Are you fearless? Do you have razor-sharp reactions and the sponsor-friendly
good looks of a young Robert Redford? Think you’ve got what it takes to
drive a supersonic jet car at speeds of more than 800mph?
If so, you might be just the man (or woman) to take the wheel of the North
American Eagle, a 42,500bhp jet car with everything it takes to smash the
land speed record, says its maker, except one thing – a driver.
Last week the team behind a joint American-Canadian attempt to win the world
record back from the British launched an open contest to find that person.
Those not put off by Richard Hammond’s recent brush with a jet car are
welcome to apply, provided they are between 20 and 40 years of age and have
relevant experience in motor racing, flying or other extreme sports
(clocking up speed-camera points doesn’t count).
Photogenic features would help in the team’s effort to attract sponsorship. So
far applicants have included two pilots and a handful of boy racers. The
field is wide open.
“When you throttle this car up, you know you’re going for a ride,” says Ed
Shadle, 66, co-owner and creator of the North American Eagle (NAE), who is
reluctantly giving up the driver’s seat. “It’s a lot of fun to drive. But if
my age is stopping us getting sponsors, we have to remove that barrier.
We’ll put some hotshot in the driving seat who looks like Robert Redford and
see how that works.”
Whoever drives the car, Shadle can take much of the credit for creating the
streamlined red speed machine out of the rusty, graffiti-scrawled remains of
a 1957 Lockheed F-104 Starfighter jet, bought for $25,000 (£12,500) from a
scrapyard in 1998.
The transformation has taken Shadle, an amateur motor racing driver and former
American air force pilot, and Keith Zanghi, a Boeing engineer, more than a
decade of work in a rented aircraft hangar near Seattle. Their project has
received funding and parts from companies in the United States and Canada
but Shadle has also spent more than $150,000 of his own money to pursue his
dream.
At the root of this 10-year struggle lies an enduring dent in America’s
national pride. Despite being the home of some of the fastest, biggest and
most expensive machines on the planet, America has failed for more than a
decade to reclaim the land speed record from the limeys across the pond.
US teams held the record for almost 20 years from 1964 (the year that Donald
Campbell set it – and then almost immediately lost it again) until Richard
Noble won it for Britain in 1983. In 1997 Andy Green, an RAF fighter pilot,
became the first person to drive faster than the speed of sound. He used the
Thrust SSC, a car built and designed by British engineers. And to rub salt
into the wound the Brits broke the record on American soil, most recently in
the Black Rock Desert, Nevada.
The North American Eagle is on a mission to put America back on top, but
although the car has been built and designed in America, the team is willing
to go global in search of the right kind of driving talent. Hence the
international competition to find a helmsman.
Shadle admits that in the early days the Eagle looked like an eccentric
“garden shed” project. “Years back, people would say, ‘This is going to go
nowhere’, but they underestimated our tenacity,” he says.
After stripping away the layers of dirt and decay on his wreck of a plane and
speaking to the US air force records office, Shadle discovered it had once
been flown by Chuck Yeager, the American pilot who in 1947 was the first man
to break the sound barrier.
Not only that; the plane bore an omen. It was number 763 – the speed achieved
by Green when he set the record in the SSC. “It was a lot of tough work just
to get the thing fixed up at first,” Shadle says. “But that number seemed
like a pretty good sign.” He and Zanghi built up a team of 38 volunteer
experts in everything from hydraulics to aerodynamics to create a
jet-propelled car with a predicted top speed of 835mph. It has hit speeds of
more than 350mph in testing.
The 56ft-long jet car runs on solid aluminium wheels – rubber tyres couldn’t
handle the heat – and a single test session costs more than $18,000 in worn
parts and burnt fuel. At full throttle the NAE burns 160 gallons of fuel a
minute. It covers a mile in 4.5sec and is capable, says Shadle, of reaching
800mph (37mph faster than Thrust) from standing in 20sec.
The record attempt is planned for this autumn in the Black Rock Desert, which
is one of the few places with a surface long and flat enough to accommodate
the NAE’s six-mile stopping distance, even with its custom-designed magnetic
brakes and two 8ft-wide parachutes.
It will be competing against two other teams, both aiming to take Britain’s
record in the coming months. Rosco McGlashan, who holds the Australian land
speed record of 500mph, is constructing his Aussie Invader 5R, which he
claims will break the 1,000mph barrier. The other team is championing the
late Steve Fossett’s attempt to build a landspeed record-beating car. The
billionaire adventurer disappeared during a solo flight in Nevada last
September.
Of the three bids, Shadle’s is perhaps the shakiest and the bravest, but he is
used to being the plucky underdog. He grew up with four siblings in a tiny
two-room cabin between Seattle and Spokane, in Washington state, where the
family had to pump water from a well and cooked on a wood-burning stove.
His uncles raced jalopies at dirt tracks and Shadle was taking engines apart
before he could drive, later joining other teenager drag racers at the
airport, where you could race on the runway for 50 cents on Friday nights.
He spent several years in the US air force before working for IBM for 31
years.
He rediscovered motor racing in 1989 when he and his son Cameron went to the
Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah to crew for a land speed race team. Then,
several ventures later, in 1995, he joined a team set on building a jet car
called the American Eagle One to compete against the Thrust SSC in the race
to beat the land speed record.
When that project faltered, Shadle and Zanghi decided they could do better.
“We felt that we were smarter than the other guys,” laughs Shadle. “That car
was quite an eyecatcher but it probably would have killed someone if it had
gone over 500mph. We decided we’d be better off on our own.”
If you think you’ve got what it takes to help team North American Eagle beat
the competition, send a 400-word e-mail listing your credentials and a photo
of yourself to landspeedracing@gmail.com.
Be warned, though – Shadle is not entirely resigned to ceding his place in
the record books to a young upstart. “I can always go and take the record
straight back from them,” he chuckles. “Not a problem. We’ll show those
young studs this old guy can still lay down a good run.”
