The water speed record hasn't been broken in 25 years - in fact, it's taken the life of just about everyone who's tried. Now two next-gen rocket jockeys are taking on the old guard.
The day was January 4, 1967, the place Coniston Water in England's Lake District, the time 8:40 am. After a swig of coffee laced with brandy, Donald Campbell slid into the cockpit of Bluebird K-7, his lapis-colored hydroplane, gave a thumbs-up, and ignited the 4,000-pound-thrust jet engine. Since 1955, he and Bluebird had cheated death to break the water speed record seven times. When he captured the land speed title in 1964, Campbell became only the second person besides his father, Sir Malcolm, to hold both records. Throughout the United Kingdom, the Campbells were legendary and the Bluebird an icon.
There wasn't a hint of wind as Donald Campbell throttled to the other end of the mirror-smooth lake. Within seconds, he'd raced through the measured kilometer, at 297 mph. "Full house!" he radioed. Campbell had just gone 21 mph faster than anyone had ever gone before, putting him in a place where the effects of air and water on a boat were a mystery. But to establish a record sanctioned by the Union Internationale Motonautique, the powerboat governing body, requires two runs through the trap in opposite directions within an hour. Campbell started his second pass. At 200 mph, his eyeballs began oscillating as he hammered across ripples left by his own wake. "I can't see much, and the water is very bad," he said. At around 300 mph, Campbell felt like he was riding a turbine-powered paint shaker. "I can't see anything I'm having to draw back [on the throttle]." Suddenly, Bluebird lifted off the lake. "I've got the bows up!" he said. "I've gone... oh... "
Bluebird rose up, somersaulted backward, and crashed nose-first in a hurricane of water and metal. Campbell's headless body wasn't found for 34 years.
There are few endeavors more dangerous than excessive water speed, and Donald Campbell was neither the first nor the last to meet his end on an otherwise placid lake. In 1930, fellow Brit Henry Seagrave tried to top 100 mph in Miss England II. He hit a submerged log and died. Eleven years later, another Englishman, John Cobb, broke the 200 mph barrier on his first run, but crashed and died on his second. While the land speed record now stands at 763 mph, its watery equivalent is but 317.6 mph. And yet it's a mark so daunting it hasn't been topped since Australian Ken Warby set it in 1978. Since then, only Americans Lee Taylor and Craig Arfons have attempted the feat. Taylor died on Lake Tahoe in 1980, and Arfons died nine years later.
Despite this grisly history, three different teams are readying assaults on the water speed record. They espouse radically opposing views on how to go about it. Record-holder Warby represents a long tradition of gutsy and innovative backyard tinkerers. He is being challenged by a new wave of entrepreneurs who put their faith in advanced aerospace technology. "Those other guys have a whole bunch of airplane and computer geeks behind them," says Warby, whose intuitive approach has served him well over 50 years of designing, building, and racing powerboats. "But this is fucking dangerous, and it's a boat, not an airplane. Their chances of breaking the record are absolutely zero, and I'm booking plans for two funerals."
Mike Ruiz
Russ Wicks, in Lake Washington with a model of American Challenge, aims to build a record-breaking empire. His boat is a result of topflight aerospace know-how.
Those "other guys" are American Russ Wicks and Brit Nigel Macknight. Both men believe death haunts the water speed record only because previous contenders didn't understand the design limits of their machines. "Donald Campbell died because he had no way of measuring when the boat was going to fly," says Macknight, a lanky former aviation and auto-racing journalist from Nottingham. Wicks and Macknight think models based on computational fluid dynamics can help mold a fast, predictable, and stable aerodynamic shape long before the boat touches water. Likewise, onboard telemetry can monitor the craft's behavior and computer-augmented stability controls can keep the boat on the water when it starts to shake, rattle, and roll.
All without breaking the bank, since even a well-funded speed record project has to get by on a fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars spent by the average Formula One auto-racing team. Macknight and his Quicksilver team expect to spend $5 million to top 400 mph on Coniston Water and bring the record back to Britain. Wicks and his Seattle-based American Challenge team are shelling out an equal amount to hit 500 at Banks Lake, in eastern Washington, in a bid for the US. Both intend to run next winter.
Warby isn't the only one anticipating a funeral, though. To Frank Dvorak, whose company Analytical Methods provides computational fluid dynamics analyses to Wicks' crew, Warby's low tech approach is ignorant folly - and suicidal. "If Ken Warby believes he can do it without high technology, he'll just become another statistic."
The history of speed records is one of self-taught garage-floor engineering geniuses cobbling together one-of-a-kind machines that ride a thin line between glory and death. Throughout the 1960s, Americans Craig Breedlove and Art Arfons (Craig Arfons' uncle) battled each other for the land speed record - Arfons broke it twice and Breedlove five times. Both were creative, unschooled mechanics whose cars achieved speeds of 600 mph.
But it's one thing to go fast rolling across solid ground, quite another to do so pushing through a dynamic medium 800 times denser than air. To escape water's drag, speed boats must be hydroplanes, meaning that at high speeds they rise out of the water, leaving areas of only a few square inches, called planing surfaces, touching the water. The challenge is to maintain stability. Since every time speed doubles, aerodynamic lift is quadrupled, to go fast without taking flight requires the most delicate aerodynamic and hydrodynamic balance. When the craft is pushed down with airfoils, too much drag is created and the water wants to pop the boat up; if it's too light, the boat takes wing. Either way, you're dead.
"There's a whole lot of uncertainty with the hydrodynamics," says Roger Gallington, a Wicks engineer with six years' experience on US Navy wing-in-ground-effect vehicles - aircraft that fly only a few feet above the ground. "There are good equations that tell us how planing surfaces react in a steady state, but a water speed record boat is actually bouncing along the water." At higher speeds, even small sheets of spray are powerful enough to affect the boat's stability. "We've looked at all the film we can get, and the craft start to dance around on the surface," Gallington says. "Boats have no suspension. They're like steel-wheeled vehicles driving down a cobblestone road. The craft leaves the water and crashes back down - that part is not well understood. It's hard to design a boat that's heavy enough to withstand those forces and not fly away, yet light enough to get up on plane."
Ken Warby happens to be the only man alive who's done it. While his record-breaking Spirit of Australia is displayed in Sydney's Australian Maritime Museum, his new boat lies in a garage behind his ranch house in, of all places, a suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio. The story of how he got there is typical Warby. When he broke the record the first time, in 1977, he had no sponsors and his own government ignored him. When he set the record again a year later, he did so with $30,000 from Speedo, the then Australian-owned swimwear company. Afterward, the government gave him a stipend of $140,000 to showcase the prowess of Australian technology at US shopping malls. Never mind that Warby had designed the boat at his kitchen table and used about as much tech as a kid building a go-kart. By the end of his tour, he had become friends with Craig Arfons, a master builder of drag-racing cars. Arfons lived in Ohio. Warby asked Arfons to build him two funny cars. Meanwhile, he acquired his private airplane pilot's license and started a cement-mixing company in Miamitown. A quarter-century later, he's still there.
Power tools litter Warby's dining room floor. An unfinished addition unfolds behind the house. At 62, he has a ruddy face, blue, twinkling eyes, and the callused hands of someone who has spent a lifetime building things. His paneled basement is filled with what he calls junk - citation after citation from the Australian Power Boating Association celebrating his speed records, balsa models of "designs I'm fucking with," and an order of the British Empire, one step down from knighthood, from "me mate, Liz" - Queen Elizabeth.
"There she is," he says, opening the garage door to reveal his gleaming white boat sitting on a trailer. It is 28 feet long and fitted with an afterburning J-34 turbine capable of generating 6,000 pounds of thrust. He assembled it by hand. It cost $30,000 and is made of wood. It has no onboard sensors, no ejection seat, and no telemetry. And not a single line of its design emanated from a computer. "Shit no!" he says, "I'm not into that stuff. I call it eyeball engineering, and I could drive it in a jockstrap and sandals!"
Warby decided to break the record when he was 13. At 16, he built his first powerboat. He craved speed but loved creating powerful machines from scratch with his own hands even more. It took him eight years to construct Spirit of Australia. He paid $65 for a used jet engine, and the whole boat cost $10,000. For a while he sold power tools, and when he was driving to see clients, he'd ponder design problems. "For a month, I'd think about nothing but the rudder." When his job got in the way, he quit, feeding his three kids by producing and selling homey oil paintings in shopping malls. He banged them out in minutes. And slowly but surely, he tinkered and tweaked and explored the limits of his boat as money allowed, until he had a vessel whose curves and nuances he understood as intimately as his own wife's.
"I researched every damn angle of that boat," Warby says, popping a videotape into the VCR in his living room. "You've got to understand water and how a boat runs on it," he explains as we watch the Spirit of Australia howl across Blowering Dam in New South Wales on its record-breaking run. The water looks rippled, not the glassy surface of Donald Campbell's final attempt. "Campbell always wanted it billiard-table smooth, but I always believed that was wrong. A slight chop lessens the drag. It's a moving surface, and you can't go out and shave off or fill in the bumps and hollows," he says, pointing out the waves. "Everyone believes you can design it like an airplane, but you can't. I'm a pilot, and if your airplane pitches or rolls two or three inches, no problem. But if that happens on the water, you're dead."
Warby shakes his head and says, "That guy in Seattle, Russ Wicks, wants to use a reverse three-pointer" - a boat that rides on one planing surface in the bow and two at the stern, like a tricycle - "but everyone who's tried one is dead. They have a slim aerodynamic shape and they work great in wind tunnels. But you can't scale water, and in reality they have balance problems. If you get on the front sponson, it'll turn you almost like a tricycle. I told Arfons he was going to die, and he did."
"Wicks says he's gonna make his reverse three-pointer stable by having a computer adjusting things. But one-thousandth of a second isn't fast enough on a moving surface with lots of hills and valleys. The computer is dealing with what's behind you, not what's in front. My boat has inverted airfoils and all sorts of trick stuff that I can't tell you about in case Wicks reads your article."
It's 2 pm on a dismal Seattle afternoon as Russ Wicks gives me a tour of his mini-mansion on the shores of Lake Washington. Actually, it's his roommate's, a founder of InfoSpace who was lucky enough to cash out before the stock market crash. Wearing black jeans and a Nautica sweater, Wicks looks a decade younger than his 39 years and seems worlds apart from Ken Warby. He has a hip haircut, a perfect tan, and manicured nails - and he's more comfortable talking about the boat as a "business platform" than he is about its technical details. "With modern technology and the right people, I think breaking the record is challenging, but not really that difficult," he says. We ogle the billiard room and bar, decorated with medieval weapons, before settling into two of a dozen La-Z-Boy recliners facing a 10-foot screen in the media room. Wicks rolls a slick two-minute promo used to pitch potential sponsors. "To me the biggest factor is a really smart operations plan with a strategic risk-management program," Wicks says, leaping from his chair when the clip ends and checking his watch. "We gotta go," he says, herding me into the car to head over to a team technical meeting at EDS PLM Solutions, a company that produces design software that will be used on the boat.
Wicks' dream is less about beating the speed record than building a record-breaking business empire. As a kid growing up on a dairy farm outside of Seattle, he raced motocross and was fast enough to be sponsored by Honda. He attended race car-driving school instead of college but never managed to get into the big leagues. During the Internet boom, he lived high off of sales and marketing jobs. But he was always looking for that ride.
One day in 1998, a friend of his who did PR for race cars and hydroplanes hatched a scheme. The oldest record in boating was the propeller-driven speed mark - then 200.4 mph. Top-end hydroplanes routinely accelerated close to this mark, but no one had gone for the record since Dean Chenoweth tried in 1979, in the famed Miss Budweiser. He flipped, got thrown from the boat, and suffered a concussion, eight broken ribs, a bruised heart and lungs, and a fractured pelvis. But Wicks and his PR buddy believed the reason no one had attempted the record since then was "voodoo" - people were just scared. And anyway, all the hydroplane guys were old farts who lacked the kind of personality that could attract high tech sponsors.
With Wicks' good looks and connections, he had no problem getting a deal. Seattle's Freei, a free Internet service burning through $150 million, forked over a couple hundred thousand dollars, and a Seattle hydroplane owner offered his boat. The electric blue and yellow Miss Freei was born. In 2000, Wicks climbed in and broke the record, clocking a two-way average speed of 205.4 mph through the measured mile on Lake Washington. He had never even driven a hydroplane until two weeks before his stellar run.
Wicks proved he could do two things: drive the boat without killing himself and round up the deals while seducing the press. Though old hands like Warby downplay the propeller-driven record ("Even a trained monkey could have broken it," Warby says), for a few heady months, Freei and its hydroplane were drowned in a media blitz, which included a 30-minute special on ESPN and coverage on all the major networks. Russ Wicks liked the attention. And he reasoned that, with technology advancing and becoming much more affordable, the barrier to the water speed record was similarly more voodoo than anything else. If he could assemble a stable of ace technical minds and hustle $5 million - $1.5 of it for marketing - he could go after the water speed record and in the process create a template for beating the land speed record, the world high-altitude free fall, and who knows what else. Russ Wicks could be an American Donald Campbell and keep his head. He'd preside over a company that showcased American technology as it reaped millions from TV deals, sponsorships, and merchandising.
As we enter a conference room at EDS, design drawings lie across the table next to a blue wooden model that resembles an F-18 fighter jet with its wings cut to the stubs. Wicks taps a key on his laptop and the latest iteration flashes onto the screen at the front of the room. American Challenge will be 40 feet long by 18 feet wide, and its General Electric F-404 engine will generate 12,000 pounds of thrust. Another tap, and there's a design for the cockpit, including the canopy from an F-16 fighter and an ejection seat - which has never before been used on a record-breaking vehicle.
"The overall concept is still fluid," says Ron Argust, a veteran of finite-element modeling and of computer-aided design, analysis, and manufacturing for companies ranging from Northrop to TRW. "Rather than waiting for it to mature and then putting the cockpit into that, why not define and design the cockpit separately, and then let the overall design concept mature around it. That's how it's done with fighters, and it'll be a great marketing tool." Heads nod. Wicks taps another key, and a complex cockpit instrument panel appears.
Team member Dixon Smith shakes his head vigorously. "That looks like something on an airplane two generations ago, when the driver spent 80 percent of his time scanning his instruments rather than looking outside." Smith is a captain with United Airlines and a consulting engineer with the championship Miss Budweiser Unlimited hydroplane team. He lobbies for simplicity. "In Miss Bud, we have zero instruments and a couple of warning lights. The driver doesn't have time to look at gauges, and we can get all the info we need from real-time telemetry right to my laptop."
Over the next hour, team members agree on a digital cockpit display, discuss the vagaries of designing the cockpit to keep Wicks from losing a limb if he needs to eject, and crack a few jokes about Warby's "technical team." Argust and Dave Knowlen, until recently Boeing's director of technical affairs, are creating American Challenge in solid 3-D models, a process nearly identical to, say, Lockheed's recent design of America's latest fighter, the Joint Strike Fighter. The designers are using Ideas design software shared via a secure Web site. All of them have access to the plans, which are instantly updated as changes are made. The sketches can be subjected to stress testing and computational fluid dynamics analyses as they mature, both ensuring structural integrity (a spar on Taylor's boat cracked before he flipped) and revealing the lift and drag of every piece of the craft. Numerically controlled machining can produce scaled wind-tunnel models quickly and cheaply throughout the process.
"We're all working from a common database, so we can design different things - like the cockpit - in parallel, not in sequence," says Argust. "Even five years ago, you couldn't do that." The arrangement allows them to design the whole machine in 8 to 12 months "with a high degree of confidence," he says. "Guys like Campbell and Arfons worked around problems; we try to eliminate them."
Once the boat is up on plane, leading-edge flaps and vertical-control fins linked to accelerometers and gyroscopes by an onboard computer will keep it stable. "We're taking this into the realm of a very high performance airplane," says Dave Knowlen, "and Russ is going to fly this boat."
Which is an idea that makes British challenger Nigel Macknight apoplectic. Inspired by a TV documentary on Donald Campbell, Macknight was just 17 when in 1973 he cold-called Campbell's best friend and chief mechanic Leo Villa and lied about his age and family fortune (he had none) in an unsuccessful attempt to enlist Villa in a record-breaking attempt of his own. Fifteen years later, Anthony Hopkins portrayed Campbell in the BBC film Across the Lake. Macknight saw the film and called Bluebird designer Ken Norris, confessing his youthful sins. "Ken had a philosophical view on the blunders of youth," says Macknight, who then convinced Norris to end his guilt-ridden, self-imposed retirement from designing record-breaking vehicles. Under Norris, Quicksilver was born, although Norris, now 81, no longer has an active role in the project. Quicksilver will have no active aerodynamic controls. "In my book, if it has aerodynamic controls, it's an airplane skimming along the water, not a boat," barks Macknight. "Where do you draw the line?" Instead, his craft will have four hydraulically activated planing surfaces attached to load cells via computer that will measure the weight of the machine on the water, changing the position of the planing surfaces to adjust the boat's pitch. But they will not be moving dozens of times a second, as will Wicks' flight-control surfaces. Like Warby, Macknight believes they simply can't move fast enough. "Water is just too variable," he says. "Waves, ripples, spray, the boat's overpressure - it's like a nonlinear cobblestone road that is changing so quickly you'd always be several cycles behind, so our planing surfaces will move just 10 to 15 times during a run."
A host of sensors - 86 on Quicksilver - will be key to both Macknight and Wicks' survival. These indicators will measure the crafts' parameters during every run and feed data to laptops on shore. "We'll take the boat to a target speed and look at the loads, and if everything is OK and it's behaving like it's supposed to, we can bump the speed up 10 knots," says Dixon Smith. "Gradually, we'll see the point at which it starts to flutter - and then we can stop before it's too late. That's something Donald Campbell or Ken Warby could never do."
That, of course, doesn't bother Ken Warby in the least. "They better have some awful smart people programming those computers," he says. "When you look down that lake, you better have all your homework done, because your chances are 50-50 - and you better be in the right 50 percent. And you better be doing it for the right reasons. If I blow through the trap at 400 and nobody even knows about it, that's OK," he says. "I do it for myself, because I know I've built a better mousetrap." Wicks maintains his odds are better than even. If his technical brain trust does its job, he'll have little to do but keep the boat pointed down the speed lane and be the trained monkey of Warby's ridicule. And that's fine by him. "What Warby did was amazing," Wicks says, "but the era of brute force and guts is over."
