"Anytime you walk away from a 675 mph crash, you have
to say, 'Well, you did most of the things right,'"
maintains Breedlove, reflecting on the circumstances that
led to a two-wheeled, hyper-velocity U-turn on a windy day
in November of '96, a few days before his permit to use
the desert expired.
"In my mind, I had no thought that there was any crosswind
condition whatsoever. We had called down for wind condition
earlier and it was at 1.5. The timing wasn't ready and we
already had the engine fired but they said, 'Shut down,'
so I was all ready to go. I actually sat in the car for
forty minutes waiting for the timing to get back on. We
re-fired the engine and had a compressor shake, so we had
to shut down and check for that--then relit again. In the
meantime, the weather conditions had changed: It had gone
from a nice, bright sunny morning to big, dark clouds and
I was having trouble even seeing the course."
This would be the SOA's first attempt at reclaiming the
LSR from Richard Noble, their first goal en route to breaking
the Sound Barrier. They would use a single J79--capable
of 45,000 horsepower--mounted on the fuselage, directly
behind the driver. It was a stark contrast to the Noble's
approach of using twin 202 Spey turbofans, each capable
of 50,000 hp, mounted on either side of the cockpit in what,
in essence, is a 10-ton, rear wheel steer Batmobile.
"The other problem, of course, was that the car was
much faster than we had anticipated. Trying to watch where
my mile-marker was, trying to look at a digital speedometer
the size of a postage stamp and back off the afterburners
while trying to figure how long I need to stay out of the
engine and when I could go back in," Breedlove remembers.
"There were some decisions made because of the weather
closing in that were just not prudent decisions; I got kind
of caught up in the 'I've-got-one-chance-to-do-it' mode.
When I called Chuck just before leaving the starting line,
I asked was the course clear because we had a problem with
policing the course, when Charlie came on and said the wind
was at one-five, I thought, 'One-five, okay...one-point-five."
The profile of Breedlove's latest streamliner could withstand
a crosswind of one-point-five mph. But a gust of 15 miles
an hour blew his precious rig around like a styrofoam cup
of coffee on a gravel road. "The omission of the decimal
point didn't click."
*****
"It doesn't have two engines for performance
reasons," said Ron Ayers, aerodynamicist for Richard
Noble's Thrust SSC, in September of '97. "Two engines
will give us a geometry which is much more stable. So two
engines for stability, not for performance--although the
extra engine does no harm for performance whatsoever. It
enables us to get the weight well forward and the front
wheels wide apart, so that means the weight is between widely
spaced front wheels, stabilizing roll, pitch and yaw simultaneously."
And he concluded, "We're very happy with a 15 mph crosswind."
Ron Ayer's approach to Mach 1--use a ton of weight and
downforce and just suck that baby to the playa--proved to
be the correct one. Poetically, on October 15th, 1997, one
day after the 50th anniversary of Chuck Yeager's supersonic
flight, Andy Green recorded speeds of 759 and 766 mph, which
translated to Mach numbers of 1.01 and 1.05, establishing
a supersonic LSR of 763 mph. "The car becomes unstable
at around Mach 0.85 as the airflow starts to go supersonic
underneath the vehicle and requires very rapid, precise
steering inputs to keep it on the white guide line,"
Green clarified afterward, ironically using the present
tense to describe his benchmark performance. "The car
becomes slightly more stable above Mach 0.9 and can then
be steered fairly accurately through the measured mile.
The shockwaves formed visible moisture on the front of the
car, which could be seen from the cockpit and which moved
back along the body as the car accelerated." Green
continued to describe how the Thrust SSC exquisitely but
firmly punctured a hole in the sound barrier. "The
car then remains reasonably stable as it accelerates through
Mach 1, with the rate of acceleration dropping off as the
vehicle generates the huge shockwaves which cause the sonic
boom." Boom. Mach 1 was no longer theoretical. The
bigger hammer method prevailed.
Noble, Green, Ayers, et. al, achieved their technological
imperative--designed and drove a racecar that wouldn't disintegrate
as it punched a hole in the sound barrier--convincingly.
Art Arfons put the magnitude of this achievement in perspective:
"Everybody has been bragging--me included--that we'll
go out there and go supersonic when we really couldn't,"
he said. "This guy did it. This has got to be the living
end."
Arfons nailed it: It was the end of an era and it all transpired
at the end of the century, during the waning moments of
the millennium. Regardless of the heroics and foibles of
Sir Malcolm, John Cobb, Craig Breedlove, and Art Arfons,
future historians will regard Richard Noble's and Andy Green's
feat as the last epic gesture of the fossil fuel age, because...hot
rodding is over--we have reached the Holy Grail. After Mach
1, what else is there? 
| (Cole Coonce is the author of INFINITY OVER ZERO, as well as the forthcoming TOP FUEL WORMHOLE...) |
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