Craig Breedlove and the Three-Wheel Record Argument

John Cobb Had Left a Proper Record to Beat

John Cobb had driven the piston-powered Railton Mobil Special to 394.196 mph in 1947. Whatever else could be said about Cobb’s machine, nobody needed a committee meeting to determine whether it was an automobile. It had four wheels, and its engines drove them.

Breedlove found a shorter mechanical route. A surplus General Electric J47 could shove the whole vehicle forward without a transmission, driveshaft or heroic attempt to feed thousands of horsepower through tires onto salt.

Point the exhaust backward and the vehicle goes forward.

Very forward.

Breedlove built Spirit of America around the jet. The wheels were mostly there to keep the engine from scraping across Utah.

Then Somebody Opened the Rulebook

The traditional FIA automobile regulations presented two awkward details. A recognized automobile was supposed to have four wheels, and its power was supposed to reach the ground through those wheels.

Spirit of America managed to miss both requirements.

From an engineering standpoint, jet thrust worked beautifully. From a classification standpoint, Breedlove had built a remarkably fast object that did not fit the accepted definition of an automobile.

Going faster than the record was not enough if the organization keeping the record refused to call the thing a car.

Three Wheels Opened Another Door

The motorcycle authorities had a different set of definitions. FIM rules could accommodate three-wheeled machinery, and thrust propulsion did not create the same obstacle.

So Spirit of America had somewhere to belong.

Anyone comparing Breedlove’s long jet-powered projectile with a motorcycle and sidecar might have noticed a few visual differences.

There were, however, three wheels.

Sometimes the rulebook only wants the correct number.

Then He Went 407.447 MPH

Breedlove took Spirit of America to Bonneville in 1962, but steering and development problems kept the first trip from producing the record. More engineering followed, Shell and Goodyear stayed involved, and Breedlove returned in August 1963.

This time the machine behaved long enough to make the argument interesting.

On August 5, Breedlove completed the required runs with a two-way average of 407.447 mph. Cobb’s 394.196 was gone, and Breedlove had become the first man to average more than 400 mph in a land-speed-record attempt.

By the measurement available to anybody holding a stopwatch, Craig Breedlove was now the fastest man on land.

There was only one remaining question.

What had he been driving?

The FIA Had an Answer

The FIA declined to recognize the run as its official automobile land-speed record. Spirit of America had three wheels, used jet thrust and did not drive any of those wheels.

Wrong box.

Breedlove had gone more than 13 mph faster than Cobb’s standing automobile record, but Cobb still held the FIA mark.

Fastest vehicle on land?

Breedlove.

Official fastest automobile?

Not Breedlove.

At 407 mph, speed had become easier to establish than identity.

The Motorcycle People Had Room for Him

The FIM accepted Breedlove’s run under its rules. Nothing about Spirit of America changed. Nobody added a wheel, replaced the jet or slowed the machine down.

Only the organization looking at it changed.

The same vehicle could be too strange to count as an automobile and acceptable to the international motorcycle authority.

Motorsports had turned the world’s fastest machine into a classification exercise.

Then Donald Campbell Went Slower and Got the Car Record

The situation improved considerably as comedy in 1964. Donald Campbell took the turbine-powered Bluebird CN7 to Australia’s Lake Eyre and completed an FIA record attempt.

Bluebird had four wheels. Its turbine drove those wheels. It averaged 403.10 mph.

That was slower than Breedlove’s 407.447.

It was also the official FIA automobile land-speed record.

The official fastest automobile was now slower than a machine everybody already knew had gone faster, because Campbell had brought the correct number of wheels and the approved connection between engine and pavement.

Perfectly logical.

Once definitions outrank the stopwatch.

The Rulebook Eventually Had to Catch Up

Breedlove was not alone for long. Art Arfons and Walt Arfons were also developing jet-powered land-speed machinery, and excluding the fastest machines on earth from the automobile record was becoming increasingly difficult to explain.

The governing rules changed to accommodate thrust-powered vehicles.

Good timing. Breedlove and the Arfons brothers were about to turn 407 mph into yesterday’s news.

In 1964, Tom Green drove Walt Arfons’ Wingfoot Express to 413.20 mph. Art answered with 434.02 in the Green Monster. Breedlove came back at 468.719 and then pushed the same three-wheeled Spirit of America to 526.277 mph.

The machine that had started an international argument over whether it belonged with automobiles or motorcycles had become the first vehicle to average more than 500 mph.

The rules had caught up.

Breedlove was already leaving again.

The Argument Was Never About the Speed

Breedlove eventually replaced the original Spirit with the four-wheeled Spirit of America Sonic 1 and pushed the record beyond 600 mph. By then nobody was spending much time wondering whether Craig Breedlove had gone fast enough.

That was never the interesting part.

The original Spirit of America did exactly what a land-speed machine was supposed to do: it went faster than the existing record.

Considerably faster.

Then the officials had to decide whether the machine underneath him belonged to the right species.

The FIA had one definition. The FIM had another. Breedlove had 407.447 mph, which was difficult to argue with regardless of which rulebook somebody was holding.

Spirit of America did more than outrun the record.

For a while, it outran the definition of a car.