Craig Breedlove’s accomplishments speak for themselves. He brought the world’s land-speed record back to the United States, he advanced the world land-speed record at a tremendous rate, and perhaps more importantly he captured national attention for a sport that had previously belonged to counts and captains. “In the 120-year history of land speed racing, no name looms larger than that of Craig Breedlove,” Samuel Hawley wrote in the prologue to his 2019 biography of Breedlove, “Ultimate Speed.” Many count Breedlove as an inspiration, but could his success even be duplicated nowadays?
Breedlove, if nothing else, was persistent. Pretty much every obituary for him that appeared since he died last week at the age of 86 related his formative adventures in Ford hot rods in his teens and recounted some of the numerous setbacks throughout his racing career – such as the 1964 crash that left the Spirit of America nose down in a brine pond at the Bonneville Salt Flats – that he overcame on his way to further records. Even after declaring his retirement in the mid-2000s, he couldn’t stop thinking about land-speed racing and had even started to assemble a team to go chase the horizon yet again in recent years.
“He was a tremendous personality, especially in terms of taking rejection and trying again,” Hawley said. “He just didn’t give up, and you see that by the fact that he was still going after records in the 1990s.”
Breedlove was nothing less than a subject matter expert in land-speed vehicles. He worked as a structural engineering technician at Douglas Aircraft at one point, but he could also parse advanced aerodynamics, get decommissioned jet engines running, and probably conduct college lectures on designing a chassis for 700MPH speeds. While others were pursuing the land-speed record essentially using hunches and best guesses at what could make them go faster, Breedlove was employing cutting-edge technology and using data capture and analytics to further his understanding of vehicle dynamics at speed. “With the first Spirit of America, Craig had installed a data acquisition device out of a fighter jet to know exactly what the car was doing and when the front end was lifting,” Hawley said.
Craig Breedlove in his father’s garage with the Spirit of America streamliner
As Hawley related, when Breedlove retired and sold his Sonic Arrow to Steve Fossett, Fossett’s engineering staff asked why Breedlove didn’t include all the drawings for the car. “Craig didn’t have hundreds of drawings,” Hawley wrote. “He never did. He explained to the incredulous engineer that (a) handful of sketches and blueprints was everything he had put down on paper. It was how he worked, going all the way back to his first Spirit (of America). ‘When I’m building a car, everything I want to do is in my head. I know every nut and bolt, every little piece. I’ve designed the whole thing down to the smallest detail, every single component.'” And this for a vehicle that had just recorded a speed of 636 MPH.
Breedlove could put together incredible teams. His first trip to Bonneville with the Spirit of America in 1962 proved disastrous, Hawley said, if only because he deferred to Rod Schapel, who helped design the vehicle and conduct wind tunnel testing on it. “He put that right in 1963 when he took the lead of the team,” Hawley said. “It wasn’t in his nature to take charge like that, but he learned that he had to assert himself if this was going to work.” Nor did he determine to do it all himself, as Art Arfons did. He went on to assemble teams full of people who he recognized as more knowledgeable than himself, all the way from Walt Sheehan, who helped with the engineering of Breedlove’s vehicles, down to Bob Davids, who contributed fiberglass components to the Spirit of America.
“You know, I can’t tell you how I was able to pull all these people in,” Breedlove told Hawley. “I guess I managed to grovel enough to get them to help me.”
Hawley cited a few other keys to Breedlove’s success, including the support of his father, Norm Breedlove, a Hollywood special effects artist who helped Breedlove envision the project and see it as a professional endeavor rather than a mere hot-rodder’s fantasy. Indeed, without funding – massive funding, far beyond what any racer could hope to attain with the local garage’s name painted in shoe polish on the door – none of what Breedlove did would have been possible.
“When he was about half done building the first Spirit of America, he realized that it would take 20 years to finish the car without a sponsor,” Hawley said. “And he wasn’t a natural pitchman. He was very shy and had to work at building the skills to make those presentations.”
Craig Breedlove with the Spirit of America
Yet, unlike Arfons, who bristled under sponsorship from Firestone, Breedlove knew exactly what had to be done, and his willingness to do it paid off with support from Shell and Goodyear. “They protected him, they cosseted him,” Hawley said. “They allowed him to have that real strong team.”
Or, at least, they did to a point. After he set the record above 600 MPH in 1965, and after the competition with Arfons essentially came to an end, funding dried up. Shell and Goodyear no longer saw land-speed racing as anything more than a liability, and all of Breedlove’s plans for greater speeds had to be shelved. “He actually wanted (Gary) Gabelich to break the record because he wanted investors to keep funding his projects,” Hawley said.
Instead, facing rejection after rejection, Breedlove left the sport. He went into real estate and made a fortune there, Hawley said, simply so he could fund a return to land-speed racing briefly in the mid-Nineties.
Nor is Breedlove the only one to face almost insurmountable funding challenges in his attempt to set the world land-speed record. Mickey Thompson essentially quit land-speed racing in the Sixties because he saw no way to find sponsors for those jet- and rocket-powered vehicles. More recently, the supremely well-funded Bloodhound land-speed racing effort went into a museum because the money wasn’t there – and this was after signing big-name sponsors and a last-minute rescue by a billionaire.
“When it came to an end (for Craig), it was all because of the lack of sponsorships,” Hawley said.
Breedlove was an exceptional man, no doubt about it. He had the right mix of talent, drive, and background to do what he did. But he also had the advantage of living in an exceptional time when an average hot-rodder with a decent elevator pitch could walk into Akron and come out with the funding necessary to pilot a land-speed racing vehicle to unheard-of speeds. Nobody else – outside of, perhaps, Arfons – could have done what he did at that time. And not even Breedlove himself could have done what he did at any other time.
