Walt Arfons' first Wingfoot Express, driven by Tom Green, captures the world's land speed record
When I learned that Goodyear was sponsoring Walt Arfons in a rocket car, I was a little upset. I felt that in the Spirit they had all the LSR strength that they needed, and it was a blow to my pride to think that they needed a backup car. Wasn't mine enough to fight off Art Arfons's Green Monster?
Art Arfons
sets a world's land speed record in his Green Monster in
1965.
I'm not one to hide my feelings too long; so I called Akron and asked, "What gives?" I was somewhat relieved to learn that the deal with Walt had been made some time before. Goodyear had supplied tires to Walt for his jet drag cars for years, and Bryan Putman, the company's number two public relations man, had told him a long time before that if he ever built his proposed rocket car Goodyear would help him. Walt's contract offered him a flat $25,000 if he broke the record and didn't pay him anything for building the car--with the exception of the rear fender covers and the windshield. Goodyear Aerospace had built those--at fantastic cost. I heard rumors that the windshield alone had cost $15,000. It must have had ground optics! It had taken some pretty expensive aerospace talent to design and fabricate the windshield, and I could see why the space program was costing so much.
The first time I saw the rocket car (it was called the Wingfoot Express, as Walt's first car had been named), I nearly broke up. There on the tail, large as life, was the largest "Goodyear" I had ever seen. I knew immediately where the idea had come from!
The second Wingfoot Express: the Rocket
Car.
The car's concept looked pretty good, but the car itself was a little rough; so I wasn't worried. But it did have 15,000 pounds of thrust, and 15,000 pounds was nothing to be sneezed at. The car was shaped somewhat like the first Spirit; it looked like a three-wheeled car--except that it actually had two small wheels, close together, in front.
I looked the Express over and could tell that it was a strong as a battleship--and probably as heavy. It was absolutely indestructible. Walt later told me the reason for the weight. When he was building the car in his Akron shop, he had a lot of visitors. Each one would ask him what would happen if the car exceeded the sound barrier. He would ponder the question and say "I don't really know." After each visitor left, the question played on his mind, and he would add a few more steel braces to the car. He finally had to lock his shop door because the floor that supported the Wingfoot Express was beginning to sag. If he'd had a couple more visitors, he would have been working on the car in the basement.
The car was to be powered by 15 separate rocket engines, each about three feet long and one foot in diameter. Actually, the rockets were called JATO (jet-assisted takeoff) bottles by the air force, and they had been designed to be attached to military aircraft that needed a boost to take off from extra short runways or jungle landing strips. The solid fuel burned out after only a few seconds, but by then the plane was, every- one hoped, safely airborne. This was the strategy of the rocket car program, too: light the fuse, stand back, and hope the record was in the bag by the time the rockets burned out--not exactly the most scientific approach, but, as I said before, the rockets did represent a lot of power.
Bobby Tatroe, who was driving the car for Walt, was a good guy, but very aggressive and boisterous, and he was going around telling everybody that he was going to fry us alive with the rocket car. He was putting the needle into me pretty far, and I figured that if the car went half as fast as his mouth, I was in trouble.
The day for Bobby's run came, and there were a lot of newsmen there because the car was really unusual. Everyone wanted to see it run. It was bound to be dramatic whether the car broke the record or not. At that stage I figured Bobby was braver than Dick Tracy, and I went over and congratulated him on his courage for getting into that roman candle in the first place. He looked at me from the cockpit and said, "Got a light?" I decided to get out of there. It was bad enough having to share the limelight with Walt and his car without supplying the straight lines for his driver.
Someone gave the signal. Bobby pushed the button or did whatever it is you do to start a rocket car, and the wildest fireworks display I had ever seen began to unfold right there on the Flats. Fire spurted out the back of the car, and clouds of black smoke engulfed everything and everybody. The car was gone. Unfortunately, the rockets fizzled out about halfway through the measured mile, and the speed was only about 385 mph.
At that point, I'll have to admit that I admired their style, though. Walt, completely undaunted by the miserable showing of the car, proclaimed that they would add ten more rockets--five to each side of the car--and come back again. If I hadn't been so involved with my own program, I think I would have gone over and slapped him on the back.
There's one thing I forgot to mention about the rocket car. Each run was so expensive that Walt couldn't afford practice runs; so all of the calculations had to be made on paper from projections made from fairly outdated files of Aerojet General, the company that had supplied the rockets--at a nice round figure of $1,000 each. So each run was costing a bundle. In comparison I was using 60 or so gallons of jet fuel on my runs.
I will say that the Express went straight and seemed to handle well enough. The problem was that the car was so heavy that the 15 rocket engines wouldn't move it as fast as Aerojet had said. I didn't know what to expect with the added ten rockets, but I sure was going to be there to see the fireworks.
In Walt's usual speedy manner, the extra rockets were inserted during the night in the sides of the car pointing back at a 45-degree angle, and the car was ready to run next morning. And in the morning there was Bobby pacing back and forth like a caged animal. He was actually anxious to get back in that wild machine.
When they ignited the rockets, I felt like sitting down and writing another "Star Spangled Banner" or something. If Francis Scott Key thought he saw "the rocket's red glare" and "the bombs bursting in air," he should have been at the Flats that morning. I was sure the car was going to start spinning like a top and explode right there on the starting line. Instead, it blasted off down the course with fire coming out all over. Most of the photographers just stood frozen in terror and didn't even click a shutter. I'll bet the editors were furious when the photographers told them they didn't even get a picture of the wildest takeoff in racing history.
Well, the car went straight and true but, unfortunately for Walt, not fast enough. Bobby's average was 471 mph, but in reaching that speed the rockets had just about burned the car to the ground. Body panels were melted Off, and even some of the braces were damaged. The wild and woolly career of the Wingfoot Express had ended.
The next day when I wheeled the Spirit back on the course, I felt as if I were following a seal act. What could I possibly do to compete with that display? I wasn't even sure a new record would attract much publicity after the run of the rocket car. But I was there to try.
The new Spirit stood on the Salt in majestic splendor. Every detail was beautiful. It had a fantastic suspension system with absolutely perfect geometry--I mean, totally correct, so that even when the car went over bumps, there was no wheel toeing--in or out. Under any conditions the wheels maintained perfect, straight traction with the ground.
We got the car out there and simply started running it up and down. After six runs I was up to 500 mph. The car was a dream. The condition of the salt was poor, but the car seemed to get up and plane through the roughest stuff. The four wheels helped, too. The additional wheel made the car so much easier to handle than the first Spirit had been that the improvement was unbelievable. With the three-wheeled car, I had been so busy with the course that I had never really had much time to think about the sensation of speed. Oh, I had known I was going fast and it had been hairy at times, but with this car I could just sit back and steer it and acknowledge the effects of the speed.
Now, for the first time, I could describe how it feels to go 500. It was like being sprayed all over with a million tiny streams of cold water at high pressure. It was invigorating, but the pressure felt strange and I wasn't sure if I was hot or cold. I lost my breath on the acceleration, and only when I reached 500 mph did it come back. The acceleration, mixed with the funny sensation on my skin, made me a little bit giddy. I felt like giggling.
If I had told anybody that I was out there running the car up and down at 500 mph and giggling, I would have been carted off in a straight jacket in the back of Ted Gillette's ambulance. It wasn't the straight jacket that worried me so much--it was the ride with Ted. I'd take my chances with the Spirit any day!
Anyway, there was little question that we were ready for the record run. We got the car ready for the assault on Art's 536 mph record on the morning of October 22, 1965. Walt Sheehan calculated the power we would need in order to break the record, and we adjusted the throttle accordingly. I got in the car, went through the check-list, and held my breath while we started the engine. When it was fired up and ready to go, I reached up and lowered the canopy (this one was hinged at the side so I didn't need help, as I had with the first car). I pressed the accelerator to the floor. The car charged off down the black line.
It was an easy, uneventful run--so uneventful, in fact, that I missed the record by 8 mph. The car had gone only 528, and we couldn't figure it out. Our calculations showed that it should have gone 540 mph. What had happened?
We ran three more times, and each time the speed was a little under what we had expected. I got a little upset and barked at Walt, "How about getting some power out of this thing? We're not the scenic bus out of Salt Lake City for all tourists, you know!" I felt bad after I said it, but Walt understood that we had a problem and he just buckled down and tried to find what it was and how to solve it.
We took the car over to the hangar at Wendover Air Base and tried to solve the case of the missing horsepower. We ran the engine, but the only thing we could find was an occasional deceleration stall that sounded like an explosion. This occurred when the power was cut. For some reason, the compressed, fuel-laden air was occasionally shooting forward on deceleration and exploding. After many adjustments, we seemed to have corrected the problem; so we took the car back to the salt.
When I ran the car again, the air speed indicator pointed to 545 as I left the measured mile. I backed off the throttle, and a fantastic explosion shot fire out of the intake duct, over the cockpit, and about 20 feet in front of the car. The force caved in the whole nose section of the car and split open the top of the canopy. I was sure the entire back of the car had been blown away, but it was "only" another deceleration stall--the grand-daddy of them all. I popped the chute. It held, and the car slowed to the point where I could use the brakes. I had built super-heavy brakes into the new car because of my experience with the other one. They brought the car to a quick stop. The cockpit was much closer to the ground on this car; so I flipped open the cracked canopy and scrambled down to the salt as fast as I could manage. I was surprised to see that the whole racer was still pretty much intact.
There had been a lot of damage, but it was repairable. There were buckled body panels, and the inlet duct had apparently expanded to almost twice its size during the explosion, because it was cracked all around. We hoped the weather would hold while we were working on the car at the air force base. It was going to take a couple of weeks of steady work to get the Spirit back in running trim.
