Riding the Four-Ton Dart : From a Laboratory in Sleepy Rio Vista, Craig Breedlove Takes Aim at the Land-Speed Record--and the Speed of Sound

Until Craig Breedlove converted an old pink warehouse into a rocket car laboratory,the biggest thing to happen to his drowsy delta town of 3,300 on the west bank of theSacramento River was Humphrey the whale. It was here that Humphrey decided he’d gone river-running far enough and turned around and headed back to the ocean.

There are no street lights in Rio Vista. There was no fast-food outlet until Subway arrived earlier this year. The stores on Front Street make the town look like something out of a 1937 time capsule. It’s on an old two-lane road halfway between Oakland and Sacramento.

The No. 1 tourist attraction is a plaque where Humphrey made his turnabout.

Breedlove’s place, where a Ford tractor agency flourished decades ago, fits right in. Behind unmarked doors, he and six employees are working on a land-speed-record vehicle they hope will:

--Break the 633-m.p.h. record set by England’s Richard Noble in 1983.

--Become the first to exceed 700 m.p.h., adding to the 400, 500 and 600 barriers Breedlove attained in the 1960s.

--Exceed the speed of sound, about 765 m.p.h.

“I’ve been working on this right here in this building for five years,” Breedlove said as he showed off his newest Spirit of America, a five-wheeled monster that looks like a four-ton dart. Or, as one onlooker said, “an F-104 without wings.”

“We built everything from scratch, just the way I did the first time in my dad’s garage in El Segundo,” Breedlove said. “I’ve gone through about a million dollars of my own, but we’re getting near the climax.”

The aluminum-skinned car, which will be powered by a modified General Electric jet engine capable of 24,000 pounds of thrust, is 47 feet long, 8 1/2 feet wide and stands more than five feet high.

“Take a good look,” the 58-year-old pioneer designer-driver said. “This is the cutting edge of technology. We’re taking American know-how out of the garage and straight into the 21st Century.”

When they make the attempt this fall at Black Rock Desert in Nevada, Breedlove will be sitting in the nose cone, as far forward as he can squeeze his well-conditioned body.

“It’s the same concept as a dart,” he said. “As much weight as possible is as far forward as possible.”

In the first Spirit of America, Breedlove sat in the middle of the car. In the second version, after studying the design of Donald Campbell’s Bluebird, which had attained 400 m.p.h., Breedlove shifted forward slightly. Now, he’s all the way.

“I’ll be like the needle point of the car,” he said.

There is an air of urgency that hasn’t existed since the ‘60s when he, Art Arfons, Tom Green and the late Gary Gabelich were taking turns setting records at the Bonneville Salt Flats.

Noble is planning to beat his own record this fall with Thrust SSC (for Super Sonic Car), a seven-ton successor to the Thrust 2, powered by twin Rolls-Royce engines from an F-4 Phantom fighter plane that are capable of developing 20 tons of thrust. It is 12 feet wide, by far the biggest car ever built for a land-speed assault.

Noble, 48, is turning the driving over to Andy Green, an RAF fighter pilot, in hopes to attaining Mach 1.1--faster than the speed of sound.

Another British challenge was planned from the McLaren Advanced Vehicles factory, which is better known for its Formula One championship cars driven by Emerson Fittipaldi, Niki Lauda, Alain Prost and the late Ayrton Senna. Team manager Ron Dennis has put the program on hold, however, apparently to concentrate on improving the team’s sagging Grand Prix fortunes.

Australia’s Ross McGlashan, in his Aussie Invader 2, has scheduled a record attempt in November on Australia’s Lake Gairdner, near Adelaide.

“We’re not lined up side by side, like Gary [Gabelich] and I proposed years ago at Bonneville, but it’s a race just the same,” Breedlove said. “We all want to be the first to get 700, and we’ll all be out there about the same time. The [time] window from September to November will be about the same for all of us.”

Breedlove expects to begin testing at Black Rock Desert, about 85 miles northeast of Reno, early in October. It was at Black Rock that Noble set the record after finding the old course at Bonneville inadequate for today’s speeds.

“Black Rock is alkaline dirt, not salt, which is a drawback, but it’s as smooth as cement and it’s the largest dry lake bed in North America, so we have plenty of room,” Breedlove said.

Eleven miles are needed for a record run--five miles to get up to speed, one mile measured and five miles to stop. The measured mile will take about five seconds. Then the car must be turned around and a second run made in the opposite direction.

“It’s like running a five-mile drag race,” the former drag racer said. “We’re under power for 35 seconds, and it takes about 30 seconds to stop.”

To regain the record, Breedlove will need to average 639.803 m.p.h. or better, because FIA rules require that the record be exceeded by at least 1%.

“The Achilles’ heel of the whole project is the wheel design,” Breedlove said. “The tires, which are filament-wound graphite, must be used to reinforce the wheel because of the forces put on it by the centrifugal force at 600 to 700 m.p.h. One problem is that the wheel grows in circumference, so it must be designed so that it doesn’t break apart.”

Breedlove has designed his own wheel-tire combination.

“I’ve gone through 20 designs, at least, in trying to find one that is practical,” he said. “When we approach supersonic speeds, it will be like a test pilot taking brand new machinery into the unknown. You compile the very best data you can, but it’s still the unknown.

“It’s more art than science at this point. There comes a point where putting a model in a wind tunnel won’t tell you what you need to know.”

One intriguing fact of approaching supersonic speeds is that part of the car will go sonic before the rest.

“The bottom [of the car] has to be sculpted so that it will reach supersonic at the same time as the top of the car,” Breedlove said. “If the top and bottom don’t match, there will be a double jolt. Another unknown. We expect shock waves and a sonic boom, but as for trans-sonic speeds, we don’t know.”

One land-speed feat Breedlove dismisses almost as if it never happened is Stan Barrett’s heavily publicized stunt in 1979 of reaching the speed of sound in the Budweiser Rocket at Edwards Air Force Base.

“It was unofficial, uncalibrated and unsanctioned,” Breedlove said. “The rocket car represents an achievement in design and driving skill, but it was a non-event, a travesty to people who work toward the goal of setting records legitimately. It is not considered by me or either of the teams in England to be anything but unofficial and inconclusive.”

The Budweiser Rocket, designed by Bill Fredrick of Chatsworth and owned by stuntman Hal Needham, did not try to run a measured mile, and was programmed only to reach the speed of sound at a single point.

*

It has been nearly 31 years since the most famous accident in land-speed record history occurred at Bonneville, but Breedlove speaks of Oct. 15, 1964, as if he were talking about what he had for breakfast this morning.

It happened seconds after he had become the first person to exceed 500 m.p.h. on land, running the Spirit of America through the measured mile at 539.89 m.p.h. on a return run to break his own record.

He was still running 500 m.p.h. when the braking parachutes broke, leaving the car freewheeling across the salt.

Breedlove recalls:

“I knew the primary chutes were gone when I didn’t slow, so I went to the emergency chutes. When I hit the button, I heard the gun go off, but nothing happened. I was still going over 400 and there was nothing left but the brakes. At that speed, they were of no consequence.

“I knew where I was headed, right toward [some] canals, so I tried to make a gigantic U-turn. I started in an arc when I saw a couple of telephone poles right in my way. I thought they might slow me, but I clipped them off like they were toothpicks. It tore the hell out of the car, but it didn’t slow it down much.

“I was going well over 200 when I hit an eight-foot berm of dirt and salt in front of an evaporation pond of brine. When I hit the berm, I got airborne. I could see I was headed straight for the water and my first thought was to get the canopy open. I didn’t want to drown after all that.

“I unlatched it just as the car hit the water and went under. I popped my harness loose, pulled myself out and swam over to the side of the pond.”

When the emergency crews arrived, Breedlove was calmly sitting on a piece of the submerged car. He had slid six miles across the salt, wiped out two telephone poles and didn’t have a scratch on him.

According to one report, he greeted the emergency crew with “My next trick will be to set myself on fire.”

He laughed when asked about it, but said as he remembered it, his first thought was to inquire if he had broken 600 m.p.h.

*

Breedlove and his fourth wife, Marilyn, also live in the historic riverfront building in Rio Vista. The living room is the old tractor showroom, the storefront windows look out on Front Street. Their bedroom is a converted sales office.

Along with their dogs and cats, they share space with memorabilia from Breedlove’s glory days, when he broke the land-speed record five times. Between August 1963, when he brought the record back to America by bettering Sir John Cobb’s record with a 407-m.p.h. run in the three-wheeled Spirit of America, and November 1965, he kept increasing the world record until he reached 600.601 in the run that ended in the brine pond.

Why Rio Vista?

“I had a real estate office in Torrance after I quit running on the salt, and one day I traded some property I held for some land on the [Sacramento River] delta, where I started an RV park,” he said. “I got so busy with RVs and the marina that I needed an office, so I bought the old tractor showroom.

“Here I am, and it should be quite a day for Rio Vista when we open the doors and roll the Spirit of America out of the building so it can be trucked to the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles for a media preview. From there, it’s on to Black Rock.

“I got the record back from England before, and I plan on doing it again.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Milestones of the Mile

Important dates in advancement of speed in the measured mile:

Date: Dec. 12, 1898

Name: Gaston de Chasseloup-Laubat

Country: France

Car: Jeantaud Electric

Speed: 39.245 m.p.h.

Site: Acheras, France

*

Date: Jan. 12, 1904

Name: Henry Ford

Country: U.S.

Car: Ford 999

Speed: 91.371

Site: Lake St. Clair, Mich.

*

Date: Jan. 27, 1904

Name: William K. Vanderbilt

Country: U.S.

Car: Mercedes Simplex

Speed: 92.308

Site: Daytona Beach, Fla.

*

Date: July 21, 1904

Name: Paul Baras

Country: Belgium

Car: Darracq

Speed: 101.679

Site: Ostend, Belgium

*

Date: March 16, 1910

Name: Barney Oldfield

Country: U.S.

Car: Blitzen Benz

Speed: 131.723

Site: Daytona Beach, Fla

*

Date: Feb. 4, 1927

Name: Henry Segrave

Country: Great Britain

Car: Sunbeam

Speed: 203.793

Site: Daytona Beach, Fla

*

Date: Sept. 3, 1935

Name: Sir Malcolm Campbell

Country: Great Britain

Car: Blue Bird

Speed: 301.129

Site: Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah

*

Date: Sept. 9, 1960

Name: Mickey Thompson

Country: U.S

Car: Challenger

Speed: 406.60.

Site: Bonneville

*

Date: Aug. 5, 1963

Name: Craig Breedlove

Country: U.S.

Car: Spirit of America

Speed: 407.447

Site: Bonneville

*

Date: Oct. 5, 1964

Name: Art Arfons

Country: U.S.

Car: Green Monster

Speed: 434.022

Site: Bonneville

*

Date: Oct. 13, 1964

Name: Breedlove

Country: U.S.

Car: Spirit of America

Speed: 468.719

Site: Bonneville

*

Date: Oct. 13, 1965

Name: Breedlove

Country: U.S.

Car: Spirit of America

Speed: 526.277

Site: Bonneville

*

Date: Nov. 11, 1965

Name: Arfons

Country: U.S.

Car: Green Monster

Speed: 576.553

Site: Bonneville

*

Date: Nov. 15, 1965

Name: Breedlove

Country: U.S.

Car: Spirit of America Sonic 1

Speed: 600.601

Site: Bonneville

*

Date: Oct. 23, 1970

Name: Gary Gabelich

Country: U.S.

Car: The Blue Flame

Speed: 622.407

Site: Bonneville

*

Date: Oct. 4, 1983

Name: Richard Noble

Country: Great Britain

Car: Thrust 2

Speed: 633.468

Site: Black Rock Desert, Nev.