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.
The Duesenberg Model X is the rarest of the production Duesenbergs, the last one came up for public sale in 1996 and it’s thought that just 5 of the original 13 have survived to the modern day. For many Duesenberg collectors the Model X has proven an elusive car, and very few collections contain one….
This feature was written by Jo-Ann McEwan, the editor of In Venus Veritas and a well-known fixture of the vintage motoring scene in Australia. Follow them on Instagram – Kate Peck – Jo-Ann McEwan For those unfamiliar with motorsport or Italian food, targa florio may sound like something one could expect to find on a…
This is episode one of Hargety’s Behind the Wheel series, it focusses on one of the great automotive controversies of the 1960s – will the Corvair kill you? Or more specifically, will the Corvair spin out of control and roll a half dozen times when you steer rapidly at speed. In 1965 an ambitious young…
This 1967 Shelby GT500 Super Snake was a one-off build with a 600+ hp Ford GT40 Mk II 427 V8 – the same engine that had won against the best in the world at the 24 Hours of Le Mans the year before. Goodyear Thunderbolt The car was built as part of a Goodyear marketing stunt for…
Dropping a 6.2 liter Corvette LS3 V8 into a Range Rover Classic may seem like sacrilege to some, but it actually makes a lot of sense. The original Rover Rover was powered by a Rover V8, which itself was based on a 215 cubic inch alloy Buick V8. Buick and Chevrolet are both General Motors…
Introduction: To Build a Better Jeep My first, and only, working experience with an Austin Champ was on a farm down in Australia where I was helping the property owner with some vermin control. We were racing across a sheep paddock doing at least 30 mph, although it felt like a lot more, in hot…
