A NEED FOR SPEED

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