RL Magazine - Their Need for Speed

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Their Need for Speed - by Matthew DeBord

The English speed racer Malcolm Campbell in front of his car, one of several named Blue Bird, at Daytona Beach, Florida, February 1933.

Craig Breedlove's triumph over the 400 mph mark in 1963 with his 35-foot-long jet car Spirit of America shifted the tenor of the quest for the land-speed record.

Sir Henry Segrave in his renowned 1,000 horsepower Sunbeam—in which he set a world speed record of 203.79 mph—at the Daytona Beach Road Course in 1927.

Ed Shadle in the North American Eagle, the car intended to beat the current land-speed record of 763 mph.

Ed Shadle preparing for a test run of the Eagle in Black Rock Desert, Nevada.

Eighty years after two daredevils’ stiff rivalry was tested at Daytona Beach, the near-primordial instinct to go fast stirs anew.

If all goes according to plan, on July 4, 2010, at a vast, flat place somewhere in the American West, Ed Shadle will strap himself into the North American Eagle, a salvaged, wingless F-104 jet fighter fitted with high-tech aluminum wheels, aim the nose at a point on the ground 11 miles away, and engage 52,000 horsepower in an effort to reach 800 miles per hour.

Shadle will be attempting to break the current land-speed record (LSR), held by Andy Green, a forty-six-year-old Royal Air Force pilot, who, on October 15, 1997, at Black Rock Desert in Nevada, steered a twin-turbofan-powered beast called ThrustSSC to just over 763 mph, smashing the sound barrier for the first time on land.

Like most of the men who have chased this record since the early days of the automobile, Shadle, a sixty-seven-year-old hot-rodder and motorcycle racer, knows that he suffers from a potentially deadly preoccupation. “If you don’t do this right, it’ll kill you,” he says. “But we’ll only go as fast as we can safely go. After I set the record, I intend to be alive to talk about it.”

The LSR has been around as long as the motorcar. In the twentieth century, it captivated well-to-do gentlemen—including William K. Vanderbilt and, later, Henry Ford—who were determined to chase velocity in the thrilling new machines. As the industrial age took hold in Europe and the United States, and a modern sensibility began to value boldness and freedom from old-fashioned limits, chasing the LSR became a pursuit charged with romance and heroism. The men who captured the LSR for became heroes and emblems of a culture that was increasingly obsessed with speed, and the power and progress it represented.

The machinery may be more exotic and less accessible these days. You don’t just pick up a $25,000 used F-104 Starfighter anywhere (the Seattle-based Shadle did in Maine). It’s also expensive: he now puts his total costs at $2 million. Although there’s still a romantic amateurism associated with chasing the LSR, it’s fading fast. The North American Eagle project, led by Shadle, relies on volunteers; but a British challenger, the Bloodhound SSC team, captained by the current and former recordholders Andy Green and Richard Noble, has government support. “This is probably the last time that normal people will go after the record,” Shadle says.

In this sense, contemporary LSR attempts still share DNA with the record’s most dashing, flamboyant—and tragic—period, which began more than eighty-five years ago. World War I had shattered the West’s dreams of endless, peaceful industrial progress but accelerated the development of new technologies, including the internal-combustion engine. Against this backdrop, a pair of Englishmen—one an unrepentant daredevil who had flown fighter planes during the war, the other a dogged insurance executive who had become a hypercompetitive race-car driver—battled for the record as the world eagerly followed their intense rivalry.

Of the two, it was Malcolm Campbell—the hawk-nosed son of a diamond merchant who had worked for Lloyd’s of London but in his thirties turned his attention nearly full-time to automobiles at his 500-year-old country estate—who got there first. In 1924, on a soggy beach in Wales, he drove the first of many cars named Blue Bird to 146 mph, breaking the record set in France just a few months earlier. A year later, Campbell broke his own record, hitting 150 mph.

Henry Segrave—educated at Eton and Sandhurst (England’s West Point), wounded in the war, and a veteran of aerial combat—also had his sights set on the LSR. In March 1926, he went 152 mph in a supercharged race car built by Sunbeam. It was the last time a vehicle designed for the track triumphed on the packed sand favored for an LSR course.

An arms race of sorts commenced between Campbell and Segrave as they dueled in a series of increasingly powerful, yet stunningly elegant, cars built specifically to achieve maximum speed. Segrave’s next chariot produced nearly 1,000 horsepower, and in it, in March 1927, he blasted through 200 mph for the first time and reclaimed the LSR at a new venue: Daytona Beach, Florida, which soon became a center of American racing. He had beaten Campbell by 28 mph in the American sunshine and finished his run with a flourish, skidding into the surf. But Campbell roared back, and in his third Blue Bird, also at Daytona, he topped Segrave in 1928.

Segrave then outdid himself and created perhaps the most famous car in LSR history, the magnificent Golden Arrow, the first high-powered car to use streamlined bodywork. In 1929, again at Daytona, he once again smashed Campbell’s record, at 231 mph, and was promptly knighted.

Golden Arrow never ran again, and Sir Henry met his demise a year later, killed while attempting to break another speed record—on water. He was thirty-three. The loss of his great rival struck Campbell at his core. “It’s bloody awful,” he told his longtime mechanic. “Segrave has killed himself.”

But Campbell soldiered on, breaking Segrave’s record in 1931. He, too, was knighted, and hung on to the LSR through 1935, bettering his own marks four more times. Later, Campbell’s son, Donald, would chase the LSR, but by the late 1930s, with war again looming, the Segrave-Campbell era drew to a close. Cars like Golden Arrow and Blue Bird, as notable for their beauty as for their power, were surpassed by rocket-propelled beasts, and the preferred LSR venue moved from Daytona Beach to the remote Bonneville Salt Flats, in Utah. The European aristocratic aura that had surrounded the LSR was replaced by a populist American gearhead flavor, exemplified by drag racer Craig Breedlove, whose Spirit of America tore past 400 mph in 1963.

But Segrave and Campbell’s rivalry resonates. What these men introduced was an intense desire not just to go fast, but to create mechanical works of art, expressions of their personalities. Campbell was in it for the long haul, and for more than ten years never went after the LSR in anything not named Blue Bird. Segrave burned brighter but, sadly, not as long. Still, his triumph that day in Daytona, with Golden Arrow’s sinuous lines glistening against the Atlantic, continues to fire the imagination. Even today, it’s hard to look at Golden Arrow, which has been preserved at the National Motor Museum in England, and not feel a frisson of what Segrave must have also felt: the rush on roaring over land faster than anyone ever had before.

Matthew DeBord is a writer based in Los Angeles. He covers the auto industry for Slate’s Big Money and has contributed to the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Daily Beast, and the Huffington Post..

Photography credits:

E. Bacon/Topical Press Agency/Getty Images
Courtesy Rachel Shadle/North American Eagle
Courtesy Rachel Shadle/North American Eagle