WHEN EVERYTHING WAS PERMITTED, PT. 1 A LINEAR HISTORY OF MAXIMUM HORSEPOWER IN A FORGOTTEN AGE OF NO LIMITS

By Cole Coonce
10/7/05

e as a society live in an age of limits... Life as we know it is a bottleneck. Raw, unmitigated speed has always been the release from the trappings of the mundane. Speed has always been a metaphor for freedom. But even that notion is tainted by the endless parade of legislation that stifles innovation... Nowadays, every automotive enterprise is an exercise is limited performance: Top Fuel dragsters have boundaries on gear ratios, revolutions per minute, air intake, choices of fuels, etc. NASCAR has restrictor plates, Champ Car (nee CART) has a limit on turbocharger boost and its emulator, IndyCar, has kissed off turbos altogether.

I'm sure there are a litany of logical arguments (z-z-z-z-z) for all of these restrictions, most saliently how these rules and regulations "save" their respective forms of motorsport, but what I'm saying is that there is nothing to "save" at this point; the form--be it Top Fuel, NASCAR, Formula 1 --is cooked, toasted and fossilized. The very notion of "limits" is antithetical hot rodding's mantra of "run whatcha brung and hope you brung enough." When the technology exceeds the capacity of its applied field of endeavor and therefore the technology must be neutered, the form is about as inspired as affirmative action, fat free tacos, stuffed-up plumbing, and movies edited for network television.

The last bastion of unlimited performance--and like I say, to most folks the notion of "unlimited performance" is what made hot rodding interesting in the first place--is the pursuit of the Land Speed Record. It is the last scene where there are damn near no rules, where freedom of expression is limited only to one's imagination, where barriers exist only in the mind. It is where there still dwells the strange, powerful energy which envelopes the id and psyche of its subjects with the same grip as the physiological phenomenon known to fighter pilots and astronauts as "Go! Fever." It is where everything is permitted...

Most fans of the form know that Royal Air Force wunderkind Andy Green hot-shoed Richard Noble's Thrust SSC to Mach 1 on October 13, 1997 in Black Rock, Nevada; his feat was the coda of a shootout between the SSC and Craig Breedlove's Spirit of America. Shamed, Breedlove vowed to return to Black Rock and "raise the bar" to 800 mph. "Going 8 in '98" was Breedlove's jingoistic battle cry, worthy of "54-40 or Fight!", had he actually achieved his goal. But, citing a lack of Other People's Money as well as a lack of understanding by the Bureau of Land Management (which governs activities on the Black Rock playa), the Spirit of America team has thrown in the towel. Their dream of turning 800 mph and taking back the LSR to the American Hot Rodder is over.

But rather than dwell on disheartening failures, DragRacingOnline has taken the closing of this chapter to salute the audacious, intrepid heroes who attacked the LSR throughout the 20th Century--that is to say, inasmuch as space allows. (Unfortunately, the publishing world also has limits...)

*****

The whole shebang began in 1898 with--of all folks--the French in--of all things--a chain-driven electric car. Count Gaston de Chasseloup-Laubat is credited as the first official plaque-holder of the World Land Speed Record. He puttered through the measured kilometer in 57 seconds for a recorded speed of 63 clicks per hour, which translates to 39 mph. In '02, France's Leon Serpollet leapfrogged over Count Gaston in a steam-engined "La Balleine" (The Whale) at 75.07 mph. Later, the US made its presence felt via Henry Ford. In a successful attempt to crank up the profile of the fledgling FoMoCo, Ford slid his black Arrow across a frozen lake outside of Detroit at 91 mph in 1904. He was later trumped by Louis Emile Rigolly, a Frenchmen who clocked a one-kilometer speed of 103.55 mph to break the 100-mph barrier.

It was around this moment when the discrepancy in what "officially" constituted a speed record began to take shape. In order to establish some semblance of credibility as per the timing systems and as to whether these attempts were aided with a tailwind, the Federation International de l'Automobile (FIA) intervened and attempted to establish order and protocol. To Yanks such as Barney Oldfield and Ralph de Palma, this French bureaucracy was about as popular as UN helicopters in Montana and they maintained that one banzai, balls out record run had as much validity as back-to-back runs sanctioned by some foo-foo timekeepers from across the pond.

By the end of the '20s the "back-to-back turnaround, two-way average within an hour" system was established as the criteria for holding the record ratcheting up the LSR wars throughout the remainder of the 20th Century with folks like Brits such as Henry Segrave, Sir Malcolm Campbell, George Eyston, Richard Noble and Andy Green as well as Yanks like Craig Breedlove, Art Arfons and Gary Gabelich; on flat tableaus such as the beaches of Wales, Denmark, and Daytona and fossilized badlands such as Verneuk Pan, South Africa; Bonneville, Utah; Lake Gairdner, Australia and Black Rock, Nevada.