R. M. CLARKE
The land speed record. Motorsport distilled to its most fundamental elements - Distance versus Time. There is something intensely appealing about that, for it is the pure essence of speed and little else. There is none of the visceral, adrenaline-pumping thrill of Grand Prix racing about land speed record breaking. Indeed, it is ironic that in a branch of the sport where speeds are astronomically higher than they are in Formula One, there is none of the glamour and the glitz one associates with the 16-ring circus. Instead, the speed seeker all too frequently finds himself and his dedicated team miles from anywhere, in some of the most inhospitable (yet breathtakingly beautiful) parts of the globe. He will spend his time waiting for nature to be benign, eyeing the curvature of the earth, fighting the ennui of isolation and hoping like hell that it isn't going to rain. It is a cold-blooded affair that requires a special kind of courage and determination. To me it has always been an ultimate test, a peculiar measure of an individual, an unusual means of judging the worth of his claim to heroic status even though, almost to a man, such self-aggrandisement is never part of their personal thinking. I don't think I've met a speedking yet who wasnt a reluctant hero. My personal fascination with the land speed record was fired even before my passion for Grand Prix racing, in the days long before I graduated to secondary school. And I give a nod of thanks to the gods of fate that I have been fortunate enough in my professional life to meet many of the people concerned intimately with record breaking, and on two occasions to have been present when Britain pushed the barriers forward. Some speak with awe of the total eclipse of the sun, but there is no sight I have encountered more impressive than that of ThrustSSC charging like a big black locomotive down the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, chased by a roostertail of dust, outrunning its own noise. Nor any sound more emotionally charging than the two sonic booms that took Andy Green and Richard Noble into the history books. As people are wont to say of events that somehow change the world, you had to be there to appreciate it. The sheer splendour and beauty of if all. And was it ever thus. Throughout LSR history, men have savoured such pivotal moments as they have waged war on speed on public roads, racetracks, frozen lakes, beaches, salt flats and alkali playas. Long may they continue their quest. The period covered in the second volume of Brooklands Books Land Speed Record series was perhaps one of the most exciting of all, The Age of Monsters. From the horror of the Great War speed seekers had been bequeathed an ironically wonderful legacy: the aero-engine. And in a world desperate to embrace brighter things, the men who sought to harness the fearsome horsepower thus liberated found themselves feted as heroes. This was the era which introduced names that would forever be linked with speed. John Godfrey Parry Thomas, the quiet Welsh genius whose technical ability was never fully reflected in the machinery that lack of serious funding forced him to make do with, and who would become the first fatality of record breaking. Captain Malcolm Campbell, the shrewd and determined Scot who would never take no for an answer and would go on to etch his name as the most successful speedking of them all. Major Henry Segrave, the first man to win a Grand Prix in a British car, whose sheer professionalism made his successful attempts on the record seem such slick public relations exercises. The United States, too, had her heroes. Ray Keech, the Indianapolis and dirtcar driver whose abnormal bravery saw him master the saurian crudeness of Jim White's Triplex Special to register America's only successful interruption to the flow of British interwar records. Frank Lockhart, the young kid who could barely read and write, yet whose mechanical genius wrought as much out of the elegant little three-litre supercharged Stutz Black Hawk as 81 litres afforded its Triplex rival. And Lee Bible, the little-remembered barber-cum-mechanic who stepped from the shadows to stand in for Keech and met such a cruel fate while seeking the impossible in the wake of Segrave's last record. An Age of Monsters this may have been, as the record rose from 124 mph to 231, but it was an Age of Heroes, too.
