well, I guess. Since that's where we all are. If we all leave, you can
assume something is happening,” she says, exasperated.
Bruno's is packed. One table is full of men in team coveralls, but I don't
see Breedlove. I sit at the counter and strike up a conversation with the guys
who flank me. As is usual among male compatriots, until we have a reason to
know one another's names, we don't introduce ourselves.
The fellow to my left is a freelance photographer; the man to my right is
a graybeard affiliated with the BBC who has been covering the national racing
circuit.
“The fools just don't understand the significance,” the graybeard
says about the dearth of race reporters here.
Cherie has not come to Bruno's, and I'm disconcerted by the number of women
in the packed restaurant—two. I order eggs and pork chops from one. The
other fills my coffee cup.
“It's a hurry-up-and-wait sport,” says Bob Sworden, the shooter.
He's a heat and refrigeration man from Fernley who works at the Fallon Air Force
Base. We introduced ourselves when he said he'd taken pictures at last year's
attempts to break 700 mph and had gotten of some shots when Green broke the
land speed record last week.
Bob and I are about a mile onto the playa from the first offramp waiting to
be shuttled to the site of Breedlove's compound. His 1984 Jeep Wrangler is filled
with camping gear. It's got a winch and a shovel on the front bumper and windows
that don't roll down, but fold in He shows me some of his better work.
I'd driven my 1964 Mercury Park Lane to the desert and, without realizing
it, I'd set myself up to be an alpha—a car guy.
A couple of dozen journalists, all men, stop by in shifts to chat, and they
all mention my car—“What is that, a '63?”— before flitting
away to gossip about women and speed.
Bob and I while away an hour. I tell him about the Futurists, an early 20th
century Italian philosophical movement.
“We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new
beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes
like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to run
on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace,”
reads a tenet of the Futurist Manifesto, written by founder F.T. Marinetti in
1909.
I paraphrase this for Bob, and he's in agreement.
“You should have been there when Green broke the record,” says Bob.
“I said to Noble, 'You're only going to have that record for about 40 more
minutes.' He didn't care. 'Yeah, well, it's about time somebody broke it,' he
says to me. You should have been there; it was awesome. Fucking awesome.”
Another hour passes while we discuss machines, technology and the philosophy
of speed. Get more work done more quickly so you can do more work. Get to your
destination faster so you can stay longer and leave later—it seems all
progress has been about increasing speed—faster modems, more megahertz,
quicker destruction.
“We want to glorify war, the only cure for the world—militarism,
patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which
kill, and contempt for woman,” reads another Futurist doctrine. I don't
point out the nationalism engendered by the Americans and Britons competing
to see who can go fastest. Nor do I point out the uncommonly high levels of
testosterone on the playa—a diametric opposition to the usual feminine-dawn-of-man
vibe there.
“It's too bad the Futurists were sexist fascists who all died in WWI,”
I say. I'm tired of waiting and tired of small talk, so I hang my boots out
my passenger window and take a nap. It's getting hot on the desert when I wake
up.
I can tell that I'm not the only bored man on the face of the Black Rock Desert.
The boys have started to gather round my car, a single-prop plane has taxied
within spitting distance, and a camper towing a half-sized, six-wheeled all-
terrain vehicle has joined our camp. A couple of the guys from Speedvision,
the cable racing channel and one of the sponsors of the race to Mach 1, have
duct-taped a model rocket launcher to the windshield of their rented vehicle
and are going to lift it off while they drive a mile a minute. The owner of
the ATV has a potato gun made of Fiberglas tubing, and he fires a half-spud
an eighth of a mile. We watch for the rocket's exhaust trail, or for the car
to blow like the Challenger.
Left to their own devices, boys will be boys.
A member of the Spirit of America team pulls up in a Ford van and gives us
the update—they're still on standby. He's a real car guy, and we reporters
hang on his every word. His name is Chris Rossi. You can practically smell gasoline
on his breath.
“What size engine that thing have?” he asks me about my Merc. We
open the hood.
“390 Marauder,” I say.
“Didn't they make a bigger engine for those things?” he says. “Like
a 427?”
I don't know. A real car guy would have known, so I feel intimidated and inadequate,
but I take comfort from the fact that I could probably whip him.
The rocket launches amid the great chatter of NASA roleplaying on the radios.
Another hour passes, and the wind refuses to die.
Dezso Molnar, 32-year-old Spirit of America crew chief and jet propulsion
pioneer in his own right (he's the jet-propelled go-cart guy from Burning Man),
has told me that people today don't care to understand “process” anymore.
“All they understand is the event,” he says.
He uses a Western movie analogy to illustrate his point. In the old movies,
he says, the cowboy would ride into town, wrap the reins three times around
the hitching post, walk up the steps and knock open the saloon doors. Nowadays
on MTV, they just kick in the door.
I have been observing the process for a long time. It's 1 p m.. and I miss
my girlfriend and child, so I make the hour-and-a-half return trip home to Reno.
I have yet to see a rocket car
THE WAITING IS THE HARDEST PART It's more than three times faster than Count Gaston de Chasseloup-Laubat was
going when he set the first land speed record at 39 mph on Dec. 12, 1898. It
is less than one-sixth as fast as Craig Breedlove hopes to drive the Spirit
of America this morning..
When I left Reno at 6:35 a.m., there was no wind. When I arrived on the playa,
there was a 14 mph crosswind at the measured mile. It was gusting much higher,
and there were whiteout conditions. The track is 13 miles long and five miles
wide. The cars get up to speed, go through a timed and measured mile, and turn
around to do it again. The whole process must be completed in one hour to be
official.
“This is not sustainable,” says Cherie of the wind, as she drives
me out to the Spirit of America compound.
She's considerably kinder than she was the other day, and I'm the only journalist
watching as team members prepare the car. It is said that technology sufficiently
advanced is perceived as magic. I don't understand what they're doing—to
my eye, it looks like they are waxing it.
The Spirit of America is 44 feet long, white and cylindrical. Not to be too
Freudian, but the car looks awfully like a cigar. It's covered with brightly
colored sponsor's stickers. It's powered by a modified General Electric J79
jet engine with afterburner. The Spirit of America runs on 92 Octane, Formula
Shell Premium Unleaded gasoline—the same stuff I put in my car. When the
car is going at full power, Craig Breedlove is sitting in the tip of a 45,000-horsepower
missile. Images of Slim Pickins in Dr. Strangelove come to mind.
“That was Craig going back into town,” says Cherie. “He was
supposed to meet me here.” She is walking on air because she's been told
she may have to fly out of town to meet with some sponsors tonight. The SOA
team has been here since August, and she hasn't had a day off'.
Her boss, Breedlove, is one of the men I must meet if I really care to know
about speed. He's held the World Land Speed Record five times.
When I get to sit clown with him, he recalls the moment when he realized that
he really likes to go fast. He was in a chopped and channeled 1934 Ford three-window
hot-rod coupe with a supercharged V8 engine.
“We had it at Saugus drag strip. It wasn't running well that day, and
they'd had some problems with it—and my friend said, 'Would you like to
drive it?' I was 13 and I said, 'Yeah.'
“And I got to drive a race car. I think I went 127. It was faster than
they'd run all day, and it was like 'Well, it must have started running again.'”
His mellow, deliberate style of speech seems antithetical to what he does for
a living.
At 16, he drove the Ford 154 mph on the Mojave dry lakes.
“Actually, I had someone else lined up to drive the car,” Breedlove
says. “But the association we belonged to said no driver could drive more
than two cars in the races. So anyway, I drove the car myself.”
Four years later, he made it to 236 mph.
He set his first world record in 1963 at Bonneville at 407 miles per. He broke
a new record in 1964 at 468 mph. And another the same year at 526 mph. Breaking
the 500 mark, he lost his drag chutes and Spirit of America blasted through
some telephone poles before crashing into a pond at 200 mph.
In 1965, with the new Spirit of America Sonic 1, he set a new record: 555
mph. His last record, also in '65, broke 600 mph by six-tenths of a mile.
It would have been inappropriate to ask Breedlove if he'd ever heard of FT
Marinetti's little group, but something he says reminds me of the second tenet
of the Futurists: “The essential elements of our poetry will be courage,
audacity and revolt.”
“It |racing] is a companionship thing, a camaraderie of guys, something
to do that everybody is interested in, involved in,” says Breedlove. “It's
also something I like because it's an ultimate ethic. In today's world, you
meet so many attorneys and so many businesspeople—at the drop of a hat,
they would back out of a written contract. This is the kind of thing where you
go to a sponsor, and you arc basically going to put your life on the line to
uphold your word.
“I think it's understood among the guys that do it—that are running
Indy cars, or guys like Craig Nelson, [the actor from Coach and a sponsor],
who races a WSC car. We have that special bond. I mean, let's face it: Craig's
got a pretty good day job, and yet on any given weekend, the guy's out putting
his life on the line. That's a special person. That's a person who has an ultimate
ethic. That person says something, you can put it in the bank.”
I told him I wanted to make a deposit in my velocity account.
“Speed, in terms of a race car, is hard to explain to someone who has
never had an opportunity to sit in one or do anything like that. You can't give
them an analogy—well, it's sort of like this, it's sort of like that—
because it's not like anything except this.”
And there is nothing like the Spirit of America cockpit.
“It's a very harsh environment. It's a very, in many respects, violent
environment. The car has enormous horsepower, and you have to give total respect
to it. It is unforgiving, and there can be no mistakes. It is very close to
the ground, so in relation to the velocity that you travel, it's very acute.
It's a very harsh ride, and it vibrates to the point where it blurs your vision.
I breathe through a mechanical apparatus. My body is harnessed down to a steel
frame, and I'm very close to the front wheels—they run a few inches from
my back. The ride is one of precision, and when you come onto the power, it
feels like some giant object has put its hand on your chest and just driven
you into the seat. This car accelerates so hard you almost can't breathe. When
the parachute opens, the G's go as high as 10, depending on the velocity that
you release the chute. You have to have a light touch, but a decisive touch,”
he explains.
Breedlove got an unofficial record last year, although it was one he never
wanted. He was going more than 650 mph when the Spirit of America turned on
its side and set the record for the world's fastest U-turn.
“It happened very quickly. I was quite confused,” he says. “When
I went up on the side, I was obviously concerned about survival. Immediately
when I got things under control and I got the car stopped, my concern went to
what happened, and to pull down everything that happened on the run trying to
focus on what caused the problem so we could prevent that from happening again.”
There are those in the Black Rock Bar who say the experience cost Breedlove
some of his nerve, and that's why he keeps the field when the Brits could run
their ThrustSSC (Super Sonic Car) and break the sound barrier.
“In the end, I'll think you'll see very big things,” says Breedlove,
giving lie to the wags in the bar. “I set out to bring back the record
to the United States, and I intend to do that.”
He says his greatest expectations for Spirit of America are not based on anything
except regaining the world's land speed record. “It'll be faster than
the British car.”
I'LL WAIT FOR YOU I'm tired of people telling me that they can get me through to meet Andy Green
and Richard Noble and then leaving me hanging, so I take a chance and simply
drive to their compound. If I'm going to wait for hours for something to happen,
I might as well wait here.
There's a 14 mph wind from the southwest since the sun came up, but other
than that, conditions seem perfect.
Photos from Monday's test drive showed a shockwave immediately in front of
ThrustSSC—you could literally see sound. The car was going .98 Mach 1—right
around 750 mph. At 750 mph, from Reno you'd reach San Francisco in 18 minutes
and New York City in less than four hours. At the speed of sound, an object
leaving the sun would reach the Earth in a little more than 14 years—which
could explain why I've never heard the crack of dawn.
I finally get a peek at ThrustSSC, even though it remains in the inflatable
quonset hut. The car is huge; the differing design solutions to breaking speed
records are visually obvious. It is 54 feet long, and I'm told it weighs more
than seven tons. It has two Rolls Royce Spey 205 jet engines, for a combined
delivery of 100,000 horsepower. It is black. If Spirit of America is a fillet
knife to delicately slice open the sound envelope, ThrustSSC is a hammer.
At 9 a.m. the word comes down— Breedlove is going to run immediately;
Green is going to go at 11 a.m. In the five minutes it takes me to get to the
viewing area above the playa, Breedlove has said he is not going to run; the
Brits have called for the medical plane, and they are going to run immediately.
Gossip travels among the uninformed spectators faster than you can say “Hedda
Hopper.” The wind slowly picks up.
I'm deep in a maelstrom by 12:40 p.m. I've returned to the Thrust camp. The
Brits will make a final decision about whether to run today at 2 pan. The wind
is blowing at least 25 knots, and the dust feels like pins and needles on my
skin. I can see at most 15 feet. Out of the dimness, two figures approach like
Bedouins—it's Richard Noble, director of the ThrustSSC project and Michael
Dempsey, volunteer and member of the Mach 1 Club, the 5,000-member group of
contributors who were the third-largest supporters of the British effort to
break the sound barrier. The corresponding individuals in America who contributed
to fund our countrymen's effort are called “exceptions.” Shell Oil
is the major sponsor of the American team's assault on the speed record.
“Say,” says Noble, “what kind of car is this?”
We repair out of the elements to Dempsey's camper.
“It's quite like war, isn't it?” says Richard Noble. “A
lot of waiting, and then a sudden action.”
“We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness,”
is the prime canon of Futurism. At first meeting, this man seems too cultured
to get into anything as bourgeois as fast cars. Breedlove reminds me of wrenches
and oil, but Noble reminds me of microprocessors and software. Noble held the
World Land Speed Record longer than anyone.
Experience aside, Noble also has a difficult time explaining the concept of
speed.
“It's very interesting, seriously interesting. There's no emotion to
it, no emotion at all. You're just concentrating on what you're doing. The interesting
thing about it is it happens in very, very slow motion. You find that your mental
processes are very, very fast, and they eventually get faster than the car.
So you reach a point where the car is actually slowing you up. On the second-to-last
run when I got my record in 1983, I was hitting the side of the car, driving
the car with one hand, beating the side of the car, yelling, 'Get on with it,
for God's sake, get on with it.' We peaked there at a speed of 650.88.”
Noble's official record stood at 633.468 mph until Andy Green broke it with
combined runs of 714.144 on Sept. 25, 1997.
“It's the most exciting thing you can do on God's Earth: It really is;
it's seriously exciting,” says Noble. “The car's ready to go, the
team is ready to go, everybody's bored out of their minds—we're ready to
go at one hour's notice.”
“So we're here and we've got a brilliant team and we've got a superb
car, which has run up to Mach .98, which is very inspiring,” says Noble.
“When it travels, it creates a shockwave which is 300 feet wide.”
That shockwave is a fine metaphor for speed. It's the first time such a wave
has ever been seen on the ground and its appearance, like a shimmering wall
moving just ahead of ThrustSSC's nose, represents the unknown.
Noble is confident that the ThrustSSC team will discover what lies beyond
that barrier, and maybe just in the nick of time.
“The weather is coming to an end here,” he says. “The sensible
thing to do would be to make sure we have this [record] with a reasonable margin.
We'll have to see. If there is a situation where we could take it on to its
design speed—which is 850—well, let's wait and see.”
I fight my way through the wind back to the car.
There is not going to be any record set today. Three days wasted; I'll see
no history being made. I wait another 30 minutes, until there is a break in
the storm before pulling out. I'm barely past the pylons that indicate the way
in when the wind comes back up and I'm blinded. I can't see the end of my hood.
I know where the highway is supposed to be, so I bear to my left. Thirty, 20,
10 mph. Finally, I'm forced to a stop. I've plainly gone into the scrub near
the highway; the wind has obliterated any vestige of a track. I'm forced to
sit and wait for some speed demon to come flying out of the gray and smash me
like my dreams of witnessing a car driving at the speed of sound.
I saw nothing—no rocketing cars, no history, I didn't even get to meet
Andy Green, the fastest man on Earth. I've done nothing but sit around, and
I'm no closer to understanding speed than I was when I started this exercise.
I have a sudden thought that makes me chuckle aloud and probably represents
Einstein's theorem as well as anything: Speed is the absence of wait.
“We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses
the earth, itself hurled along its orbit,” proclaimed the Futurists.
For some, that is enough.
There is, of course, a postscript. This is taken from the ThrustSSC websight.
The British carried on, increasing their speeds whenever the worsening weather
permitted, until on 13th October Andy Green became the first man ever to achieve
an officially timed supersonic run through a measured mile. The turnround was
49.6 seconds over the hour, though, and ThrustSSC did not set a new record. It
was one day short of fifty years since Chuck Yeager went supersonic in the air
for the first time.
Two days later the ThrustSSC Team were back into action, and this time
they attained their objective - reaching Mach 1.020 to set a two-way average
of 763.035mph. An historic World First had been achieved! For those who
want the whole story, check out http://thrustssc.digital.co.uk/
Speed.
“We declare that the splendor of the world
has been enriched by a new beauty of speed.”
—Futurist Manifesto
Day 2, Wednesday, Oct. 8, 1997
I buried the speedometer as I passed a flatbed truck between Empire and Gerlach.
At 120 mph, it is undoubtedly the fastest I've ever driven.
Breaking the 500 mark, he lost his drag chutes
and Spirit of America blasted through some telephone poles
before crashing into a pond at 200 mph.
Day 3: Thursday, Oct. 9, 1997
It's clear as a bell at 6 a.m. No wind. It rained last night, and as I tossed
in my too-short bed at Bruno's, I could hear it.
The Spirit of America is 44 feet long,
white and cylindrical. Not to be too Freudian,
but the car looks awfully like a cigar.
Questions, comments, or suggestions? Drop me a line.
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