WHEN EVERYTHING WAS PERMITTED, PT. 2 A LINEAR HISTORY OF MAXIMUM HORSEPOWER IN A FORGOTTEN AGE OF NO LIMITS

By Cole Coonce
Photo courtesy Cole Coonce
11/8/05

hh, the 1960s. This is where the LSR gets truly over-the-top. The assault on the 400 mph barrier began via the intrusion of some wily Americans who sullied what had heretofore had been the sanctified sandbox of European aristocracy. After the shootout between Eyston and Cobb concluded, the Yanks began kicking up dust storms on the salt flats in contraptions so stripped down, coarse, and primitive that the Brits kinda' viewed them as uncouth tinderbox folk art.

Perhaps most emblematic of this mindset was Akron, Ohio, scrapyard scavenger Art Arfons, a drag racer who terrorized the strips with Allison aircraft engines until the National Hot Rod Association pulls the rug on both his ingenuity and his aircraft engines, and tried to relegate Arfons to a circus act. In retaliation, Arfons doesn't get mad, he just turns up the boost on a mighty mastodon of mutant machinery that he has christened the "Cyclops," and aims his crosshairs on the salt flats, leaving the drag strips in the rear view mirror of his memory. "I had an Allison (aircraft engine) for ten years and I couldn't get to 200 in the quarter mile," Arfons recalls about the '60s. "I wanted more horsepower." It is difficult to ascertain what was the bigger monster at this point: the racecar or Arfons himself.

To satisfy his jones for unbridled adrenaline, Arfons scores an experimental J79 from a F-104 for $625. "I got it when it was still classified," he said. "It had been scrapped because of foreign object damage. I had hit all the scrap yards and said, 'If you ever get a '79, I want it.' So a guy called from Miami and he said, 'I got one.'

Arfons then called General Electric and asked for an owner's manual, in essence sending a smoke signal to a GE whistleblower. With something rotten in the Rubber City, a colonel from the military paid Arfons a visit. "He said, 'That's a classified engine, you're not allowed to have it,'" Arfons remembers. "And I said, 'Well, here's my piece of paper (receipt). I bought it after you threw it away.' I said, 'You can't have it.' Two years later, they declassified it."

Arfons chained his military surplus monstrosity to a tree in his back yard and--to the horror of his neighbors--began purging the afternburners, searching for harmonic imbalances. "There was a special wrench to take them apart," he said, referring to a ratchet that wasn't in his toolbox. "I knew a man who worked at Wright Patterson (AFB) and he got me the tool I needed to fix it. He would sign it out and drop it by the fence for me. He'd check it out in the morning and I'd get it back before he had to turn it in that evening. I had to do that to take it apart and I had to do that to put it together. The blades were all damaged, so I just removed every third one. Never did balance the thing. I just put it back together that way and it ran fine. It had all the power I needed."

"He was armed with the biggest gun in town once he got that J79," Craig Breedlove said, laughing with envy. A SoCal drag racer and firefighter, Breedlove was just as smitten with the concept of thrust unlimited as his compatriot from Ohio. Indeed, cheap, abundant jet power enabled both Arfons and Breedlove to dominate the Land Speed Record scene throughout the decade.