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 day I went in to buy my new Datsun 1600 I was in all probability the most unhappy new car buyer on the face of the earth. That was not to do with the Datsun 1600 being in some way a misery causing car. The reason for the truckload of unhappiness was that I’d been negotiating to buy an Austin-Healey 3000 in a private sale, and the seller had bailed out of the sale at the last minute.
The BMW Alpina B7 S Turbo had big shoes to fill when it was introduced in 1981 as a replacement for the BMW Alpina B7 – a car that was the fastest series production 4-door car in the world when it was released in 1978. Alpina Alpina is a German automaker founded in 1965, though…
The Venturi 400 GT remains one of the fastest cars ever designed and built in France, in fact when it was released in 1992 it was the fastest and most powerful French road car in history. The two-seat 400 GT was designed by Gerard Godfroy specifically to compete with the likes of the Lotus Esprit…
This Ford Bronco restomod has been comprehensively built from the ground up to be something the factory never originally offered in 1969 – a four-door six-seater with 460 hp, air conditioning and a keyless push-button start. The Ford Bronco The Ford Bronco was initially conceived by Donald N. Frey, one of the men responsible for…
In motor racing circles there are a few things that are invariably spoken of with only with deep reverence. Two of those things are Paul Newman, and the Porsche 911 Carrera RSR 3.0. Paul Newman – Race Car Driver (And Part-Time Actor) Although it isn’t commonly known outside motoring circles, Paul Newman had a career…
This Husqvarna Model 30 A is a custom motorcycle of sorts – it was built by a privateer racer before Husqvarna offered their own factory-built version – the Model 350DT (DT for “dirt track”). The 1920s and ’30s were an important, formative time for dirt track racing – also called flat track, circle track, and…
