In his piece on the possibly-JR series of X-toys, Ferryman briefly mentioned the
origin of the X-50 Racer. Which I fear I must've missed at the time, so I
was pretty excited at discovering it all for myself the other day.
In
what turned out to be a nice example of serendipity, I spotted a
(recent) metal decorative piece representing a world-speed record car at
a friend's house. Who had no idea that it was based on something real
(and ditto for the rather nice (but also recent) deco-style Mosquito
bomber on his desk). So coming home, I had a google for him to find it
was close to Campbell's 1928 Bluebird record car.
Looking
for a good picture I stumbled upon a slideshow at the Time Magazine
archives, and had a look at the rest out of curiosity. To my amazement I
then saw a blurry but very familiar shape in another picture, captioned
as being Craig Breedlove's first Spirit of America of 1963. I had known
of a later Breedlove car on four wheels, but this three-wheeled vehicle
was a dead ringer for the X-50 Racer minus its wings.
Always
interested in some documentation, I ended up getting the October 1963
issue of Hot Rod magazine, which has a good feature on the vehicle and
its success, as well as an advert by Goodyear (one of the sponsors with
Shell) that yielded the pictures shown here.
What I
learned was that Breedlove wasn't the first to try jet power in a
record car, or on three wheels for that matter. But he was the first to
try and get his record officially recognised in some way. "In some way",
because the FIA (International Automobile Federation abbreviated in
French) wouldn't recognise any of these vehicles - first for only having
three wheels, but more importantly because the engine doesn't drive at
least two of those wheels. Their motorcycling colleagues over at the FIM
took a more imaginative view, and ratified the record while recognising
the Spirit as a three-wheeled motorcycle and sidecar combination!
And so
Breedlove's dream and hard work resulted in history being made. And as
luck would have it, you can actually see him doing so on youtube (though without the original voice-over - that version has just been taken down due to copyright issues).
Article and research by Paul Vreede
Article and research by Paul Vreede
4 comments:
Great article, and obviously the prototype for the toy!
I have the same toy, moulded in black and sold as a Batplane. The Batplane is a JR.
Thats great - that catagorically nails the X-Series as JR 21 - any chance you can send us some photos ?
I should point out that all text, pics and research are by Paul Vreede. I just posted it.
Post a Comment