Bid to Break Speed Record Stalls

A British team gave up its attempt Saturday to set a speed record for an electric-powered car, after its vehicle wouldn’t start for a third consecutive morning along a stretch of highway in eastern Nevada.

The “e-motion” car ran well in England and on a single practice run in the Nevada desert about 120 miles west of Salt Lake City, but then ran into baffling electrical problems that kept it from firing up for the record attempt.

British driver Mark Newby and the car’s chief technician Colin Fallows, a retired Royal Air Force propulsion technician, said they planned to return next year to try to top 300 mph in a battery-powered vehicle.

Engineers working around the clock have been able to start the car in a warm garage, but it has been shorting out on the racecourse in the cool mornings after being towed to a remote stretch of Route 93A about 38 miles south of West Wendover, Nev.

On Saturday a power spike shut down a circuit board governing the controller unit. That unit sits in the nose cone of the 34-foot-long yellow car.

“The big juice is not getting to the drive wheels,” team manager Malcolm Pittwood said.

Insurance that the team took out and a permit to use a 7.2-mile stretch of state highway both expired Saturday.

The team was trying to break the record for an electric car weighing more than 2,200 pounds by using a vehicle with 52 batteries and no mechanical gears.

The 245-mph record was set by an American team in 1999 using a similarly streamlined car powered by thousands of AA batteries.

That record was set on Utah’s nearby Bonneville Salt Flats, which are too wet at this time of year for speed racing.