SPANAWAY, Wash. ? When Ed Shadle was growing up, you could buy a junker for a couple hundred dollars, pound out the dents, drop a big engine in it, paint it candy apple red, take it to the outskirts of town and race from stoplight to stoplight until the cops told you to go home.
A computational fluid dynamics study showing the flow of air around the vehicle. The orange areas indicate where air is approaching the speed of sound. Blue is decelerated flow.
Mr. Shadle, a retired IBM field engineer, is 67 now, and he is still racing. So a bit over 10 years ago, he and his good friend Keith Zanghi bought a junker in Maine, pounded out the dents, customized the exterior, dropped a big engine in it and painted it red.
Except this junker was a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter. The real thing. The single-engine Mach 2.2 interceptor that ruled the skies in the 1950s and 1960s. ?In a post-9/11 world we probably wouldn?t have been able to get one,? Mr. Shadle acknowledged. But in 1999 they drove this one away for $25,000.
And next year ? on July 4, perhaps ? they intend to take the North American Eagle to the hardpan desert at Black Rock, Nev., and run it through a measured mile to set a new land speed record of about 800 miles per hour, 45 miles per hour faster than the speed of sound. Mr. Shadle is the driver.
The Eagle has stiff competition. Late last year, Richard Noble and Andy Green of Britain, who broke the sound barrier on their way to setting the current record of 763 miles per hour in 1997, announced the beginning of Bloodhound, a new three-year project to build a jet-and-rocket car capable of 1,000 miles per hour.
Bloodhound enjoys private-sector sponsorship, university technical support and the endorsement and some education financing from the British government. The Eagle, on the other hand, has about 44 volunteers giving up weekends and vacations to build the ultimate hot rod.
Angels have contributed vitally important hardware and expertise to Eagle, but like the rest of the team, they do it mostly for fun. Mr. Zanghi said he and Mr. Shadle had bankrolled Eagle for about $250,000 over the last decade with one thought in mind: ?What we want,? Mr. Shadle said, with a slow drawl and a near-grin straight from central casting, ?is to go fast.?
That was the idea on a recent wintry Saturday at Spanaway Airport, a small, privately owned landing strip a few miles south of Tacoma, Wash. The Eagle arrived around 10 a.m. in its customized tractor-trailer, and within an hour sat resplendent on the tarmac. From nose to tail, it is 56 feet long, weighs 13,000 pounds and is powered by a single General Electric LM1500 gas turbine, better known as a J79 when it flew in F-104s.
The engine is a loaner from S&S Turbine Services, a Canadian firm that rebuilds J79s for repressurizing natural gas wells. The current engine has been souped up to generate 42,500 horsepower, but the one Eagle will get from S&S for the record run will top out near 50,000 horsepower.
The rules are simple. Clock the racer through a measured mile, turn around and do it again, then average the two speeds. Mr. Shadle said Eagle would need 11 miles for each run: a mile to warm up to 250 miles per hour; four miles to light off the afterburner and get up to record speed; a mile in the speed trap; and five miles to stop.
The vehicle must have at least four wheels ? two of them steerable ? and be back at the original start line within 60 minutes. And that?s it. ?You race Formula One or Nascar, the rule books are as thick as the Bible,? Mr. Shadle said. ?For this, the rule book is a half-page long.?
But consider the challenges. Rubber tires turn to molten licorice at anything above 350 miles per hour, so the Eagle uses custom-built, single-billet aluminum alloy wheels, grooved for traction on soft surfaces. They will not work on asphalt or concrete. The brakes are special alloy magnets that generate 4,700 brake horsepower as the magnetized drum approaches the moving aluminum wheel, slowing it gradually without ever locking up.
The big imponderable is the sound barrier. In the sky, the shock wave simply dissipates. But on land, it bounces off the ground and can flip a racer into the air. Since each car is unique, the problem has to be solved differently every time. Computer modeling is important ? but only up to a point.
Mr. Noble of the Bloodhound project is well aware of the challenge. ?We?ve done it once, and now we have to do it again,? he said in a telephone interview. ?The forces are huge ? 15 tons were pressing downward on the front of the vehicle when we set the record. You spend an enormous amount of time on the aerodynamics.?
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