It all started in October 1983, when Project Thrust was rained out from the Bonneville Salt Flats on the east side of Nevada (and the west side of Utah) near Wendover. Driver Richard Noble and his team of Brits relocated their rocket-car operations to the flat and extensive Black Rock Desert in northwest Nevada. They set up a 10-mile straightaway on the cracked-mud playa with a 10-mile overrun -- in case the braking parachutes failed to deploy. Noble cranked up the Rolls Royce Avon engine (with afterburners) of his Thrust II rocket car and attained a speed of 633.606 miles per hour. That finally broke a 13-year land-speed record of 622.407, set at Bonneville in 1971 by Gary Gabelich.
(A second record was set when a crew member towing an outhouse to the raceway hit 70 mph, establishing a world speed record for portable toilets.)
The Black Rock's affair with speed was rekindled in summer 1997 as Noble the Brit and former record-holder Craig Breedlove (407 mph in 1966) of the U.S. made plans to face off on the playa in the first-ever head-to-head challenge for the land-speed record. By August '97, the Noble and Breedlove camps had received permission from the BLM to construct a dozen parallel 15-mile tracks on the Black Rock. Plans called for the teams to leapfrog from track to track in a succession of speed trials throughout September (or until the start of the rainy season, whichever came first).
The BLM imposed a series of conditions on the racers intended to address complaints from the Paiute tribe about damage to cultural sites; environmentalists over possible impacts to wildlife; and history buffs over proximity to nearby emigrant trails. By 1997, the ever-popular Black Rock simply wasn’t as remote as it’d been in 1983. By the late ‘90s, the speed with which permits were issued was as important as the speed of the vehicles themselves.
Craig Breedlove had tried to break Richard Noble's record a year earlier, but the BLM held up his permit, forcing him to attempt his run in windy conditions. His hopes for a new record, though luckily not his brains, were dashed when a gust lifted the nose of his Spirit of America rocket car (clocked at 667 mph), sending him careening through the world’s fastest -- and longest -- U-turn.
Setting a record requires a car to make one run down the track, refuel, and return within 60 minutes. Official speeds are averaged from the elapsed time minus the midway pit stop. So even though Breedlove exceeded Noble's record by more than 40 mph, his 1996 time didn’t count.
A month before the 1997 event, the Breedlove and Noble camps were downplaying any hint of a personal or international rivalry as hard as the media were playing it up. Their respective representatives said both men were eyeing the record -- and the 741.4 mph sound-barrier speed -- not each other. The fact that both teams ended up on the Black Rock at the same time, however, seemed designed to boost public and corporate (sponsorship) interest in the event. The pressure was also on to burst through Mach 1 by a land vehicle in '97 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Chuck Yeager’s first supersonic flight.
Breedlove, a 62-year-old grandfather, was set to pilot Spirit of America, which boasted a single jet engine with afterburners from an F-4 fighter that could deliver 48,000 horsepower. That was more horse than all the racers in the 1995 Indianapolis 500 combined.
Noble, also in his 60s, but by then an organizer and front man, enlisted Andy Green, a Royal Air Force pilot, to take the wheel of Thrust II, a sinister-looking twin-jet design. Resembling a jet fighter without wings, the thing looked capable of accelerating to Mach 1 and more.
The Breedlove team began test runs on the playa on September 6, two days before the Noble team. Spirit of America was clocked at 330 mph before engine problems delayed further runs till Sept. 19, when Breedlove hit 381 mph. After a series of technical (and financial) challenges, Spirit of America was clocked at 531 on October 12.
Noble’s team arrived at the Black Rock with the 10-ton Thrust II on September 8 and the race was on. Andy Green’s first runs on Sept. 10 achieved 428 and 517 mph. For the next two weeks, problems with the suspension, power converter, hydraulic system, computer, and weather postponed the British team’s quest. On Sept. 22, Thrust II completed two runs at 618 and 653 mph, but they didn’t count toward breaking the record as it was more than an hour between them.
The next day, Sept. 23, Green revved the car up to 693 and 719, but again missed the record books on the same technicality.
On Sept. 25, it finally became official: two runs of 700 and 728 miles per hour within an hour of each other to set the new land-speed world record at an average of 714 mph, 80 mph faster than the previous record.
But Noble’s team didn’t rest on its laurels, not by a long shot. On October 14, 1997, one day before the 50th anniversary of Yeager’s breaking through the sound barrier in a jet, Thrust II hit supersonic speeds of 760 and 764 mph, breaking the sound barrier on land for the first time in history. When the speed of the rocket car exceeded Mach 1, it let off a light sonic boom; much of the noise was absorbed by the acoustically soft desert. It didn’t, however, set a new record: The runs were 61 minutes apart!
