"The real trailblazers were the ones
at Daytona and Eyston and Cobb and them guys," reflects
Art Arfons on the rich, gallant British aristocrats who
were the players on the LSR scene as they broached the 200
mph benchmark. "Those men really had to be something
else."
In
March of '27, Henry Segrave punctured the 200 mph benchmark
for automobiles, clocking 203 mph on the "treacherous
sands" of Daytona Beach in his "Sunbeam."
His source of motivation was a pair of 12-cylinder Sunbeam
Matabele aircraft engines. A year later Segrave's mark was
raised by Malcolm Campbell, who clocked 206 on a pass that
nearly had Malcolm singing "Nearer My God to Thee";
while blazing across the beach at 200 mph, Campbell's "Bluebird"
encountered a sand ridge, which served as a catapult and
launched the hapless, passive car and driver 100 feet into
the air. Cowabunga! Campbell split the beach scene in search
of some salt flats--preferably in the colonies of the British
Empire--that could safely accommodate his target speed of
250 mph.
Emblematic of how pushed the competition had become, Campbell
engaged on a journey into a chunk of real estate that was
completely uninhabitable, but was the perfect backdrop for
Malcolm to implement his vision. Using kaiser blades and
machetes, B'wana Malcolm pushed through the thick brush
of South Africa with his shark-shaped Bluebird II streamliner
en tow, in search of a fabled chunk of salt known as the
Verneuk Pan (loosely translated, "Swindler's Salt"),
all the while ignoring the fact that this was in fact the
habitat for puff adders and cannibals. The nearest source
of water was five miles away--and it hadn't rained in five
years.
Drought, serpents and the headhunters were least of Campbell's
tribulations, however. Once the trail was blazed onto the
Pan, the intrepid explorer discovered that the virginal
"course" was fraught with shale that would shred
the Bluebird II's Tulip tires to ticker tape. Rather than
hightail it back to Daytona, Campbell ordered his crew to
remove 12 miles of shale and lay down some white line. They
did...only to the witness the fruits of their labor completely
torn asunder by a ferocious turdfloater of a storm.
Meanwhile, Segrave was lighting up the timers at Daytona,
streaking to a 2-way average of 231 mph as Campbell and
his minions hiked back out of the jungle with the bitter
memories of a disheartening ordeal in their wake. Ultimately,
the centrifugally-supercharged Napier aircraft-engined Bluebird
had hit 200 mph at the Pan, but for all practical purposes
Campbell's campaign had been mau-maued by the uninhabitability
of the "Swindler's Salt." It was time to get back
to the beach.
In the interim Segrave died in 1930, while attempting to
set a new water speed record. Campbell continued to "endeavor
to prove the supremacy of British workmanship and material"
and fired off a volley for God and Country. His latest Bluebird
was also a test bed for the Air Ministry, who bequeathed
Campbell with a new, secret aircraft engine. It went 250
mph in Daytona, a watershed performance. King George V knighted
Campbell.
And although Campbell had stormed through the 250 mph zone
virtually unchallenged, this feat merely served to raise
the bar to 300 mph for this land speed pole vault. And Campbell's
new threat was fearless and formidable: Captain George Eyston,
decorated World War I officer and shoe of the massive, 6-ton,
eight-wheeled, dual Rolls Royce-powered "Thunderbolt."
But Campbell once again prevailed, this time at Bonneville,
where on September 3, 1935, he tallied a record speed of
301.13 mph in his now Rolls-Royce-powered vehicle. This
just antagonized and cranked up Eyston's sense of both pride
and honor, however, as he terrorized Utah's potash desert
floor with a series of gonzo runs; after a succession of
300+ mph saline sleigh rides where the clutch disintegrates
in the Thunderbolt, on November 19, 1937, Eyston's goggles
are blown off as he blasts through the measured mile en
route to a record of 312 mph. Outrageous.
The following summer Eyston engages John Cobb in a duel.
With an enclosed cockpit and the Thunderbolt's aluminum
body painted black, Eyston goes 345 on August 27, 1938.
Cobb goes 350 a week later. Eyston's titanic Thunderbolt
gets lean and mean: Eyston shitcans the radiator and stabilizing
fin and recaptures the LSR at 357.50 mph in September. Eyston
continued his assaults on the salt that year until, finally,
Thunderbolt's rear suspension wishbone snapped at nearly
400 mph. Eyston retired--only to help brainstorm on the
Invasion of Normandy in WWII.
After D-Day became V-Day, more attempts at cracking 400
mph transpired. John Cobb resurrected his unique 4-wheel
Railton 'liner (now coined the "Railton Mobil Special"),
a sleek Manta Ray of a streamliner with independent suspension
and a Napier-Lion 12-cylinder aero-engine mounted in each
curve of the S-shaped chassis, motivating each axle simultaneously.
At Bonneville on September 16, 1947, John Cobb laid down
a scoriating two-run average of 394.196 mph. Asked to describe
the runs, Cobb exercised the British gift for bleached-dried
understatement when he said, "Everything happens quite
quickly." Yes, things do happen very quickly at those
speeds: Cobb was killed attempting the water LSR at Loch
Ness in 1952. He never cracked the 400 mph barrier; his
record remained unplucked like a grape on a vine until 1963.
Next month: the Au Go Go 1960s...
