Farewell to Craig Breedlove, America's King of Speed
He was our earthbound Neil Armstrong. Craig Breedlove took giant leaps for us into the ethereal unknown on the salt flats of Bonneville, strapping inside handmade rockets that emerged from his mind, making history as the first human to fire past the 400-mph mark on land. Eclipsing 500 mph was next. And then it was flirting with the sound barrier as hurtling past 600 mph was achieved by this son of Southern California.
Born in 1937 in Los Angeles, Breedlove—Land Speed Record racing’s biggest and most enduring star—died this week at the age of 86, bringing an end to one of the sport’s most celebrated chapters.
Coming of age following World War II, Breedlove fell in love with the automobile in the exact place and time when hot rodding and drag racing cultures sprang to life. Before his first visit to Bonneville and his final run on the Black Rock Desert, Breedlove’s legend began when he purchased his first car at the age of 13, testing his mettle against others in straight line dashes on local city streets.
The Mojave Desert hosted Breedlove’s initial foray into LSR pursuits at 16; with his supercharged 1934 Ford V-8 howling and kicking up a dusty trail, 154 mph was achieved by the high school student. By 20, with Utah’s famous salt bed beneath his feet, Breedlove transitioned from child savant to serious competitor, raising his bar to 236 mph in a streamliner powered by a supercharged Oldsmobile V-8.
Increasingly drawn to the conceptual side of the sport, Breedlove found a perfect place to express his curiosity while amassing the mechanical, aerodynamic, and design skills required to chase loftier thresholds of speed. Taking a job at the Douglas Aircraft company, Breedlove’s immersion in aeronautics would inform the remainder of his life’s passion and pursuits as the limits of piston-engined creations reached its end.
Breedlove drew a proverbial line in the sand in 1959. For $500, he took possession of an ex-military jet engine and commenced the process of creating his legacy. Steeped in patriotism, Breedlove named his effort 'Spirit of America,’ which fit the wonderment-filled era as LSR competition captured the world’s imagination at the dawn of the 1960s.
In three- and four-wheeled hand-formed missiles–fashioned by Breedlove and friends in a growing assembly of hot rodders and aerospace veterans who cut, welded, and riveted the imaginative experiments together–the Spirit of America crew were our enduring explorers. Each adventure to a miles-long proving ground with the latest machine presented equal opportunities for failure or glory. An acceptance of LSR’s other participant, the ever-present risk of death and calamity that rides, waiting to strike with a structural failure or strong crosswind, was also required.
In a three-year span from 1963 through 1965, Breedlove’s successive conquering of the 400-, 500-, and 600-mph barriers made him a household name. Blessed with the looks of a movie star, his LSR exploits caught the attention of Hollywood and New York where television appearances and cover features in sports and lifestyle magazines and routine newspaper coverage brought him the same kind of fame that elevated fellow racers Dan Gurney, A.J. Foyt, and Mario Andretti to national acclaim.
Barring the infamous crash in 1964 that nearly sank Breedlove when the parachutes failed on the Spirit of America and sent him on a five-mile journey culminating in the vehicle knocking down a telephone pole and nosing into a lake, he escaped major injuries throughout a career spanning five decades.
Along with Walt and Art Arfons, Gary Gabelich, and other domestic land-speed heroes and record-setters, Breedlove took pride in defending America’s ownership of all major LSR speed titles. Breedlove’s 600.601-mph blast stood until 1970 when Gabelich’s Blue Flame moved the new standard out to 622.407 mph. As the 1970s beckoned, the country’s fascination with land-speed daredevils started to wane, but that didn’t stop England’s Richard Noble from chasing history at Bonneville in 1983.
Nearly 20 years after Breedlove first hurtled over the 600-mph line, freshly secured by the Briton, LSR’s new king stood tall on the 633.47 mph produced by his Rolls-Royce turbojet-powered Thust2. Breedlove’s response was by no means immediate; taking form in the early 1990s, corporate support was sought to build the most ambitious Spirit of America to date.
Backers in the form of Ford, Shell, and the burgeoning cable TV outlet SpeedVision underwrote the effort Breedlove assembled to reclaim the record from Noble while moving the number into the stratosphere by going supersonic. Chasing the sound barrier with a two-way run north of 750 mph would be necessary. It was the only stated goal for Breedlove’s Californian crew, but the pursuit didn’t go unnoticed by Noble who commissioned the Thrust SSC endeavor to parry Spirit of America’s run on its LSR crown.
Conceived and fabricated by a number of Breedlove’s tenured crew from his Rio Vista shop, the analog missile was regularly documented in video segments aired on the forerunner to the SPEED Channel and covered in words and pictures by the peerless race car designer-turned-photojournalist Pete Brock. We were back in the LSR business with the former teenager—approaching 60 and the golden years—staring out of the cockpit with one mission in mind.
Pitted against each other in dueling compounds erected a few hundred feet from each other in the amphitheater of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, Breedlove’s last LSR effort fell short of its target as the upper reaches of 600 mph were achieved; testing in 1996 proved the Spirit of America could attain 675 mph, but an aerodynamic imbalance—possibly exacerbated by gusts of wind—caused the pearl white machine to lift one of its outrigger rear wheels off the ground and continue rolling until the nose, with Breedlove at the tip of the listing rocket, began to dig into the sun-dried desert basin and cause extensive damage as it shed hundreds of miles per hour through grinding friction before it came to a halt.
Repairs pushed Spirit of America’s return to the latter stages of 1997. Outfitted with new electronic instrumentation on the dash connected to load-calculating sensors in the wheels, Breedlove had small lights affixed in his line of sight that would illuminate if the front or rear wheels measured anything close to zero weight through the data system. On one early run, the right-rear wheel triggered the warning light and Breedlove throttled the jet engine down and abandoned the seven-mile journey.
It wouldn’t be the last outing for the Breedlove and the Spirit of America, but with Noble and pilot Andy Green making immense strides with the computer-controlled ThrustSSC, news soon circulated the planet as images and video of the sound barrier being broken by the ultimate expression of LSR technology as the numbers 763.035 mph were written into history where it remains unmatched.
Undeterred, Breedlove painted a target on 800 mph and initiated another round of fundraising which proved more challenging than the last; being second to go supersonic proved a hard sell, and by 2006, the last Spirit of America produced by the LSR icon was sold and never revisited its natural habitat on salt or playa.
Inducted into all manner of motor racing- and speed-related halls of fame for his pioneering and steadfast contributions to the sport, Breedlove spent his final years being lavished in reverie and admiration.
America’s last speed king now rests.
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