That's not what I said. It's what I wanted to say. Instead I just put my thumb up in the air and smiled, like I was ready. Like you can be ready for a ride in a jet-powered car, a ride that's going to take you from a standing start to 300-plus miles per hour in about 3.5 seconds.
I do want the record to reflect that I wasn't crying when they sealed up the cockpit, no matter what the crew says. My eyeballs were sweating, that's all. First they put me in a flame-retardant suit (not flame-proof, let's be clear about that), then they cinch-belted me into the cockpit and THEN they handed me the release form, so they'd know where to FedEx the pieces should the car decide to become an aircraft.
So how did I wind up in a needle-like car powered by an engine that used to belong to an F-4 fighter? Marketing, baby. It's a beautiful thing. It started with a group of backyard hot-rodders from Washington State, guys who liked to build cars for drag racing and off-road and probably souped-up supermarket carts, when they were kids. Anyway, they're sitting around one day and somebody starts talking about the land speed record. And they laugh. And then they talk about it some more, and they're not laughing so much. Pretty soon they're drawing pictures on napkins. And the military surplus engine comes in. And the chassis starts coming together. And all of a sudden they're thinking, 'Hey, this thing might just work.'
But how to get the money to finish the thing and actually try to break the land speed record? Money requires publicity. And then they REALLY came up with a special idea: A second seat. That way they could take sponsors and media types for rides. So when I heard they were willing to take writers for rides IF they had a place to get their stories published, I called and told the team Maxim wanted me to take a ride and write about it. Which wasn't exactly the precise, absolute truth. The truth was that Maxim didn't know anything about it until I called and told them I had talked myself into what might turn out to be the fastest car in the world. When Maxim said yes, I had just bluffed my way into the ride of my life.
After flying 3,000 miles and sleeping in my rental car, I watched them roll the 40-foot car out of the trailer. The first thing I wondered was "how the hell are they going to keep that thing on the ground?" The answer was that they weren't sure. They were kind of just feeling their way forward, going a little faster with every test run. Turns out they hadn't done any fancy wind-tunnel testing (no money for that). They hadn't even built a scale model (no money for that either). They didn't seemed bothered.
"You build it horizontially stable and vertically stable and that's it, pretty much," said Rick Kikes, the car's designer. "You don't want to overcomplicate things." At that point I started wondering if Kikes and the others just drew it up in the dirt with Popsicle sticks. But they were a little more sophisticated than that, and more important, they were very experienced. They're old-fashioned hod rodders who fell in love with jets because of their simplicity and their brutal power. The car, called the North American Eagle, is the seventh jet car built by Kikes. (I was afraid to ask what happened to the other six). Everybody on the Seattle-based Eagle team, from Kikes to project manager Ed Shadle, had run cars at the Bonneville Salt Flats, built dragsters or funny cars, or otherwise paid their racing dues. Their driver, Les Shockley, is a semi-retired grandfather of five who had probably logged more jet-car runs than anybody in the world, and whose jet-truck driving recently earned him the title of the best airshow act in the country.
What they hadn't done was approach the speed of sound, which at sea level is about 750 miles per hour. If they were going to go faster than anybody else, that's what they were going to have to do. But not today. Not with me. Today was more testing.
What they had been doing was "low speed" test runs that would bring them up to around 300 mph or so - not all that fast. The impressive part is how quickly you get there. The acceleration is about the same as a top-fuel dragster, for the first second or two, and then the afterburner on the jet car takes over in a brutal way. At that point the Eagle accelerates faster than a jet fighter (because it's lighter) or just about anything else on Earth. On afterburner the General Electric J-79 engine develops about 48,000 horsepower. A top fuel dragster might put out about 5,000, but not for long. They're tempermental, fragile and they need rebuilding after almost every run.
To claim the world speed record, Kikes figured it will take a burn of about 15 seconds, which would take them to about 700 miles per hour, not far from the speed of sound, the point at which some engineers still think shock waves would bounce a car right off the ground.
My ride today, which a much shorter burn time, will mean we'll pull about 2.5Gs, roughly equivalent to being shot into the air off an aircraft carrier's catapult. That's a lot less than I experienced while flying in an Air National Guard F-106 during combat practice, but more than I ever pulled in a car.
Once the car was in place at the starting line, Shockly and I suited up and climbed in. The wind was light. It looked like a go. The runway, at an old airstrip in a remote part of Washington State, looked incredibly short to me - more like a drag strip.
*** When they light the engine, my adrenaline spikes. There's nothing I can do now except try to stay fairly calm. The engine, about 25 feet from my head, kind of moans at low rpm. It's a creepy noise, that whine. I'm used to the sound of race-tuned piston engines, which are lumpy and sputtery at anything close to idle. The jet engine just whines smoothly. Then Shockley gradually adds throttle. The pitch of the whine edges higher in increments. As the pitch increases so does the volume. The whine becomes a shriek. Now the sound is going right into that special place in my brain that produces adrenaline. Inside the engine, the turbine blades are sucking oxygen and then mashing it, compressing it, mixing it with kerosene and then it's lit, and the car begins trying to push forward. The brakes are having a hard time keeping it still. Every time the engine pitches up, my heartbeat incrases.
Then Shockley releases the brakes and lights the afterburner. What happens is simple. A big batch of kerosene is dumped into the back of the engine, where it explodes. That's all an afterburner is, a controlled, continuous explosion, consuming about 10 gallons of fuel every second. Inside the car, the Gs are pushing me back in my seat. I can't move my arms. I feel my face contort, like in those old video clips of the early astronauts. For three seconds it feels like somebody has put a big boot on my chest and is pushing, hard. Outside the airstrip is moving by so fast I'm losing my focus. Then the boot switches to my back, pushing me forward. Just when I'm becoming aware that I'm riding in a freaking rocket car, Shockley has shut the engine down and deployed the parachute and we're slowing rapidly, which is good because the end of the airstrip is coming up fast.
When they lift the canopy and we can take our helmets off, all I can do is smile. I don't want to talk. I just want to breathe. I wonder if my organs really did move. That's what it feels like. And then we're back in the pits, where all the volunteers - cousins, granddaughters, friends - start pumping fuel for the next run.
"It's a big, bad boy," says Kikes.
No it isn't, Rick. It's worse than that. It's a freaking beast. I want one.
(The North American Eagle team continued testing and was ready for an assault on the world land speed record when they learned that a well-funded British team had gone an astounding 763 mph in Nevada's Black Rock desert, well past the speed of sound. At that point, knowing their car was designed to approach the speed of sound but not break it, the American Eagle team gave up. I was the only member of the media to get a ride. Well, one TV guy also got a ride. He's a motorhead you may have heard of: Jay Leno.
