In October of '64, Walt Arfons, Art's stepbrother,
make his presence felt at the salt flats with his "Wingfoot
Express." With Tom Green pushing the pedals and pulling
the parachutes, this bulbous, bulky flounder of a 'liner
reels off a new record of 413.2 mph at Bonneville...Art
Arfons and the "Green Monster" turn 434 mph...Breedlove
clocks 468...and so it goes, a month long game of ping pong
with a target speed of 500 mph.
On the 15th, Breedlove strikes paydirt--and a telephone
pole. After bursting through the 500 mph barrier, Craig
turns his SOA around and is chewing up black line is supreme
fashion, easily generating enough thrust to backup his provisional
record run. Through the speed trap, however, chaos envelopes
the vehicle: At 539 mph the parachutes shred like CIA phone
records and, like a domino, his brakes melt into goo-goo
muck. The barreling machine is vacuuming up salt like June
Cleaver on Benzedrine, and begins swerving off axis from
the infinite black stripe burnt into the salt and continues
barreling towards an imminent peril. After the rampaging
bull of a streamliner snapped a telephone pole into kindling,
it hit an embankment which launched the racecar and dunked
'er into a brackish brine canal. Breedlove swam to the surface
and climbed onto the stabilizing fin at the stern of his
streamliner, the only portion of the vehicle not completely
submerged. "For my next act, I will set myself on fire,"
a wet but euphoric Breedlove told stunned camera crews.
His two-way average speed was 526.61 mph.
Upon
word of Breedlove's conquest, Art Arfons dutifully 180s
his converted school bus out of his shop in Akron and hauls
his jet car operation back into Utah. "It was really
competition between Goodyear and Firestone," is how
Arfons explains his return to Bonneville. "They were
the motivating things.
"My car wasn't real streamlined," Arfons continued.
"When Breedlove went 500, he told Goodyear they could
go ahead and put their ads out because the Green Monster
was about as aerodynamic as the side of a barn and I would
never go that fast." Barnyard aero or no, on October
27, 1964, Arfons unloads his weenie roaster and rips a new
mark of 536.71. With winter eradicating further record runs,
Arfons, the rubber city son-of-a-chicken-farmer, could claim
bragging rights--at least until the snows thawed.
The transonic tennis match continued at Bonneville the
next year. In the new four-wheeled J79-motivated "Sonic
I" streamliner, Breedlove whooshes to 555 mph on November
2. Five days later, Arfons loses a tire while upping the
ante to 576 mph. Art is nearly asphyxiated from smoke enveloping
the cockpit as fiberglass shattered and the vehicle careened
haphazardly across the salt flats.
November 15, 1965: Breedlove records an average of 600
mph; He is the first human being to go 400, 500, and now
600 mph. Two days later, in attempt to push the envelope
even further into the stratosphere, Arfons's white-knuckle
symphony turns completely discordant. He crashes at over
600 mph, after losing a front wheel. Art gets the 'chutes
out as the other wheels let go. The car noses down then
rebounds into orbit. "I did a big end over end,"
Arfons recollects, "it went 527 feet before it hit
the ground." The plexiglass canopy disintegrated, and
while Arfons wrestles his suicide machine to a grinding
halt, his flesh is scoriated by the billowing sand and salt.
"I don't remember nothing until they tried to get me
out of the wreckage." This was the denouement of the
match of Russian roulette. Breedlove held onto the record.
Until...
Next month: the rocket of the 1970s..
(Parts of the “Everything is Permitted”
series has been adapted from the feature length book, INFINITY
OVER ZERO. Author-signed copies available from the DRO
store.)
