Speedquest: Inside the Blue Flame
by
In the early 1960s, Art Arfons, Craig Breedlove, and Walt Arfons bought surplus aircraft turbojet engines – and found out how fast they could go. In 1965, three guys from Milwaukee [Ray Dausman, Pete Farnsworth, and Dick Keller] decided how fast they wanted to go! Then they decided to build their own rocket engine to go that fast! It took twenty-seven months and a half-million dollars to complete the project… which started out as a concept and ended up looking like a Fighter Jet on wheels.Gary Gabelich drove The Blue Flame to the first world land speed record over 1,000 kilometers per hour [1,014.656 km/h in the flying start kilometer] on October23, 1970. That record lasted for 27 years and is the last world land speed record by an American car and driver, and the last on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.The Blue Flame became the world’s fastest “green” machine. It set the world land speed record at 630.388 mi/h on October 23, 1970 on the Bonneville Salt Flats. Using highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide [H2O2] oxidizer and liquefied natural gas [methane, CH4] fuel in the rocket engine, the exhaust gases [water and carbon dioxide] were environmentally clean.This book is the story of how The Blue Flame came to be, and the men behind that dream.