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Britain’s Richard Noble, the reigning king of land speed, is building a rocket on wheels to shatter his own record. The only problem: A ragtag American team might beat him to it


The sun doesn’t rise over the Black Rock Desert in Nevada; it ignites. One minute the blaze-orange glow of dawn is cascading down the sulfur-rich Jackson and Kamma mountain ranges, tinting the prehistoric lakebed a million shades of pink. The next, it’s full celestial throttle. By 6:30, the sun is blinding and the heat is ratcheting up.


So if you’re going to spend a day in the open, pushing a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter attack jet that you’ve converted into a drag racer close to the speed of sound, it’s advisable to get the prep work done before the heat sets in. Yet at 7:00 on a Wednesday morning in July, hardly a single member of Team North American Eagle was stirring. By 8:00, only a few bleary-eyed troops in this volunteer army of American and Canadian aircraft mechanics, engineers, scientists, machinists and hot-rodders had emerged from a cluster of RVs parked alongside a makeshift hangar. Apparently a party at the hot springs, about 12 miles north, ended well past midnight, culminating in a car-to-car flare-gun battle on the ride back to camp.


The wind had kicked up on the playa by the time Team Eagle rolled its car out to the 3.5-mile improvised runway around 10:00. Crew members, finally looking alert and focused, ran down their checklists. Data-acquisition engineer and resident hacker Steve Wallace was up on a ladder, making some last-minute tweaks, leaning down into the web of wires, nodes and connectors set inside Eagle’s fuselage. In the supersonic zone, the slightest aerodynamic instability can cause a ripple effect, mustering forces that can annihilate a car and scatter its pieces across the desert like cracker crumbs, which is why the team had to pull off some successful data-collection runs this week. They had already pushed their erstwhile jet fighter faster than 400 mph, but before they can make their scheduled run for 800 mph—a new world land-speed record—on July 4, 2010, they need to gather enough data to finalize the vehicle’s design.


A team member towed the car to its mark with a pickup truck. Team leader and driver Ed Shadle lowered himself into the cockpit. Pulling on his helmet and lowering his oxygen mask, Shadle gave the thumb’s-up. The crew wheeled over the “huffer cart,” a mobile power unit used to start aircraft engines. With a shriek of its own small turbine, the cart cranked over the Eagle’s General Electric J79. Dust swirled as the jet engine gulped for air.


Suddenly someone ordered a shutdown. One of the parachute bays had popped open. Shadle aborted the start-up, which, as it often does, left some unspent fuel in the combustion chamber. One of the crew spotted a small orange flame burning inside the tailpipe. Shadle got the signal to restart and blow out the flame, but when he did, a fireball leaped from the exhaust, sending crew members diving for cover.


At times like this, Team North American Eagle can look like a bunch of amateurs hot-rodding a surplus jet in the middle of the desert. And frankly, that’s what they are. Such is the way with land-speed racing, an amateur pursuit in which sponsorship money is scarce and breakthroughs are often possible only when a new engine becomes available at the surplus auction. During the first such races, in the 1890s, a French nobleman and a Belgian racecar driver dueled in electric cars, the Belgian eventually setting a record of 65.79 mph. When aviation-derived gasoline engines replaced electrics, the record shot skyward quickly, pushing past 200 mph by 1927, with British teams leading the way. But it was during the 1960s that the land-speed race really took off, as a healthy stock of military-surplus jet engines spawned new competition among Americans Craig Breedlove and rival half-brothers Art and Walt Arfons. The record shot from the 300s into the 600s in less th

Tags: Cars, Feature, Mike Spinelli, bloodhound, cars, feature, jet cars, land speed record, northa american eagle, October 2009, racing, Richard Noble, Richard Shadle, thrustssc

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The Race to 1,000 MPH was originally published by Popular Science - Cars. Read the full story by clicking here.