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In 1965, with a shiny, gold streamliner they'd built in a shed — and four Hemi V8s — brothers Bill and Bob "Butch" Summers ended the longstanding British rule over the wheel-driven land-speed record. Bill Summers died last week at 75. More »
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Remember the great land speed records waged between Art Arfons and Craig Breedlove that pushed speeds to 500+ mph and more? This is just like that. Only slower. And with lawn mowers. More »
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When Bloodhound SSC makes its 42 second run for a 1000MPH land speed record, it'll use a Rolls-Royce EJ200 jet engine and hybrid-rocket to deliver 47,500 pounds of thrust. Somehow, former fighter-pilot and driver Andy Green hopes to survive. More »
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No? How about the drawing that Bill Mitchell filed for the '63 Corvette? One of Henry Seagrave's land-speed record cars? Maybe you'd prefer a Weddell car-boat thing? We're ordering prints now. Why aren't you? [Vintagraph] More »
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It isn't often that an engine makes the front page of Wikipedia, but not many engines score as high on the Ass-Kick-O-Meter™ as the Rolls-Royce R! More »
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There are countless classes attempting records at Bonneville but Spectre Performance is attempting one of the most important: going over 400 MPH in a gas-powered, wheel-driven car. Audio of the engine and pictures below. More »
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The British team attempting to break the long-standing steam-powered land speed record have beaten the 127 MPH mark, unofficially. They still need a visit from the FIA and another pair of runs to make it official. More »
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Jesse James set a record speed of 199.712 in the hydrogen-powered Streamliner at the El Mirage Dry Lake Bed last week, besting the hydrogen record previously held by the BMW H2R, thus proving Americans lead in increasingly obsolete technology. More »
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If you're one of those weirdo intellectual gearheads who reads books, we're not going to give you the swirly-and-stolen-lunch-money treatment you probably deserve. No, we're going to indulge your shameful habit! More »
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It seems like the team of British speed freaks aiming at one of the oldest land speed records on the books is one step closer after successfully testing their steam-powered speedster. More »
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Andy Green, former RAF pilot and current holder of the world land speed record, and Richard Noble, the driving force behind the Thrust 2 and Thrust SSC speed record cars, today announced they were signing on to the new Bloodhound SSC project intended to break the 1000 MPH mark. If they get there, they'd smash the current record by more than 200 MPH. Since the Bloodhound SSC has the backing of the British Science Minister, the team is hoping funds on the order of $16 million will be relatively easy to come by. The key components — the engines — have already been figured out. More »
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British car shoppers in the late 1990s, perhaps not predicting the all-encompassing speed-camera network that would one day render their island unsuitable for M5-grade fast driving, probably yearned for the new factory-hot-rod BMW after seeing this ad. But… don't jet cars go a couple hundred MPH faster than a piston machine? More »
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The Land Speed Record for the Grand Touring Sports Car Under 750cc had stood at 80.143 MPH since 1991, and what better car to make a run at the record than a Deutsch Bonnet HBR-5? That's what Mark Brinker of Texas thought, and he knew where to find one: Junkman! You can get the details after the jump, but we can tell you right now that they annihilated the old record! More »
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Jalopy Journal has a transcription of an article which ran in a 1952 copy of Mechanix Illustrated detailing the land speed record run of one Piero Taruffi, and his Double Bullet race car. Taruffi's car used a 1.7-liter four-cylinder Maserati engine running a chain drive mounted on one side of the car, with him mounted in the other. All four wheels rode on a longitudinally mounted, fully independent suspension (unlike the cutaway in the gallery used for illustration) and carried Peiro to a crushing world record in the 2-liter class. More »
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A guy named Ed that works for Edmunds Inside Line (we suspect nepotism) just got back from driving the 2008 Dodge Viper ACR to Bonneville. There, he discovered that driving really fast in a straight line, at least in a twitchy track special on the salt, is a lot harder than it looks. If we'd been there, we'd have told him that the key to traction in slippery conditions (whether they be caused by salt, rain, ice or snow) is high revs and small throttle openings, but then no one ever listens to that advice anyways. While he didn't quite hit 200 MPH, Ed did manage to discover a truth about driving a Viper: you pay for its speed with hard work. We just hope his back managed well with the strain. More »
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Steam as a motive force is both powerful and difficult to contain, but a team of Britons will be doing their best to topple the steam-powered land speed record with this amazing vapor-driven monster. Granted, the FIA-recognized steam-powered land-speed record is only 127.66 mph­ and was set in 1906 (the unofficial version is 145.607 MPH), but this thing hopes to crush that speed with an expected top-end of over 150 MPH. That's damn fast, particularly considering the rate at which you have to build steam to get moving that quickly. The cool part about this machine is the lack of a big, locomotive-style boiler. Instead, it uses a series of LPG-fired mini-boilers feeding a 360 HP Curtis turbine engine. More »
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The North American Eagle team is anxious to break the world landspeed record with their jet car, which is powered by the engine from a F-104 Starfighter. There's only one problem: money. They're not getting the sponsorship they need to best the current record of 763 mph held by the British Thrust SSC team and they think it's because they're old men. They need an awesome driver to attract an awesome sponsorship. Said designer Ed Shadle "My age is stopping us from getting sponsors, we have to remove the barrier. We'll put some hotshot in the driving seat who looks like Robert Redford and see how that works." Awesome. Information on how to apply below the jump. More »
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A military rocket train was propelled down a track at nearly nine times the speed of sound yesterday, thereby reaching a world land speed record for rail (though Guinness wasn't invited). The previous record was held by another rocket sled at about mach 8.5. Approximately three miles of the test was inside an inflated helium tunnel because, as one official said, hydrogen would be "a bad choice." The payload of this particular sled was classified, though only projectiles for a rail gun or some sort of warhead make any sense to us. More »
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Okay, let's be honest, we only brought up the subject of Sir Henry Segrave's Sunbeam 1000 and his push through the 200 mph barrier in 1927 so we could tell you about this car. After Segrave made his record-setting run, the competition predictably responded, though not for nearly a year. In February 1928, the dastardly Malcolm Campbell retook the title at 206.95 mph in his Blue-Bird. The following April saw an American, Ray Keech, best Campbell at 207.55 mph. Noteworthy advancement, but Segrave was developing a car to blow those records away. More »
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Ten years ago a cadre of British paramilitary-industrialists came to America and set the world on its ear; for the first and only time, a man set an official supersonic Land Speed Record of Mach 1. That hot shoe was RAF pilot Andy Green, a taciturn speed demon who punched through the sonic wall in his twin jet-engined Thrust SSC, an accomplishment achieved with the help of team owner Richard Noble and engineers such as aerodynamicist Ron Ayers. This watershed was accomplished on the barren wastes of Black Rock, Nevada, on a forty-mile long dry lake bed. More »
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As the last chunks of salt are chipped off the race cars there is a post speed week battle forming. The SPAL Ford Powerstroke Rocket Ranger team is claiming the title of World's Fastest Diesel Pickup Truck. Gale Banks says this simply isn't true, stating that the Banks Engineering Cummins-powered Dodge Dakota Sidewinder still holds the official FIA World Record - set in 2002. More »
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Earlier today we spoke of the Napier-Railton setting a 1939 speed record at the Brooklands Motor Course outer circuit. Sections of the British race track are still intact, or as the photographer who took these pictures writes - lying derelict, broken into by Gallaghers. [Brooklands Race Track] More »
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Our favorite part of going to events like the Monterey Historics or the Pebble Beach Concours is seeing cars not only spit shined for static display, but also barreling around a race course. The 1933 Napier-Railton Special was built exclusively to run the Brooklands Motor Course high-banked oval at maximum velocity. In 1939 John Cobb pushed the 24-liter Napier Lion aircraft engine powered Special to a speed of 143.44 mph. This Brooklands outer circuit record stands unbroken today. The Napier-Railton wasn't moving at record speeds when the Brooklands Museum director wrestled the two-ton monster through the corkscrew at Laguna Seca. Then again, the car was never designed to turn right. [Motoring Exhibits via the Brooklands Museum] More »
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The man known as Coop has installed a bang up gallery of Speed Week at Bonneville photos on the Flickr. Bathe your eyeballs with the 1327 pics that Coop took while he was out there. More »
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The Southern California Timing Association reports that Speed Week at Bonneville is underway. Some rain earlier in the week had caused problems, but favorable weather helped the crews scrape out some courses. As of yesterday 230 entries were passed through tech inspection. Next year we'll enter the Jalopnik 1971 Fiat 500 in Classic Unblown Gas Coupe. Until then we hope the Burkland Streamliner can wick up the twin blown hemis and break its own 417 mph record. Stay on top of records as they happen over at the SCTA. [Bonneville records and photos via the SCTA] More »
]]> http://jalopnik.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=288522&view=rss&microfeed=true Wherein Captain Slow assembles a scale measured-mile and attempts to have slot-car racers break the late, great Don Vesco's 2001 wheel-driven land speed record of 458 mph. Can they break it? Who knows? Can we get enough James May? Never. – Davey G. Johnson More »
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To Joe Strummer and Mick Jones, the Gates of the West may have been New York City. Or Saint Louis. Or San Francisco, where they holed up to record overdubs and vocal tracks for Give 'Em Enough Rope with Sandy "More Cowbell" Pearlman. But for many returning soldiers at the end of World War II, the Gates of the West were the breakwaters of San Pedro Bay, at the dangling, southwesterly tip of Los Angeles. Last night, Kasey Dubspeed and I did a runner from the coast up to Cole Coonce's place in Eagle Rock (or "Buzzard Boulder," as Cole perennially refers to it) for his annual Memorial Day barbeque. Cole's backyard is somehow an odd nexus of Los Angeles culture of the city's Golden Age. I spent much of the evening chatting with fashion-and-film-industry people, but at Cole's, one may just as likely end up in a conversation with a Top Fuel driver, a cycling fanatic or a random person who saw the Germs like 48 times and lived to tell the tale. The Second War, as Mike Watt refers to it, gave the world Los Angeles — a diverse, wonderful, maddening, depressing, stunning, sick megalopolis. The GIs who stepped off the boat here after the cessation of hostilities gave us hot rodding. More »
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Can your penalty box go 123.224 mph with a destroked one-liter engine? Didn't think so. Back in the late 1980s, a wonderful gang of engineers began tweaking a less-than-2000-lbs. Subaru Justy to set the Class I Production World Speed Record. The first problem they ran into was that the rules stipulated a maximum engine size of 1000 cc. The stock, US-spec Justy sported a (relatively) massive 1.2-liter three-cylinder mill. So they replaced the crankshaft and rods with the 1.0-liter parts from Japan. Butting right up against both the letter and spirit of the rules, Roger Banowetz and his team managed to squeeze 99 hp from the puny engine. A few more engine tweaks plus the removal of rearviews/windshield wipers and the addition of aluminum moon disks allowed the über-Justy to set a two-way record that stood for 18 years. Sadly, to save weight, they went with the FWD variant instead of the true econo-hero AWD model. Still, we love the #440 Justy. We simply love it. (Thanks to Ric Hawthorne and Roger Banowetz for the images.) – Jonny Lieberman More »
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19 years after the murder of Mickey Thompson and his wife, Thompson's former business partner, Michael Goodwin, has been sentenced to two consecutive life terms for the crime. Goodwin was convicted of first-degree murder for hiring bicycle-riding hitmen to kill Thompson at his home in guard-gated Bradbury, California, apparently over a business deal gone sour. While this conviction won't bring back the creator of the unbearably awesome quad-blown-Pontiac-powered Challenger, it does bring an ending to the long and painful battle of Thompson's sister, Colleen Campbell, to bring Goodwin to trial. – Murilee Martin More »
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In the annals of mostly-forgotten Ford Product of the 1980s, there lies the EXP, the front-drive two-seater for active singles or childless couples on the go. And as with any car, it has its own enthusiast group. Now, add biodiesel to the Venn diagram and in the overlap, you'll find the vehicle utilized by the Ford EXP/Mercury LN7 owners' club, who've yanked the petrol mill in favor of an Escort diesel unit, in hopes of winning The Northeast Sustainable Energy Association's annual Tour De Sol Challenge, followed by a record attempt at Bonneville. – Davey G. Johnson More »
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For those of you who happen to be fans of the Bandit's dashboard or '50s diner countertops and/or trim, engine turning — aside from any weird fetishes you may have that we'd probably rather not know of — is likely the reason. It's simple in concept, really. Just a gritty pad on a mill laid down repeatedly. Of course, to do it well, it helps to spend hours throwing away and screwing up material. Anyway, the back half of Bobby Greene's bellytanker canopy was just subjected to the treatment and then emblazond with the Coop-drawn Old Crow logo. Does it get much manlier? We just checked our pants. It is manlier than us, that is for sure. – Davey G. Johnson More »
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Now and then, Citro n SM resto specialist Jerry Hathaway has been known to show up at Crystal Cove/Coffee & Cars with a 200mph dry-lakes SM towed on a fifth-wheel trailer by an SMamino. Last night, we were talking with commenter Punkey about how the SMamino may be the greatest car ever because it's a little bit of everything any sensible enthusiast should stay away from: It's French, it's Italian it's a pickup and it's front-wheel drive. Therefore, game/set/match SMamino. Dare to front and an atomic wedgie is in your future. – Davey G. Johnson More »
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"Dandy" Dick Landy, one of the most innovative men in drag racing history, has died of kidney failure at the age of 69. Proprietor of Dick Landy Industries, Landy kicked the 1/4 mile onto its ear with what was the predecessor to the Funny Car, rocked early Pro Stock, built a flathead that was good for 300mph at Bonneville and constructed the 440 for what is undoubtedly the most famous ambulance of all time: the Yates/Needham/McClure/Chaos TransCon Medevac. Dick, you passed too soon, but thank you for everything you gave us. We at Jalopnik offer our deepest sympathies to the Landy family. – Davey G. Johnson More »
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This case has been brewing for sixteen years and today, a jury has finally come down with its decision. Supercross godfather Mike Goodwin has been found guilty for the deaths of Mickey and Trudy Thompson. The jury also agreed with the special circumstance charges of lying in wait and multiple murder, although the prosecution has chosen not to seek the death penalty in the case. Predictably, there will be an appeal. According to public defender Elena Saris, "We don't believe justice was served. We believe passion controlled and there was a Hollywood version of events." [Thanks to Scott for the tip.] – Davey G. Johnson More »
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He's a record-setting balloonist, sailor and pilot, and he's even run the 24 Heures du Mans. He's Steve Fossett, and he holds a fistful of records. And now, with the purchas of Spirit of America, he's going after the outright land speed record, hoping to take down the nearly-a-decade-old Thrust SSC record set by Andy Green, the first man to verifiably go supersonic on land. Back in 1997, Craig Breedlove was chasing the supersonic record as well, but a grenaded jet engine put an end to his attempts and a lack of sponsorship dollars has sidelined the car ever since. More »
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If the phrases "5-inch chop," "full belly-pan," "original Ford steel" and "Ford Top Loader" set your heart aflutter and you've got 30k burning a hole in your pocket, you could walk off with this ridiculously sexy lakes coupe. Hell, it even comes with a parachute. Just add big-block Chevy and SCTA license. – Davey G. Johnson More »
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Coop packed up with his pal Bobby Green again and headed out to the dusty environs of the historic El Mirage dry lakebed. Bobby's first attempt at running the belly tanker netted him a 93.1, which was apparently limted by a pretty heavy-duty headwind. Coop believes in the magic 100. As one of our common mantras is, "We should be more like Coop," we have no choice but to believe as well. Click over to the noted artists site that carries an index of positive apeness for a plethora of pics from one of the hallowed grounds of speed. More »
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Everyone's favorite Satanic Toulouse-Lautrec made a day of it out on the dry lakes with a group of friends running a belly tanker. And, in typical Coop style, he leaves any trick paraphrasing we could perform mouldering in a steaming pile of can't-say-it-better crap, so just click through and read his take. – Davey G. Johnson More »
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The conclusion reached after hearing a team of wacky Brits are looking to set the 100-year unbroken land speed record for steam powered vehicles is probably something like "there's a land speed record for just about everything." You'd probably be right, and proof of that assertion's coming in the spring of next year in Verneuk Pan, a lake bed in South Africa's Northern Cape — where the all-British team (complete with a "lady driver") will seek the un-Hammond-like speed of 200 mph as the champ speed of all things steam. That would beat the conductors cap off the old official record set at 127.659 mph by Fred Marriot's Stanley Steamer in 1906. But in our minds it still falls short of the old unofficial record set back in 1928, by a little cartoon duck named "RailCar Daffy" — unfortunately, his run of 382.1 mph was not sanctioned by the F d ration Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA), the world motorsport's governing body, which requires an average of two runs in opposite directions — as well as requiring non-fictional drivers to not infringe on any of Disney's non-fictional water-vehicle driving characters. – Ray Wert More »
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The Times, which has a more highly-staffed graphics department than your lowly Jalops, pieced together a graphic illustrating the Hamster's fateful trip down the runway at Elvington Airfield in the Vampire. From everything we know, Hammond didn't crest 300mph, although the Times claims he was "reaching speeds of up to 300mph." Also of note, the Vampire's Rolls-Royce Orpheus engine consumes 7-10 gallons per mile. That's a fair bit of JP-8. More »
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