R. M. CLARKE
The land speed record. Motorsport distilled to its most fundamental elements - Distance versus Time. There is something intensely appealing about that, for it is the pure essence of speed and little else. There is none of the visceral, adrenaline-pumping thrill of Grand Prix racing about land speed record breaking. Indeed, it is ironic that in a branch of the sport where speeds are astronomically higher than they are in Formula One, there is none of the glamour and the glitz one associates with the 16-ring circus. Instead, the speed seeker all too frequently finds himself and his dedicated team miles from anywhere, in some of the most inhospitable (yet breathtakingly beautiful) parts of the globe. He will spend his time waiting for nature to be benign, eyeing the curvature of the earth, fighting the ennui of isolation and hoping like hell that it isn't going to rain. It is a cold-blooded affair that requires a special kind of courage and determination. To me it has always been an ultimate test, a peculiar measure of an individual, an unusual means of judging the worth of his claim to heroic status even though, almost to a man, such self-aggrandisement is never part of their personal thinking. I don't think I've met a speedking yet who wasn't a reluctant hero. My personal fascination with the land speed record was fired even before my passion for Grand Prix racing, in the days long before I graduated to secondary school. And I give a nod of thanks to the gods of fate that I have been fortunate enough in my professional life to meet many of the people concerned intimately with record breaking, and on two occasions to have been present when Britain pushed the barriers forward. Some speak with awe of the total eclipse of the sun, but there is no sight I have encountered more impressive than that of ThrustSSC charging like a big black locomotive down the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, chased by a roostertail of dust, outrunning its own noise. Nor any sound more emotionally charging than the two sonic booms that took Andy Green and Richard Noble into the history books. As people are wont to say of events that somehow change the world, you had to be there to appreciate it. The sheer splendour and beauty of if all. And was it ever thus. Throughout LSR history, men have savoured such pivotal moments as they have waged war on speed on public roads, racetracks, frozen lakes, beaches, salt flats and alkali playas. Long may they continue their quest. The period covered in this third volume of Brooklands Books Land Speed Record series came after the orgy of speed in the Twenties, and began with the tragedy of Sir Henry Segrave's death attacking the water speed record on Windermere. Perhaps subconsciously spurred by that, Captain Malcolm Campbell continued on his indefatigable course, each year creating a faster version of Bluebird, always seeking something better. In 1931 he would push Segrave's Golden Arrow record to 246 mph, but no sooner had he achieved four miles a minute than 250 became the figure with the magic ring. He achieved that the following year, and reached for 270. He attained that in 1933, and a heavily modified Bluebirds subsequent failure to add more than four miles an hour to that figure finally prompted the angered move from Daytona Beach to the Bonneville Salt Flats. There, in 1935, Campbell would achieve his final mark of 300 mph, and bring the curtain down on the old era. In his wake would come two more Englishmen, but fellow Brooklands racers Captain George Eyston and John Cobb were different characters altogether to the brash Campbell. And different, too, were their machines. Eyston's self-designed Thunderbolt introduced twin engines and the enclosed cockpit; Cobb's brilliant Reid Railton-designed Railton Special the teardrop shape and four-wheel drive. Brute force was no longer sufficient; it was science as much as a heavy right foot that would take Eyston and Cobb through the 300s, and tantalisingly close to the magic 400.
