photo courtesy landspeed.com

The Bloodhound SSC effort may have the goal of 1,000 MPH in mind, but it’s certainly not the only team that is currently working to break the world land-speed record. Aside from two Australian teams – the Silver Bullet-RV1 project and the Aussie Invader 5R project – the Washington state-based North American Eagle team aims to take that record away from the Brits by topping the 800 MPH mark, and they hope to make their record runs later this year.

Project Manager Ed Shadle said that while the team continues to run computational fluid dynamics analyses of the shock waves they anticipate at that speed with their converted Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, he expects to make some test runs up to 600 MPH at Edwards Air Force Base in California in July, then possibly make the record runs in October.

Where he plans to make the record runs, though, remains up in the air. Ed said the Black Rock Desert in northern Nevada, where he and the team have tested the Eagle in the past, isn’t adequate for their purposes due to its uneven surface and overcrowding from campers. The course at Edwards, at 11.5 miles, is too short for their runs, so Ed hopes to reach an agreement with the Bureau of Land Management in Nevada to run at Diamond Valley in central Nevada, which offers a 15-mile stretch of flat and uninterrupted land.

“We’re battling the two biggest hurdles, money (no title sponsor) and mother nature,” Ed said. “The car is pretty much ready to go.”

As for the 1,000 MPH mark, Ed said he’ll reassess his goals after that becomes a reality.

“They (Bloodhound and the two Australian teams) have a very tall order with very high risk, so I don’t believe it will be an overnight success for them,” he said. “They are a very tenacious bunch and I expect them to give it a go as soon as possible, probably within two years.”

The current world land-speed record stands at 763.035 MPH, set by Andy Green at Black Rock in 1997. The last American to hold the land-speed record was Gary Gabelich, who set the record at 622.407 MPH in 1970 and held it for the next 13 years.