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.”

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