The whole misadventure was documented by CBS Sports Spectacular and was passed off as authentic, with additional corroboration by Chuck Yeager who wrote in a letter that, "Having been involved in supersonic research since the days of the XS -1 rocket plane, which I flew on the first supersonic flight on October 14, 1947, there is no doubt in my mind that the rocket car exceeded the speed of sound on its run on December 17, 1979."

The jet set saw this as poppycock--Chuck Yeager or no Chuck Yeager. "It degraded the whole Land Speed record business. It took a wrong turn," said future land-speed hero Richard Noble. "The most outrageous thing about that whole project was that they wasted the time giving Chuck Yeager a ride in it the next day when they could have done it again (properly)."

Breedlove debunks the Needham claim this way: "There was a water truck that was driving in the background," he said in reference to the corruption in the radar gun's data. "On this specific run, when the operator was hand-tracking the car, the range finder targeted the water truck because it was a bigger target. They had no actual third data point," Breedlove postulates in reference to co-ordinates of speed, range and angle needed to gather data via radar. "The following day, they had the car drive down the course and then took the data from the range of the other vehicle and substituted that into the calculations and then extrapolated data in that manner. It is just so unbelievably flawed; the manufacturer of the radar says its not even calibrated to do that. You've got an uncalibrated radar--hand operated--with the third leg of the data being substituted. Can you imagine a guy trying to claim a drag racing record that way?"

Indeed, this, umm, whole stunt attempt was fraught with arrogance, ambiguity and unresolved issues. Hooray for Hollywood.

******

"When I drove Thrust 2 to the record in 1983," recalls Richard Noble of his 633 mph jet car ride that reclaimed the LSR for Great Britain, "frankly, as a team we were damned lucky to get away with it. The car was within 7 mph of takeoff and with the huge dynamic pressures involved it would have gone upwards at 40G."

Noble and his Thrust 2 machine were encroaching on the physical barrier of supersonic travel--and its incumbent aerodynamic disturbances. This would be the last campaign for a record in the subsonic speed range. From here on out, it would be a thrust-unlimited duel to Mach 1 between Richard Noble's Thrust SuperSonicCar (driven by Royal Air Force prodigy Andy Green) and Craig Breedlove's sleek new Spirit of America streamliner. The target speed was now the Speed of Sound--a velocity whose consequences could be fatal, as supersonic shock waves would almost certainly send the vehicle careening out of control at between 740 and 765 mph. No more pussyfooting.

Suffice it to say, when the price of glory is quite possibly death you gotta' really want to go Mach 1. It has to be in your blood. It has to be innate. For, in the same way that the laws of quantum mechanics tell us that the cosmos exploded and are in fact expanding, and the essence of this expansion is the behavior of subatomic particles, well, this same molecular information is at the root of a land speed throttle monkeys' genetic code and drives its host harder and faster, ultimately creating speed demons infected with a primeval "sickness" of "Go! Fever," a fever that is a twisted, atavistic permutation of manifest destiny and good ol' honky imperialism. I.e., it is what makes people try to "discover" continents, climb Mount Everest in a blizzard, run 4-minute miles, design spaceships, or travel at the Speed of Sound on land. I mean, if the universe is infinite Mach 1 is not a physical barrier after all, it is just an illusory line, right?

It was no cosmic coincidence that the Mach 1 attempts would transpire in Black Rock, Nevada, an 80-mile chunk of parched alkali as expansive as the human imagination when it knows no boundaries. Breedlove and Green would attempt to travel at Mach 1 because that is what they were born to do--it is what we were all born to do, really.

*****

In summarizing his approach to going Mach 1, Craig Breedlove was uncharacteristically terse: "We don't want a lot of downforce because it creates drag." Indeed, Breedlove's methodology could be described as low weight, low drag, and low downforce, a combination that could create a lack of stability and perhaps a vulnerability to powerful crosswinds, a phenomenon that is rampant in the desert outback of Nevada. And, perhaps not surprisingly, Breedlove was a victim of transonic turbulence...