Breedlove's Magnificent Obsession
Article by: Bernice Yeung

For 40 years, Craig Breedlove has sacrificed everything in pursuit of speed. Now all he needs is $1.5 million to build a car that will do 800 mph. Is that too much to ask?

Breedlove hopes to set a new land speed record - over 800 mph - in 2001, when he'll be 64.
Breedlove tried to break the sound barrier with the Spirit of America in 1997 but was thwarted when a stray bolt was sucked into the engine.
Breedlove after setting the world record in 1965.
In the cockpit of the Spirit of America after a 1962 run.
By the '70s, he had retired from land speed racing to drive smaller rocket cars.
On the Bonneville Salt Flats, Breedlove deploys his braking parachutes after a 1963 run.
Breedlove and the unfinished skeleton of the Spirit of America. Funders are scarce, but "we're not quitters," Breedlove says.
Chief mechanic Dave Schmidt stands next to the unfinished Spirit of America.
The car's F-4 Phantom jet engine has more horsepower than the entire field of the Indianapolis 500 but, so far, nowhere to run.

More than once, Craig Breedlove's obsession has nearly killed him, and still he can't let go. The last time was when he set out once again to break the world land speed record by piloting his supersonic jet car across a Nevada desert at nearly 700 mph. He was 59 at the time, and it had been 31 years since he had run the car, when he climbed into the tiny cockpit of his beloved Spirit of America, a 44-foot, horizontal missile.

With the jet engine blazing at nearly full power, he lifted the ski brake that anchored the car to the ground and, in a roar of flame and earsplitting sound, sent himself screaming across the desert floor amid a giant plume of dust, pinned to his seat by 2 G's of acceleration. He was a mile down the course in five seconds, but it took less time than that for Breedlove to realize something was terribly wrong. As soon as the afterburner kicked in, he says, "I went, "Oh, man, we're way over the top.' I knew the car velocity was way too high."

But as he eased up on the throttle, a sudden 15 mph gust of wind caught the car and flipped it on its side. Breedlove found himself skidding across the ground like a giant Roman candle, the desert floor roaring by inches beneath him, careening at nearly supersonic speed toward a mountain range at the edge of the playa. Blinded by the dirt smashing against the windshield, and expecting any moment to be smeared across the desert floor, Breedlove instinctively managed to coerce the car into a 675 mph U-turn, carving a 2.7-mile-long parabola into the earth before the car miraculously righted itself and eventually coasted to a stop. When the dust settled, Breedlove climbed out of the cockpit unscratched and unfazed.

But perhaps the most remarkable thing about that story -- which Breedlove relates with an almost conscious nonchalance -- is not that he survived, but that next year, a few months after his 64th birthday, he wants to try it all over again.Craig Breedlove has one -- and perhaps only one -- need in life: to drive faster than any human being ever has. It is a need that has nearly cost him his life, wrecked four marriages, and maxed out his credit cards. It has also made him famous, though not nearly so much these days as in his heyday 40 years ago.

To many baby boomers, Breedlove was and remains an icon of the '60s, as much a part of the culture as bell-bottoms and flower power, Woodstock and weed. He was the subject of endless newspaper and magazine profiles around the world. The Beach Boys even wrote a song about him. Over the course of the decade, he established himself as the fastest man on wheels. He designed and drove his rocket car to five world land speed records, becoming the first human to travel faster than 400, 500, and 600 mph on land.

But as the age of muscle cars passed, and the cost of setting speed records rose, interest faded, and Breedlove entered something like retirement. He went into real estate, where he made his private fortune, and was content, it seemed, to rest on his reputation. Content, that is, until the British stole the record from the Americans, and he found a way to get back into the game.

When a well-financed British team obliterated the United States' record in 1983, Breedlove saw it as an opening to appeal to American companies' sense of patriotism to sponsor his next run. Rumors began that the British were trying to break the sound barrier on land -- but Breedlove planned to be the first to do it. In 1988, after a 20-year hiatus from racing, he sold the boat he was living on and traded some real estate for an old car dealership in the small Northern California farming town of Rio Vista, which he converted to a workshop in the hope of relaunching the attack on the land speed record.

His obsession has resurfaced with a vengeance. Now, 30 years after his last land speed record, Breedlove aims to get back into his rebuilt rocket, fire up her jet engine, and push her to 800 mph in 2001.

So far, however, his mission remains frustratingly unaccomplished. Since that botched 1996 attempt, Breedlove has been foiled by technical problems and a lack of financial backing. Though he had a series of sponsors at one point, all funds ran out in February. Work on the car has screeched nearly to a halt, and the skeleton of the Spirit of America sits motionless in the cool darkness of Breedlove's immaculate, 12,000-square-foot workshop. The government-backed British team, meanwhile, made good on its pledge to break the sound barrier, with a record 763 mph run in 1997.

Still, Breedlove remains focused on the goal. He continues to tinker on the car, and pores over computer data that show the vehicle can easily go 800 mph. He is constantly pondering the nuances of gyroscopic forces and steering ratios, even as he showers and eats. He exercises every day to make sure he can fit into the cramped cockpit, and he has even assembled a crew of about 30 people who would temporarily abandon their families to help run the car.

"I didn't think I would have invested 10 years of my life and gone through such a number of difficulties," Breedlove admits. "I thought that this would have long since been done. But sometimes that's the way it is, and we're definitely not quitters. But I sure would like to get to the other side -- I've had about all the fun I can stand. I'm ready to get the record."

Breedlove has planned the record-winning run of the Spirit of America with as much care and precision as a wartime military strategy. And now, everything seems to be in place.

The only thing standing in his way is $1.5 million.

It is a Saturday morning in early November, and Breedlove sits at a folding table in his Advanced Vehicle Design Center in Rio Vista, diligently autographing Spirit of America merchandise as a line forms in front of him.

A band of Breedlove enthusiasts has flocked to the sleepy riverside town this morning for a public tour of the Spirit of America compound. These tours, announced every few months on the Spirit of America Web site, have attracted more than 2,000 wide-eyed motor sports fans to the tiny town just off Highway 12. Some visitors have planned family vacations around the event, flying in from around the country to get a glimpse of Breedlove and that awesome jet car.

They often arrive with cameras slung around their necks, and some have toted their entire Craig Breedlove memorabilia collection to Rio Vista so they can get their trinkets signed.

Sharpie marker in hand, Breedlove is a natural celebrity. He is gracious with his admirers, speaking to them slowly and quietly, using the vocabulary of a voracious reader. Even when signing autographs, he moves with slow precision, carrying himself with a gentility that suggests he should be racing yachts, not a supersonic hot rod.

Today, as he does every day, he wears a pressed Spirit of America polo shirt tucked neatly into starched khaki pants. When he goes out later, he'll don a black leather jacket and sunglasses, even if it's foggy out.

"To look at him from the outside, Craig is really more of a movie-star type," says Henry Brown, a Spirit of America team member. "He's got charisma, charm, and looks. You wouldn't think he was a hot rodder."

Among a certain segment of nostalgic racing fans, Breedlove is an undimmed star. They remember his triumphs from the '60s; they have lovingly saved the magazines and newspapers that trumpeted his accomplishments. They buy exorbitantly priced memorabilia from one another on eBay, and, nearly three years after his last run, about 17,000 of them every week still visit his Web site.
At hot rod events where he has been invited to speak (without irony) about driving safety, they gather around him like groupies at a rock concert. They ask him when he's running next and what he's doing with the car. When Breedlove tells them of the project's financial woes, many are indignant, and more than once Breedlove has been assured that when one of them wins the lottery, they will donate it all to the Spirit of America. Then they tell him it's been the thrill of their lives to shake his hand, and they utter a spirited "Go get 'em" as they turn to leave.

But those crowds always disperse, and Breedlove's life returns to a quiet monotony. He will try to liven up his day with exercising, paying the bills, or stumping for funds, but he is frustrated by the inactivity.

The lights to the workshop are turned on only a few times a week when one trusty crew member stops by to work on the car -- quite a contrast to the 24-hour production it was just a few years ago.

He has desperately scrounged for funds for nearly three years now, but he has yet to find sponsors who will commit to signing a check.

"You just wish that everybody would send in 50 cents, or a quarter, and just stick it in the mail," Breedlove says wistfully.

But Breedlove tries not to focus on the negatives. He must push on, he says. "The only thing that defeats you is when you stop," Breedlove says. "If I don't give up, there's still hope. I'm one of those stubborn people that once I start something, I have a hard time throwing in the towel. I've spent a lot of time on this project, even when other people thought it would have been wiser to stop. And I hate to get beat."

Craig Breedlove plans to trounce the British land speed record in the summer of 2001. Already, he can envision hauling the Spirit of America to an as-yet-undecided expanse of land, climbing into the cockpit, lighting the jet engine, and taking off in a flash of dust.

In his mind's eye, he can see the Spirit of America skimming across the ground like a high-speed dart, as he clocks in runs at over 800 mph. In just one minute's time he'll burn through the 13-mile course, then turn the car around and do it again to officially reclaim the record for America.

And he will not crash.

The vehicle that will deliver him to the other side is Breedlove's famous Spirit of America. Breedlove says he has devoted a lifetime to developing the most aerodynamic and stable jet car possible. He designed it, he explains, to fly like a plane, but on the ground. It is a 44-foot-long projectile of gleaming white aluminum, narrow as a catwalk, with a tiny 4-foot cockpit. About two-thirds of the car is nothing but engine -- and what an engine.

The car may be a beauty, but it's a beast of a machine. The engine, the car's soul, originally belonged to an F-4 Phantom jet fighter plane. When powered up, it has more horsepower than the entire field of the Indianapolis 500 and spews a 20-foot flame behind it. The car burns 70 gallons of gasoline in 30 seconds, and it takes two parachutes and a ski brake to convince it to stop. The car runs on five 36-inch-diameter wheels -- three in the front and one on each rear side -- that are made of carbon fiber and weigh 170 pounds each. On test runs, the car has gone nearly 700 mph.

In comparison, the British Thrust SSC (Super Sonic Car) is a hulking, 24-ton blue monster that is powered by two Rolls-Royce jet engines. British engineers have admitted that their car has reached its limit -- the Thrust's tremendous mass simply can't fight the laws of gravity and aerodynamics, and throwing more engines onto the car will only make it faster by about 5 mph.

The British monster makes Breedlove's 9,000-pound Spirit of America look like a sports car. "The car is light on its feet -- like a dancer," Breedlove says. "It's not a tugboat, and it doesn't have much drag. There's not much to hold her back. She tiptoes around, and she's touchy to drive, but given good conditions, she's a real screamer. This thing runs, boy."

Breedlove's latest Spirit of America is the culmination of a love affair that began in 1958 when, at age 21, he became dissatisfied with the drudgery of working two jobs to support a wife and three kids.
"I knew I needed to do something to improve the situation," Breedlove says. "An all-possessing concern to me was that if you lived your whole life on this planet, and you left and were unable to really ... I mean, what if you live your life and then it's over and no one knows you were here? There was this overwhelming feeling that I needed to find something to give my life significance."

Breedlove had spent most of his childhood in a garage fiddling with hot rods, and most of his teens racing them. (His awareness of mortality was not purely philosophical -- at the age of 16 he says he flipped a '32 coupe end over end while street racing in Los Angeles and broke his neck.) He knew more about cars than anything else; as a kid, he had paid more attention to the intricacies of a carburetor than he did to his schoolwork.

His role model was drag racer Mickey Thompson. Like Breedlove, Thompson didn't have money or a college degree, but he was able to convince large corporations to give him funds to run his monster dragsters.

"Mickey was able to really pick himself up by his bootstraps," Breedlove says. "He was so inspirational."

At the same time, Breedlove learned that for the first time, the government was selling surplus jet engines. He figured that if he could be one of the first to put a jet engine in a car, he had a chance at the world land speed record, something he had heard about from his hot rod days. And that, he figured, could be his stab at greatness.

Breedlove was working as a fireman, and during his downtime began reading books on aerodynamic speed vehicles, sometimes carrying the books with him to the scene of a fire. He used every spare moment to research and design a car. The speed, the challenge, and the world record began to seduce him -- and even to consume him.

"I've had to align everything in my life so I could do this," he says. "It's probably the reason I'm single. Because who's gonna put up with this obsession?"
The first of Breedlove's four wives left him in 1960, taking their three kids with her.

The strain on their marriage had been building for a while. On his 23rd birthday, for example, Breedlove had stayed late drafting a letter to Goodyear Tires asking the company to sponsor the car. Engrossed in the letter, Breedlove forgot that his wife had asked him to come home early that night. When he finally arrived two hours late, he found his children waiting to give him a birthday cake they had baked themselves. His wife was livid.

But things were moving too fast, and Breedlove was spending more time building the car and less time with his family. Eventually, his wife stopped asking where he was going or when he might come home.

Within months, the charismatic and handsome Breedlove had convinced a couple of sponsors to donate an engine, $10,000 in cash, garage space, and tires. He had assembled a talented crew and convinced people to sell him materials on credit. He decided to quit his job and work on the car full time, at which point his wife decided she wanted out.

After she and the kids left, Breedlove moved in with his father and lived off unemployment. When two of his sponsors pulled their support, Breedlove resorted to building the car in his dad's garage. Without any income, Breedlove was on the thinnest of shoestring budgets, spending what little money he had on the car and child support payments. For nearly three years, he ate poorly and went to meetings with potential corporate sponsors wearing Levi's.

When his father could no longer stand the mammoth jet car jutting out into his yard, or the crew of sleepless hot rodders running around his house, Breedlove was told that he and his car had to go.

So Breedlove hauled his jet car over to his new girlfriend's apartment and moved in. The apartment was transformed into a car fabrication warehouse, with huge fiberglass air ducts in the living room and steel tubing in the driveway. After three years of frantic work and finagling sponsors, the car was finished, and Breedlove promptly christened it the Spirit of America.

For the next decade, Breedlove's preoccupation with winning the land speed record never waned. He began to live in cycles. When he wasn't working on the Spirit of America, he was on the Bonneville Salt Flats or the Black Rock desert in Nevada, running the latest version of his car for the world record. He developed a famous rivalry with another American racer, Art Arfons. Summer after summer, the two faced off, pushing each other to faster and crazier speeds. In 1964, Breedlove's braking parachute snapped off, and he drove the jet car straight into a lake at about 500 mph, barely escaping from the cockpit before the car sunk like a brick. The next year he was back to make a daredevil November run -- between windows of snow and drizzle -- to recapture the record at more than 600 mph.

Meanwhile, the distracted Breedlove never was able to separate himself from his beloved jet car to the satisfaction of his family. In the end, four women divorced him when it became apparent that he had more passion for racing than domestic life.

"I understand why a wife or a girlfriend would say, "I want more attention,'" Breedlove concedes. "However, if I'm going to do this, I have to make it a priority. I'm very conscious of what it takes, and most people are not willing to make that sacrifice."

Breedlove's focus is what his crew admires most about him. "You can tell the man is on a mission, and he's going to do what he says he's gonna do," team member Bob Hitchcock says. "I don't have any doubt in my mind that we will do over 800 mph.

"You need to understand that he's not some crazy person with a death wish. He's a very focused person."

Breedlove's fixation is apparently contagious. The roughly 30 men and a handful of women on the Spirit of America team are willing to go to outrageous lengths for Breedlove. Volunteers have been known to make six-hour round trips to work on the Spirit of America; devoted husbands and fathers will abandon their families for weeks during world-record attempts.
During the summers of 1996 and 1997, for example, sheet metal mechanic Terry Hendrickson left his family behind for nearly two months each time to help out on the desert.

"He came home twice, which is what kept the marriage alive," his wife, Althea, says of Terry's 1996 absence. "He'd make the six-hour drive for a 24-hour stay to kiss his daughter." Even in the months before the record attempt, Terry says, "I'd leave work at 4 p.m. and get to the Spirit of America by 6 p.m. I'd work there until 11 p.m. four or five days a week. Friday and Saturday were Spirit of America, but Sunday was family day."

"So you see, I had my choice," Althea says. "I could either be supportive or I could make my marriage hell. I made the decision to be part of it. I started bringing the guys food once a week, and they became family."

In August 1999, when Breedlove was undecided about making another attempt, the Hendricksons were expecting the birth of their second daughter. "Althea won't be happy to hear this, but I didn't know how I could work it with the new baby," Terry says.

"It was a difficult time, and in the end Craig didn't end up running," Althea adds. "But I foresaw Terry either showing up late to the hospital from the desert, or leaving two days after the birth. And I would have let him go. Because it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity." Breedlove sits in a Rio Vista cafe, stirring Equal into his coffee. His eyes are focused downward, as they often are when he is concentrating. He is pondering the reasons why he is being held at the mercy of corporate sponsors, and he simply can't think of any logical ones.

"You look at it and we're so close," he says. "So close. It's ironic to me that we can get support up to the last 10 percent. How can we get this far to get stuck?"

Fund-raising efforts for the next record run have been foiled again and again. In desperation, Breedlove had to toss $2 million of his own money toward the project, maxing out his American Express card to pay crew salaries in 1996 and 1997.

Meanwhile, team member Cherie Danson has been trying to massage sponsorship deals out of at least four companies for about three years now. None of them wants to be the first to throw down a check, and none of them can give the Spirit of America the full $1.5 million it needs.

Breedlove, too, has shined his funding pitch to a gleam.

"We'll provide a good return on their investment to our sponsors," he says. "The image we're trying to project is speed and technology. There has to be a company that feels the identity of their company is this achievement of establishing an unlimited speed record. Like for a small computer company trying to build name recognition. We could put "XYZ Company' on the side of the car, and people would say, "Oh! What's that?' They would see it on the car at an event, and it could make an indelible impression. They could really get a lot of visibility and exposure."

But so far, no such company has come forward, though Breedlove is buoyed by a promise from a computer printer company to pay up to half of the $1.5 million if the team can find the rest elsewhere.

Without funding, Breedlove spends his quiet days talking up his project, searching for potential sponsors, running errands, and planning vacations to places like Mexico. But the longer he waits, the more impatient he becomes, and the more jaded he grows toward American industry's lack of vision.

He is so certain of success that he can't understand why there are people who don't believe he can do it. After all, he has conclusive computer data and a string of common-sense arguments that absolutely prove he can go 800 mph if given the chance.

He simply cannot think of any more ways to explain a fact, and he can't understand why more companies don't want to step up to help out such a quintessentially American endeavor. He can only think that times have changed.

"Kennedy -- that was a very profound time," Breedlove says. "We were already into this project when [the inauguration speech] occurred, and it gave special importance to the mission. It was that magical time when all things seemed possible. In a way, a lot of that has changed. Now there is more emphasis placed on the bottom line. You can't do something just because it's a great thing to do. It has to make a bunch of money. Maybe that's why they [corporations and industry] don't care about the Spirit of America."

Breedlove pauses, as if he is about to admit a terrible secret.

"There must be a belief among investors that this project will not pay off. They have to believe we can't do it. They're wrong."