Even though I was born at Castle A.F.B. in 53 in Atwater, Merced was where we all went to cruise 17th street when we were old enough to drive and have cars, thanks for this post, brings back a lot of memories.
1965 Mickey Thompson Drag Race Fontana Drag City Owner/Driver Doug Robinson appears to be pushing his Horsepower Engineering KRLA dragster down the drag strip in his fire suit. 1965 Bonneville Land Speed Record Attempts. Walter Arfons, brother of Arthur Arfons, attempted to break the record in a rocket-propelled vehicle dubbed the Wingfoot Express. 1965 Nationals Indy tech was in parking lot across the street Drag New Meet at Lions 1965 - Bonneville Land Speed Record Attempts. NSU produced this twin-engined streamliner with took the record for the sports class driven by Wilhelm Herz.
1965 NASCAR Darlington Southern 500 Stock Car Race 1965 NHRA Nationals - Indianapolis Maico special Spirit of America Jet Land Speed Car - Craig Breedlove Wheel from ^^^^ 1955 Indianapolis 500 Roger Ward's team before the race.
TV Tommy Anderson bros & Bernstein British auto racing pioneer and entrepreneur Sydney Allard (1910 - 1966) sits inside one of his custom-built drag racing machines, RAF Silverstone, England, September 10, 1963.
View attachment 4355434 Walt Arfons "Wingfoot Express", parked in front of one of the hangers at what was once Wendover AFB, located in Wendover, UT. When I was working for Craig Breedlove in 1965, Walt, Art and Craig shared time on the salt, each trying to break the World Land Speed Record. Our Team eventually was the winner, in that we set a LSR of 600.601 MPH (a two run average), which stood for several years... Walt's car was actually very interesting, regardless of the reality that it did not run very fast. Bobby Tatroe was the driver (Walt never drove). Bobby was a great guy and very friendly. Walt on the left, Bobby on the right. Here is the car on the salt. In some respects, the car was a little crude (the rear fenders for instance), while in other respects, it was ahead of it's time. Note the dual tires in the front. Putting them together like that presented a much smaller aerodynamic entry, versus having them located at the sides of a wider vehicle (like Breedlove's car). Having four wheels (rather than three wheels) classified the car as a "car". Tecnically, Breedlove's three wheeled jet car was never classifed as an "automobile", but as a motorcycle with a side car. The difference was meaningless, as the official LSR refers to the Worlds Fastest Vehicle, although they race under two seperate sanctioning bodies, the FIA for Automobiles, and the FIM for Motorcycles. Here's where things got a little dicey. The original configurtation had the power coming from 15 JATO bottles, all in the rear of the car. With a 1000 lbs of thrust (per bottle), the power was there. The issue was that the thrust only lasted for about 10 seconds (or a little more), which was not enough to get the car to accelerate fast enough to break any records. Walt then mounted 10 more bottles, 5 on each side, facing out an angle, which in theory would give the car about 10,000 lbs more thrust than Breedlove's J-79 jet engine (rated at about 15,000 lbs.). Here is a photo in the original configuration, before the side mounted bottle configuration (running without the rear wheel covers). And here with the updated configuration. If it looks like some of the bottles are not working, that's because they weren't. Walt had issues from day one trying to get all the bottles lit at the same time, which to my knowledge (and I witnessed every run they made in 1965), never happend. If JATO bottles could run for a couple of minutes, and all 25 would work at the same time, it might have been a different story, but even with rocket power, it takes some time to get up to speed, especially once you get past 500 MPH. With Breedloves car, we used a 5 mile run-up to the first beams (the timing distance is 1 mile). Once in the "flying mile", the time between entering the mile and exiting the mile was (are you sitting down?) six (6) seconds (actually, it was 5.993 seconds)...
The Jalopy Journal
