With the Bonneville salt flats in Utah echoing to the sound of a new land speed record achieved by a British team, the timing could not be more apposite. The historical legacy of the challenge of pushing the envelope of pace is being dusted down and made public in the form of an extraordinary archive from more than a century of record-breaking machines and their singularly driven pilots. On Tuesday, JCB’s Hydromax car took the hydrogen-powered International Automobile Federation (FIA) land speed record, reaching 406.320mph at Bonneville.
Appropriately the car was driven by Andy Green, the former RAF wing commander who holds the current outright land speed record of 763.035mph, set in 1997 in the ThrustSSC car in which he also became the only person to have broken the sound barrier on land. His efforts in the ThrustSSC and now the JCB Hydromax join a rich history of land speed records, the archive of which is being re-examined, much of it seeing the light of day for the first time. The FIA is in the process of digitising for public viewing more than two million documents and pictures from its archive.
Its collection relating to the land speed record, held in the FIA storage facility in Valleiry, France, is one of the first projects to be undertaken and will be made public shortly. The battle to be the fastest had begun shortly after the invention of the motorcar at the end of the 19th century, but initially under electric combustion power. The Frenchman Count Gaston de Chasseloup-Laubat set the first mark in 1898 at 39.24mph in a Jeantaud car but the baton was swiftly taken up.
Belgium’s Camille Jenatzy joined the fray and the pair swapped records for two years until Jenatzy broke the 100kmh mark in his car La Jamais Contente (“The Never Contented”), a striking, torpedo-shaped beast in which Jenatzy sat bolt upright from the knees upward. What followed became a furious competition as men and women in machines from around the world vied to take the top spot and swiftly caught the public’s imagination. In what might be considered the competition’s golden age, the British were front and centre.
Kenelm Lee Guinness took the record in a Sunbeam 350HP after the first world war, followed by four more successes from Malcolm Campbell, the latter becoming a household name and a key player in a frenetic contest in the 1930s as he and his fellow Britons George Eyston and John Cobb went at it. When the decade began the record stood at 231mph. By its close it was 367mph.
The archive reflects a period when the exploits were front page news. Pictures of Cobb’s Railton Special being assembled speak evocatively of the time while the technical report of his records included understated remarks noting that the course was “unusually rough”. Photos of Campbell’s efforts in 1935 at Bonneville include a picture of the time scorer and calculator, with a handwritten note on the back reading “early morning – clothes not yet removed”, and of his Blue Bird car hurtling across the salt.
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