There's a little bit of supersonic car in all of us.
Immortality is what they want, and they can see it out there, flickering in a salt-flat mirage. It's the kind of immortality accorded to men who have walked on the Moon - the rare few who have undone mythology by undoing the distance from here to there. It is the kind of immortality that comes fixed to a machine. Craig Breedlove saw it shining on the desert in October 1996 as his Spirit of America jet car flipped on its side at 675 mph - a speed no other human has ever experienced on land. But Breedlove saw it change into a more fearsome unknown, his own mortality, as the mud lake surface of Nevada's Black Rock Desert scraped by just inches from his head.
The World Unlimited Land Speed Record is the last great act of hot rod culture - and perhaps the American Dream. It is a quest to build a freedom machine in your garage and hightail it over the horizon as fast as possible just to see what no human has ever seen, and so become the eyes of the entire species. The fastest are remembered forever in the record books.
Immortality is what they want, but it is the mortality of the World Unlimited Land Speed Record that makes us care. Raw speed and this act of perceiving what no one has perceived shoves these racers very squarely back into their bodies and very literally down to Earth, where the clock ticks out milliseconds as loud as a pile driver. That's what enables the rest of us to identify with their desire - cheating time and space is what most of us do for a living.
Although his damaged vehicle was unable to run the requisite second trial, Breedlove's failed world record attempt was the first time in 13 years that anyone had threatened the still-current record of 633.470 mph set by Britain's Richard Noble in his Thrust 2 in 1983. Breedlove, who turned 60 this year, has held the record five times. He was the first man through 400 mph (1963), 500 mph (1964), and 600 mph (1965). (See "The Fast American Hero," Wired 4.11, page 184.) Now, he's hoping to punch through the sound barrier. Meanwhile, Rosco McGlashan will try to put his Aussie Invader III past 700 mph on Lake Gairdner in remote Western Australia. In early September, British RAF pilot Andy Green will drive Noble's new glossy black monster, ThrustSSC, during a head-to-head showdown with Breedlove in the Nevada desert. ThrustSSC is believed capable of 850 mph.
Breedlove and Noble say they will not only break 700 mph, but will also hammer through the speed of sound at 765 mph - a feat no person has accomplished on the ground. No one knows what happens when a car pierces the barrier. Shock waves may lift the car and throw it like a child's toy. But no matter what happens, we'll be watching. We'll all be watching because we understand intuitively that these men commuting toward Mach 1 are taking part in something we do less and less often in our speed-obsessed culture - perfecting the way we move physically, rather than virtually.
"If I could describe being the head of a bird, and the car as an extension of your being, you'd be like the brain inside of the bird because you are part of the vehicle," says Breedlove, sitting in the shade of his garage compound in the quiet Sacramento Delta town of Rio Vista, California. The lazy breeze smells of rust, carbon graphite, and the fat Sacramento River. "Through the input that comes through the steering wheel, through your back, and through the sensory input you get inside the cockpit, the vehicle becomes an extension of yourself, and you operate it from that level. You are the guidance. You are so integrated with the hardware, it's like there's an absolute synergy between man and machine. Pilots experience that, too. They become like the head of a bird. They feel the wing tips as if they're up there flying with feathers."
Such stony, Gibsonesque ruminations on the man-machine interface are part of our fascination with what Noble calls this "new era" of speed machines. We yearn to fly. We ache to visit space. We play computer games that deliver the visual sensation of being the ghost in the machine.
But Breedlove has his ass firmly planted in a real machine. He has no safety net, no Off switch, and no virtual death. His speed act is both mortal and immortal. Roaring jet cars mimic communications technology by removing us from the body's limitations. And yet, they really do hurl the body through space using one of our most familiar technologies - the car. Noble, talking from Thrust headquarters in an old hangar at the sprawling former Royal Air Force base at Farnborough, England, has noticed this paradox. "Thrust 2 was probably one of the most stable and best land speed cars of all," he chuckles in his no-bullshit British clip. "It went over 600 miles per hour 11 times. It got so reliable that it was our 600-mile-an-hour taxi. Seriously. That's what you've got to do with them, of course. You've got to keep making them more and more reliable until eventually you get to a point where 600, 650, 700 miles per hour is just commonplace."
The technological feat of a land speed record is matched by a purely human act of mind expansion. As guys like Noble learn to drive a car at 600-plus mph across sunbaked playas all over the world, they hone their ability to control the vehicle by reconfiguring their sense of time. "It's very interesting," Noble adds. "When I was driving (the land speed record car), I was driving on a very regular basis. What happens is that your mental processes speed right up, just like when you're about to have an auto crash. Everything happens in very, very slow motion. You're actually holding the wheel between finger and thumb - it's a very delicate sort of thing. There is plenty of time for everything. It's very relaxing. On the last record attempt, I was actually hammering the side of the car, saying, "Get on with it! Hurry up!' 34,000 horsepower, ya know? I suppose I'd gotten to a stage of development where I was ahead of the car."
Being ahead of the car may be humanity's fatal flaw. We travel, communicate, and even live so much faster in our minds than we can in our bodies. But that is less true if you happen to be driving a land speed record car, where speed is registered by real dirt moving beneath your wheels, and control has perfectly correlating consequences. For the rest of us, the battle is perceptual. Unconsciously or not, we want our bodies and senses to respond as quickly as our brains move and process information. This modern version of the classic mind/body split fuels "the need for speed" and helps explain the quest for the World Unlimited Land Speed Record.
Some top conceptual thinkers entertained this possibility in November 1996 at the fourth annual Doors of Perception conference - a popular Netherlands-based confab ruminating on sticky new media subjects. The subject was "Speed." The presentations, given by more than 40 speakers, ranging from architect Rem Koolhaas to environmental guru Wolfgang Sachs to film archivist Rick Prelinger, coalesced around two main points: first, that the vectors of technology and natural resources are out of sync and diverging, leading to an industrial ethic that designs and markets products much faster than natural resources can actually be grown, mined, or recycled; and second, that this is also happening on a personal level, as our rapidly changing, media-oriented lives diminish the physical reality of our bodies.
Despite the apocalyptic overtones, the Speed conference posed one of the most important questions of our age: as we trill across the structures of cyberspace, what happens to this bag of bones we drag around attached to our heads? "For the modern mind, space and time are the basic forms of hindrance," said Sachs, a member of the Wuppertal Institute environmental think tank, in his address. "Anything that is away is too far away. The fact that places are separated by distances is seen as a bother. And anything that lasts, lasts simply too long. The fact that activities require time is seen as a waste. As a consequence, a continuous battle is waged against the constraints of space and time; acceleration is therefore the imperative which rules technological innovation as well as the little gestures of everyday life."
Craig Breedlove is no stranger to such heightened high-speed perception. Film critic Hollis Frampton describes a dramatic 1965 Breedlove crash in his book Circles of Confusion. At 620 mph, Breedlove's Spirit of America went out of control, sheared off a few phone poles, sailed airborne and upside down, and landed in a salt pond. Breedlove emerged unscathed. Frampton writes: "He was interviewed immediately after the wreck. I've heard the tape. It lasts an hour and 35 minutes, during which time Breedlove delivers a connected account of what he thought and did during a period of some 8.7 seconds. His narrative amounts to about 9,500 words. Compared to the historic interval he refers to, his ecstatic utterance represents, according to my calculation, a temporal expansion in the ratio of some 655 to 1."
Ultimately, the details of what Breedlove said in that hour and a half are less important than the fact that there were details at all - and not just an adrenalin-flavored blur of terror. "It's amazing how much information you actually pull in and how much you can pull back," says Breedlove. "It's the kind of thing where you can have your attention interrupted for just an instant and miss some type of data input, a marker or location - at the speed that the vehicle's going, that could be a fatal mistake." What makes the land speed record particularly terrifying, of course, is the closeness of the rushing earth, connecting that speed to the real distances traveled by the human body. In an age when whole libraries - or even whole economies - spurt back and forth across the globe as instantaneous electronic information, it may make absolutely perfect sense to blast through space in a jet car for no other reason than to see how fast it can go.
"Since the inception of the automobile, there's been a world speed record," Breedlove says. "It's like the heavyweight champion of motor sports - it's a simple concept that people relate to and understand. It has to have four wheels, and they have to touch the ground, and you have to do the record within an hour time limit, and it is a two-way average, so you have to do it twice - but other than that, it's just the fastest car in the world."
The aesthetic of the land speed record competition is strictly Run What Ya Brung, and it remains an exercise in technological improvisation. From a design standpoint, anything goes. Noble's ThrustSSC, for example, uses two Rolls-Royce Spey 202 turbojet engines normally used in the RAF's Phantom fighter jet. The car sucks aviation fuel at 5.06 US gallons per second and generates about 50,000 pounds of thrust at a rough maximum of 110,000 horsepower. (Noble points out that this equals about 1,000 Ford Escorts or 145 Formula One racing cars.) The car's driver, Andy Green, sits between the tubular engines, steering by the rear wheels. On June 4, during a test run in Jordan, this car reached a peak acceleration of 1.2 g and a top speed of 540 mph (869.022 kph). At 10 tons, ThrustSSC is extremely heavy, and it is designed for high downforce. In short, Noble hopes his car will power through the sound barrier like a jet-powered brick.
The Spirit of America, on the other hand, is supposed to skip through it like a hurled stone. Breedlove's car runs a single Modified J79 GE-8D-11B-17 jet engine from a US Navy F-4 Phantom fighter. This engine puts out 22,650 pounds of thrust and 45,200 horsepower with afterburner and water injection. It burns plain ol' Shell 92-octane premium gasoline. Breedlove drives the car himself, crammed into a cockpit 20 inches wide and 5 feet long at the nose of the 44-foot craft. The downforce is calibrated to be the minimum necessary. Fully loaded with fuel, the Spirit of America weighs 9,000 pounds - less than half the Thrust's weight. Breedlove's 675-mph skid last year was caused by transonic instability generated while slicing though a crosswind. This year, Breedlove hopes he's cured the aerodynamic inequities so that the car will be able to weather shock with more stability as it slips through the sound barrier.
Their major challenger is Rosco McGlashan, whose Aussie Invader III is also a light, single-engine design, running a SNECMA 9K-50 turbojet engine that kicks out 36,000 horsepower using AMPOL Jet A1 fuel. McGlashan drives it, sitting off to the side of the huge engine, near the car's midline. His last car, Aussie Invader II, claimed the Australian land speed record at 802.613 kph (approximately 498 mph). Invader III is similar, though it has been shortened by 3 feet to alleviate downdraft problems that caused its predecessor to plow its nose through the salt. Both Breedlove and Noble believe that McGlashan's car is easily capable of 700 mph, but they have doubts about 765. McGlashan insists, however, that it's been designed for well over Mach 1.
These are the specs - the solid stuff a guy can trust. To deal with the intangibles of the interface, Breedlove has worked with sports psychologist Marty Greenberg of the University of California at Davis to help him learn to trust his pile of nuts and bolts. Noble and McGlashan say that the love of their team assures them that their cars have been put together right. Noble says soberly, "If you trust the team, then of course you trust the car. There's no way that you can check a thing like this out absolutely, every nut and bolt. It's like trying to ask Neil Armstrong to check out his Saturn V before he goes out. You can't do that."
These drivers want a line in the record books, yes, but it's more than that. They want to win the race against time and taste immortality. But there's a dizzying irony in chasing down immortality by driving a land speed record car: the faster you go, the more mortal you become.
Even if the World Unlimited Land Speed Record approached the speed of light, in the end it would still be a race against time. The record itself is only made meaningful by the clock. Yet as William S. Burroughs pointed out, the clock is an agent of mortality. "The One God is Time," he writes. "And in Time, any being that is spontaneous and alive will wither and die like an old joke." But Burroughs also devised a solution to this problem, suggesting that we step "from Time into Space."
Immortality will require a technology that trades time for space. It will require a vehicle that can travel light-years, and suspension methods to slow or reverse the effects of time on the body. Teleportation. Time travel. The kind of devices that will probably be invented by obsessive speed freaks who long to build a freedom machine right there in the garage. People like Craig Breedlove, Richard Noble, or Rosco McGlashan.
"I really believe that all three of them were put on this world for a purpose," says McGlashan's wife, Cheryl. "Ross was put on this world to be the fastest man in the world. He started off with a V-8 bike and a rocket motor bike and a rocket go-cart, and he's always had that - as you say, 'the need for speed' - in him. Everyone has their job in a different area - an accountant is a very good accountant. Well, Ross is a very good driver when it comes to handling speed. He never gets fazed, never panics; he's just at home sitting in a race car. I'm sure he was put on this world just to be the fastest man in the world."
Maybe you ought to just get out in your car and drive.
