All American Dream

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Excuse us for continuously pestering you about American history-in-the-making here, but once again we couldn’t get other then being mesmerized about this day in 1965. On 15 November that year, a 28-year old all-American boy called Craig Breedlove, set a new land-speed record at just over 600mph. This in a car aptly named the Spirit of America. They were the prosperous years, when anything must have seemed possible. For nearly twenty years, the fastest man on earth had been Englishman John Cobb, but in the mid-1960s hot rodder Breedlove and his Spirit of America passed the land-speed title around like a hot potato with another American machine named The Green Monster, driven by Tom Green and Art Arfons. Together they broke the record six times in one year.

In October 1964, Breedlove became the first man to go faster than 500 mph and he nearly died in the process: The Spirit of America’s parachute snapped off and Breedlove crashed. But he escaped through the car’s roof with a new record: 526.28 mph. Arfons shattered that record a year later, but another week passed and Breedlove hit the 600 mph mark. “Boy, it’s a great feeling”, he said afterwards. In between the stints he also set some speed records with the Daytona Shelby Coupe above and was contracted by American Motors Corporation (AMC) next to prepare their high-performance cars for speed and endurance records. Boy. Did anyone say Let’s America great again?

(Words Jeroen Booij, picture Jalopyjournal.com)

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