Ultimate Speed

Ultimate Speed
  1. I got an email last week from Samual Hawley about a new book he wrote titled: The Fast Life & Extreme Cars of Racing Legend Craig Breedlove. He was curious if I would be willing to run an excerpt from the book along with a few images. Being a lifelong Breedlove fan, I couldn’t decline… and here we are.

So, enjoy:

The ’32 Ford coupe belonged to Stan Burnhaley, an older guy, a decent automobile bodywork man. He wanted the flathead engine souped up so he took it to Craig, who at age seventeen already had a local reputation for doing good work. Craig boosted the horsepower by boring out the cylinders and installing bigger pistons and by porting and relieving the combustion chambers to increase the airflow. The rod was rumbling like a barely bridled beast when Stan picked it up—a whole lot of power now packed under the hood. In fact it scared him a little. The days passed and he couldn’t bring himself to floor it, to really open it up like he wanted. Finally he went back to Craig and asked if he’d do the inaugural honors, take the coupe for a test run to see what it could do. Craig, proud of his growing stature as a drag racer, shrugged and said, Sure.

Craig didn’t know much about Stan’s coupe beyond the work he’d done on the engine. And he didn’t ask any questions. He had therefore just broken Drag Rule Number One: know your machine before you race it. But it was understandable, for he was just a teenager. He didn’t have any conception of how easy it was to get killed.

Craig laughs now as he recalls that night. “That’s how stupid I was.”

***

They headed west on Culver Boulevard in the Ford, out of the city to the usual spot among the bean and celery fields, the quarter-mile stretch between the Lincoln overpass and the train tracks. There were three of them—Stan, Craig and Marge—squeezed in the front seat. A few other cars tagged along but none to race against Craig. Craig would be taking a solo run in Stan’s coupe.

They arrived at the overpass. Stan and Marge got out and Craig took the wheel. No seatbelt, no helmet. Niceties like that weren’t a part of street racing. He started the engine he’d worked on. He gunned it, foot on the brake.

Clutch out. Hit the gas. The coupe took off, leaving behind strips of rubber. It shot down Culver past dark fields, the speedometer needle sweeping past 60, 80, 100, the flathead kicking out horses, doing what Craig had rebuilt it to do.

He was going over a hundred when he flashed past the signpost marking the end of the quarter and hit the train tracks crossing the road. It was like running into a wall, for the coupe’s front end was as stiff as a board.

“Stan had put the car together,” says Craig, “and had not put shock absorbers on the front. So when I hit those railroad tracks going over a hundred, that thing took two giant leaps and rolled end over end in the middle of Culver Boulevard and threw me through the roof. In the center of the ’32 coupe there’s a piece of fabric and wood and some chicken wire and stuff that form the top of the car. I went flying through that soft top, came to out in a celery field, a big gash in the top of my head, knocked clean out of my shoes. I was bleeding like a stuck pig and had a really bad concussion.”

Marge came running up, frantic, as Craig staggered to his feet. His hair was matted with blood. He was still stunned and glassy-eyed from being knocked out.

Sirens in the distance. Stan had found a phone and called for help. Thinking he was in big trouble, Craig in his confused state had only one thought: Run.

“I grabbed Marge by the arm and dragged her across these celery fields, trying to ditch the cops. I’m in my bare feet, and the whole time we’re stumbling along I keep forgetting what happened. I’d ask Marge, ‘Marge, what happened?’ And she’d say, ‘You were racing the car,’ and I’d say, ‘Oh yeah…oh yeah.’ And then five minutes later I’d ask her the same thing, over and over, because I was cuckoo from smashing my head.”

Craig dragged Marge all the way back to the Clock Drive-In, where his own car was parked. When they finally got there he got spooked. What if the cops had his car staked out? What if they were waiting to arrest him?

He kept walking, dragging Marge down Venice Boulevard, down past the high school, back to her house. Then he got spooked again and took her to a neighbor’s house instead where she sometimes babysat.

It was the neighbor who phoned Ken Bowman to come and do something about his bloodied and addled stepson. Ken was not happy when he showed up in the family sedan. He drove Craig to Santa Monica Hospital and got his head stitched up.

***

Thirty years later, in the mid 1980s, Craig went to a chiropractor seeking relief from neck pain that had dogged him throughout his life. It had been manageable when he was younger but was now getting worse. As a first step before attempting treatment, the chiropractor took X-rays and sent them out to be developed.

He phoned Craig up the next day, deeply concerned. “What the hell did you do to your neck?”

“I don’t know,” Craig said. “It just hurts.”

“Well, you’ve got a double compression fracture in vertebras five, six and seven.”

It took Craig a few minutes to think back to that crash on Culver Boulevard in 1955. It had done a whole lot more than put a gash in his head. He had broken his neck.

Craig’s condition was considered inoperable when it was first discovered. He would have to live with a badly healed broken neck for another decade and more, getting by on Ibuprofen to ease the discomfort. Finally the pain became so bad that an operation was deemed necessary despite the risks. It was gruesome—the surgeons went in through his throat—but ultimately successful. Craig walks around today with three of his neck vertebra fused together with a titanium plate.

“That crash was actually a good thing,” he says, looking back, “because it slowed me down. It made me respect those things [race cars]. I didn’t think I was invincible anymore.”

***

Reads pretty promising, no? You can get your copy at either of these places:

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

AND, for more land speed archives you can check out Sam’s site here.

 

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