In this wonderfully retro 1963 film Craig Breedlove breaks the land speed record at the Bonneville salt flats, driving a jet car named Spirit of America.
Breedlove lost the record in 1964 to Tom Green but returned to Bonneville in the same year and took the Spirit of America to over 500mph, reclaiming his record. After his record setting second run the Spirit of America lost its parachute brakes and hurtled out of control for 5 miles across the salt, then took out a series of telephone poles before crashing into a pond at 200mph.
Breedlove survived the accident miraculously uninjured and set both the world speed record and the Guinness World Record for the longest set of skid marks ever made, clearly making him one of the coolest men to ever walk the Earth.
Ben Branch has had his work featured on CNN, Popular Mechanics, the official Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with millions of readers around the world and hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
This Ferrari F50 V12 engine was built to F50 GT specifications along with three chassis and another three or four race-specification engines. The F50 GT (also known as the Ferrari F50 GT1) was built by Ferrari in collaboration with Michelotto and Dallara to compete in the BPR Global GT Series against the likes of the…
The legendary NCR workshop played a significant role in the early competition life of Ducati, perhaps most famously they built the special 900cc race bike that Mike Hailwood piloted to his seemingly impossible comeback win at the the 1978 Formula One TT at the Isle of Man. NCR was founded in 1967 as a small motorcycle…
Isle of Man TT is a feature film by Studio Kippenberger, the world renowned team of filmmakers headed up by Christopher Kippenberger. It’s notoriously difficult to capture the essence of the world’s most famous motorcycle race held annually on the Isle of Man – a self-governing British Crown dependency in the Irish Sea that’s roughly…
The first generation of the Ford Bronco has become a much sought after vehicle by people looking for a simple and easy to maintain classic 4×4 that delivers a good (for the period) on-road and off-road driving experience. The fact that the Bronco is a design icon from the early days of civilian 4x4s does absolutely nothing to hurt its global desirability.
Editor’s Note: This film was transcoded from VHS so it’s not perfect, there are also a couple of black screen sections where I assume the original ad breaks were – I suggest fast forwarding through them. The original Widowmaker Hill Climb took place on a hillside in Draper, Utah. It became a world famous event…
The Mercedes-Benz 560 SEC AMG 6.0 “Wide-Body” was developed by the German tuning house as an all-out muscular German GT car with almost 400 hp on tap, a 0 to 60 mph time of under 6 seconds, and a top speed in excess of 285 km/h. Mercedes-Benz and AMG AMG was founded in 1967 by former…
