Black Rock

If you’re lucky, REALLY lucky, you might be offered the chance to partake in a life-long fantasy. For me, and of my oldest and most prized fantasies, the invitation to join Craig Breedlove and his Spirit of America Land Speed Record (LSR) attempt project in the late ’90’s wasn’t one I took a second to ponder. Yes, yes, and yes, Mr. Breedlove, I’ll be there ASAP.

“There” happened to be the Black Rock Desert in Nevada–the dry lake bed is so long that when viewed from one to the other end, the curvature of the earth can be seen. Unreal.

For me, this childhood dream turned adult reality stemmed from a set of encyclopedias my father bought. I’d routinely read and re-read all racing content offered in the dozens of those bound treasures, but one section always stood out as different than the “Formula One” or “Indy 500″ sections I’d memorized. The “Land Speed Record Cars” section was just odd enough to keep me coming back to try and grasp the surreal nature of the men and machines that sought speed records but more often found a grisly end.

With this invite to help improve the engineering and data acquisition aspects of their struggling program, I was awestruck to actually meet Breedlove, the man I’d read about for 20 years and thought of as the automotive equivalent of Chuck Yeager. As it turned out, Craig was just an old-school cat from LA that loved hot rods, loved his dogs, and saw what he did pursuing the sound barrier on land as a normal part of life. The well worn cliché of someone being said to have “ice water in his veins” actually applied to Breedlove; only when his Spirit of America started to lift off the ground at 500mph did I see him react sharply to our ground crew at the end of a run. The ground crew, similar to a flight crew, were the first on the scene whenever the SOA rocket came to a stop. This time, it was a blessing the vehicle came to a stop on it’s feet.

With the hatch opened and his visor flipped up, it was plain to see Breedlove wasn’t his normal blasé self. His style, something the man has by the ton, was felt by all in the quiet but forceful look he gave us.

No yelling, no cursing–just a look and reaction that said “you’d better get this ‘trying to fly to the moon once I get above 475mph thing’ figured out soon because I don’t know how many more ‘get out of Heaven free’ cards I have in my pocket.”

We downloaded the data, and the car’s co-designer and chief engineer, the brilliant John Ackroyd, and I set about taking the aero pressure sensor data and drawing out a map of the registered downforce (or lift, in this case) during the run as the car reached it’s attempted liftoff speeds. The SOA also had load sensors on each of the three axles. The SOA features a central front wheel just behind the cockpit, and two outer wheels at the back of the vehicle, like a rocket powered tri-cycle.

A special light system had been installed in the instrument cluster with a colored bulb denoting each of the three wheels–a light would flash if and when one of the load sensors saw a drop in the weight on its specific wheel. Each load cell was programmed to go into alarm and trigger the its dash light to flash when a wheel saw less than 500 pounds of weight. With the SOA weighing in over two tons, the only reason for a wheel to register less than 500lbs of weight would be if it was starting to lift off the ground…

Breedlove had good reason to install this system.

Craig, having flipped over at 575mph in ‘96 on an initial trial run in the SOA, skidding almost upside down for nearly 3 miles(!) finally coming to rest in a shallow lake, and insisted that load cells and the dash alarm lights be implemented during the vehicle’s repairs.

His hyper-sensitivity to the SOA even getting close to taking off again at speed was understood by all, and his intense “get this thing fixed before you bury me and the car in the same grave” stare reminded us how serious this game was.

The load cells showed Craig that the right rear wheel had gotten down to 300lbs before he backed off the throttle, and the aero maps John and I made showed that at high speeds, the SOA was so light on downforce that even the slightest crosswind, a left-to-right crosswind in this case, would plant the right rear wheel and side of the vehicle, and push upwards on the left rear side and wheel. The loss of air on the left side cause lift immediately, and coupled with the change in pitch from the right rear wheel being forced further down into the playa (lake bed dirt surface) the delicate aero balance was upset.

As a veteran of land speed pursuits, Craig was attuned to his vehicle enough to feel the slight shift at the rear of the SOA, and said he noticed the light came on just as he felt the slight pitch at the rear. With the playa being untouched and undisturbed, the skinny wheels on the SOA drew clear paths in the playa during the vehicle’s 7 mile straight line run. With the data gathered, the SOA turned around and mounted for towing back to the base (or shed, I should say…) we took the time to drive back following just to the side of the SOA’s wheel marks.

It was VERY scary, almost chilling, to see that for nearly one mile towards the end of his run, just before he shut the jet engine down, the tracks for the left rear wheel was so light you almost couldn’t see it. Craig had just driven for nearly a full mile at over 350mph in a rocket that was bicycling on two wheels. More than his intense stare could have told us, seeing the visual proof–a lack of one wheel touching down, was enough for us to dig in and brainstorm our way to a solution.

I’d come from the last Indycar race of the year just a month before our Black Rock LSR runs, so I threw some Indy aero mods at the SOA. With 2″ tall wickers fitted to the trailing edge of the rear wheel spars, we made another run. I’d expected to see a marked increase of downforce–not more than a few hundred pounds of downforce, but enough to keep the rear wheels planted without creating too much drag. Boy was I wrong.

Not only did my ridiculously large wickers fail to deliver much in the way of measurable downforce, according to the Pi data system, they didn’t do much of anything. Craig, confirming that the right rear load sensor light came on again, backed off at the 375mph threshold again.

I took A LOT of heat from the veteran LSR crew, and many of the jet propulsion and rocket scientists (seriously, they really were ex-rocket scientists) that made up the team. My “Indycar technology” was laughed right off the SOA, and I was asked to rethink my next round of aero or engineering suggestions.

The reality of the situation was twofold: I knew the principles behind the wickers were sound, Indycars or not. Secondly, some bigger truths about the SOA were becoming hard to ignore. The English Thrust SSC team were located just a short walk from our own camp, and they’d been edging closer and closer toward the sound barrier without problem. A disparity in design, engineering. technology, and genuine modern expertise between Breedlove’s SOA team and the Thrust SSC was undeniable.

The Thrust team was always welcoming to us, and was keen to show their masterful active-suspensioned rocket to our crew whenever we wandered over. Without any sentiment of disrespect to Craig’s SOA effort, it became obvious that while Breedlove built the new SOA that targeted breaking the sound barrier with the same crew he’d used since the ’60’s, the Thrust team, barring a few of the crew members, were still in diapers when the SOA team were building Craig’s first generation of LSR cars.

In some scenarios, that veteran experience and guile is more valuable than youth and inexperience. When it came to building an LSR capable of breaking the sound barrier on land, the young, computer savvy, college trained, and open-minded Thrust SCC team designed and built their vehicle using more technology, more science, and more free thinking to overcome the insane challenges of traveling North of 750mph on a dry lake bed.

The SOA team, hot rod builders at heart, had followed a simple LSR formula they’d used since day one: build a long tube, install a jet engine, angle the jet downwards at one degree to provide downward thrust on the chassis to provide stability, and weld or machine everything in-house. The Pi data system on the SOA was fairly simple, yet a BIG leap forward in technology for the team; on the Thrust, our Pi system would have been inferior to computer they used to keep the pilot’s tea warm.

So, national pride aside, the SOA design was thirty years old before it was built in ‘96. As much as I wanted us to succeed, it was plain to see that the wicked technology, testing and overall engineering superiority of the Thrust wouldn’t be threatened by our Spirit of America. Realizing that the effects of crosswinds and shockwaves as they broke the sound barrier would necessitate an active suspension that could correct and perfect the attitude of their vehicle in a millisecond, the Thrust could deal with any of the scary aerodynamic fluctuations that would hit their vehicle.

The Spirit of America, devoid of any such systems, and build without the modern engineering and technological resources required to be competitive in the race for the sound barrier, was always destined to be second best. Wicker bills and the dozens of other solutions invented on the Black Rock would never overcome a fundamentally flawed and aged design philosophy.

While the outcome of this effort was one that saw the Thrust SSC team set the land speed record, the failure of the Spirit of America never registered as a point of regret or disappointment for me. I’d lived a childhood dream, met a childhood hero, stood on the playa and watched Craig Breedlove streak by at 500 miles per hour, and also saw the Thrust SSC inch forward, run by run, towards a record that still stands.

No matter what you’ve done in racing, be it F1, NASCAR, NHRA, or otherwise, until you’ve stood on a dried lake bed, panned left to right and seen the curvature of the earth in clear sight, watched the Spirit of America or the Thrust SSC explode past you faster than you can swivel your head as you listen in silence as you wait for the Doppler effect to deliver the sound that follows seconds behind, or peered into the eyes of a man that’s just challenged himself in ways you were never meant to try yourself, one’s motor racing experiences aren’t complete.

By chance, and by fortune, Craig Breedlove bestowed a great honor upon me to share the most incredible experience I’ll ever know in motor racing.