It is a little after eight in the morning on 15 October 1964, out in the bleached abyss of the Bonneville Salt Flats in the Utah desert. Craig Breedlove is strapping himself to a J47 jet engine that once took a fighter plane up into the sky during the Korean War, only now it is under the hood of a car, the Spirit of America. In a few seconds, he is going to try driving it faster than anything has ever moved on land. Breedlove didn’t sleep much last night; he dreamed that he was going to die.
In 1962, drag racer Glenn Leasher tried to set the Land Speed Record with a salvaged J47 engine of his own, in a car called Infinity. He had only ever driven piston-engined cars, and these desert rockets were still a total mystery to everyone who brought them out here. There were no industry standards or rigorous factory tests, there were just whatever new depths of insanity these men decided to explore. They were not new-age math geniuses or engineering wizards; they were dreamers and greaseballs, hot-rodders and daredevils with skin that was tanned jerky-maroon from all those hours standing out in the desert. They were not astronauts or fighter pilots, they were not the delirious academics of the Manhattan Project. They were men whose governing romance was with engines and the gut-melting thrill of pushing a machine to right up to the point of rupture and then coming back to try it again. On Leasher’s third run of the day, at close to 475 mph, the Infinity burst into flames, ripping the aluminum body to shrapnel and killing Leasher.
But Breedlove could imagine no life besides this. He never went to college because this was all he wanted, building cars with whatever he could find, filing down metal scraps, screwing it all together in his father’s garage, and then driving what he built as fast as it could go. He worked as a welder and a fireman and rode his unemployment benefits till they cut him off just to pay for it all. His first wife divorced him and his second wife kept the family afloat working as a drive-in waitress. In 1959 he found a surplus store out on Alameda Boulevard in Los Angeles that had purchased about 400 old J47s after the war was over. He bought one for the scrap metal price and decided he was going to put it on wheels. “Four years,” he said. “Four years of seven days a week, 18 hours a day—no movies, no going out to dinner, no TV, nothing but work.”
And in 1963 he drives that car 407 mph, a world record, and it makes him a very famous man. He had a gleeful, bright-white smile and his hair looked perfect even when he pulled his helmet off. He was making $100k a year now, living in the hills in Los Angeles and lounging by a swimming pool, and when the mail came in it was addressed like this: THE FASTEST MAN ON WHEELS, U.S.A.
When the Apollo program imagined the future, they saw an infinite frontier out there in the stars to be discovered and understood. But for Breedlove and his mechanics, this was all just a dare and some gasoline. In early speed tests, they did not understand what “pounds of thrust” meant, only horsepower, so they had to have a simple equation to translate it all for them. But there was a spirit here that was as pure as any that was roaring in the heart of sixties America: How badly do you wish to make a name for yourself, and how much are you willing to risk? How much do you think this thing can handle?
"I wanted to do something more than just have a job and live a regular life,” Breedlove said. “I felt like if I went on with the fire department, I'd just live my life and die, and nobody would ever know I was here.”
As Breedlove sat there on 15 October his 1963 record had already been broken three times—once by Tom Green (413.2 mph), once by Art Arfons (434.03 mph), and once by Breedlove himself, just two days prior, a 468.719-mph run out here on the salt flats. But there were still a few weeks left till the rainy season came, and there was still this car, and nothing else to do but see how much it had left.
There is a shrieking whistle as the engine comes to life and then Breedlove takes off. A first run that hits 513.33 mph, and then a second, this one even faster; “he’s really standing on it,” radios a mechanic. There is a magnificent, annihilating sight outside the windshield of a car moving over 500 mph. You have been in planes moving this fast, but in the sky there are no points of reference, nothing rushing beneath you, just what feels like this dreary purgatory at a new altitude. But you know cars, they have taken you to a great many places and you are familiar with what the Earth is supposed to look like from in there. You have pulled up to her front door on a Friday night in them, inched through drive-thrus in them, felt them clinging around the curves of empty backroads in them.
To glimpse the world as Breedlove did from the cockpit cameras, hurtling across all that hot salt and sand, moving that fast feels like you are breaking into another dimension, like you are somewhere in a sacred zone between life and death.
While Breedlove is on his second run, the mechanic radios again. “I see a smoke trail. Something came off of the car. He lost his chute, he lost his chute.” And then the narrator of the video, in a plain voice. “He’s going too fast for the brakes to hold. He’s out of control.”
Breedlove hits an embankment, and then a telephone pole, and then into a small lake, skipping on the surface once before coming to a halt, and somewhere while the car was airborne, he unlatched the canopy so he could climb out. There were pickup trucks and white Cadillacs that sped out to help haul him out of the wreck, and Craig’s father was heading out with them. But from the moment they arrived, Craig was hooting and had a pitch of hysteria in his voice, describing for everyone how close he came to the edge. “I tried to hit the brakes and the brakes just wouldn’t go, put the brakes all the way down—nothing, no brakes at all. Then I hit my other chute and nothing happened. I looked up, I hit the water, and that water starts slowing me down—I’d seen this big old bank coming I thought oh nooo, I hit the bank and I just went right over the top and I’m flying like 25, 30 feet in the air.”
This was the nightmare that Breedlove had the night before but it was also, in a sick way, the fantasy—the moment when soul breaks free from machine, when all barriers separating man from Pure Speed were gone, when there was only you and the rocket, at its mercy and holding on. Breedlove said this in a 1996 interview: “Speed can also be menacing. All my crashes share the sensation of losing control, and a healthy dose of fear shoots through me. To survive, I must calmly remember to remain just a good witness while surrounded by violent speed. Pure speed, like pure light, is a spectrum of vivid experiences that happen in an instant but stay with you for a lifetime.”
By the end of 1964, Arfons had the record again. Breedlove’s Spirit of America was last seen being craned out of a lake, and the racing season on the Salt Flats would be over before he could build a new one. The first Spirit of America had taken over three years to build; to get its replacement ready for the 1965 season, they had seven months. “We worked seven days a week, just outrageous hours,” Breedlove said.
“Art came back and broke my 526 record, that’s what the record was that day, and he had run 536, and so I needed a new car.”
And then there it was. The Spirit of America Sonic I. There was nothing much to the car. It looked almost like an enormous, Pepsi can-blue mechanical pencil. On the dashboard there are just five dials, and what looks like a bent bicycle handle to steer with. The sheer size of the Sonic I gives it almost the presence of private plane or a limousine, with these vents that look almost like tinted windows, but inside all that aluminum was just this big-ass deluxe cheeseburger of a jet engine, almost literally a man sitting on the head of a rocket, a cowboy wrangling a bucking bronco out in the desert rodeo.
There was a camera fastened inside a window of the Sonic I, and that year when Breedlove touched 600 mph the car and windowpane began to jostle so ferociously you could not make sense of anything at all, just a scramble of bouncing lines, the Utah mountains appearing to trampoline on the horizon.
“On the 608 mile-an-hour run we had absolutely zero weight on the front wheels of the car,” he said. “We looked at the recorders afterwards and just shook our heads because we were just on the verge of flying.”
The Sonic I was a triumph of mechanical improv, a ferocious Frankenstein of military engineering and audacious gearhead modification brought to life in a pit crew-like scramble to beat a deadline, and the car’s legacy is partly that. A rocket from a different kind of space race. But to Breedlove it was more than history, more than a record; it was a terror and a fantasy, something that kept him up in the middle of the night—somewhere way out in the desert, one more ticket to oblivion.
