Already Broken

A requiem for speed records

- By Mike Duff

The first recognized automotive speed record was set in 1898 by the French aristocrat Count Charles-François Gaston Louis Prosper de Chasseloup-Laubat. He entered an electric Jeantaud in a test organized by an early auto magazine and covered the flying kilometer in well under a minute. Like 57 seconds. Astounding.

That's 39.24 mph! That was barely faster than a galloping horse and much slower than the speediest locomotives of the era. Yet the car would soon overwhelm the train. In 1904, an elegant 4-4-0 steamer belonging to England's Great Western Railway became the first vehicle in the world to (disputably) break the 100mph barrier, albeit briefly and on a falling gradient. Two months later, Louis Rigolly, another Frenchman, pushed the automotive record to 103.56 mph in a 13.5-liter Gobron-Brillié race car. From that point on, the land speed record has been held by loosely defined automobiles and the occasional rocket-propelled sled.

The bar soon jumped as increasingly powerful cars, and increasingly brave drivers flung themselves at glory. Benchmarks fell quickly: 150 mph in 1925, 200 mph in 1927, and 300 mph in 1935, when Malcolm Campbell took his Blue Bird V, powered by a supercharged Rolls-Royce aero engine making a reputed 2300 hp, to the salt at Bonneville. But record-setting also proved dangerous; onetime record holders J.G. Parry-Thomas, a Brit, in 1927 and Frank Lockhart, an American, in 1928 both died during failed attempts. Many other record-setters were killed chasing ever further-out benchmarks before World War II.