Death On The Salt Flats
Sports Illustrated August 08, 1960
Written by: Hays Gorey

Salt Lake City mechanic and driver Athol Graham, trying for a new speed record at 400 mph, was killed when a wheel flew off his homemade car

A scarlet, cigar-shaped racing car rocketed down the gleaming white straightaway of Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats this week in an all too daring effort to break the 400-mph land speed barrier. At the controls was Athol Graham, a 36-year-old Salt Lake City mechanic who had dreamed for 10 years of surpassing Sir John Cobb's speed of 394.2 mph and entering into the 400-mph realm.

The roar of the airplane engine powering Graham's car dinned across the Flats as it neared the three-mile point on the 12-mile racing strip. The machine was going more than 300 mph and still accelerating. Then the left front wheel flew off the axle.

The car twisted sharply, bounced into the air and tumbled end over end for three quarters of a mile, disintegrating into a tangle of gasoline-soaked junk.

"This is Post 2. He crashed!" an official observer near the accident scene shouted into a phone connected with the timer's stand at the measured mile. "Did you say he passed?" called back a timer from the stand. "No. He crashed!" answered Post 2.

Graham was unconscious when the first ambulance reached him. Flown to a Salt Lake City hospital, he died two hours later. It was a shockingly tragic beginning to a season which is to see the biggest assault ever made on a land speed mark.

In the next six weeks at least four other men are coming to Bonneville with good chances of reaching 400 mph. One, England's Donald Campbell, might even do 500. Son of one-time speed king Sir Malcolm Campbell and holder of the present water-speed record (260.35) he has worked three years to develop his Bluebird streamliner (see page 20). Three million dollars and the help of 68 British-companies have gone into Campbell's effort, set for early September.

Among the other contenders due. at the Salt Flats are Mickey Thompson, the El Monte, Calif. hot rodder whose four-engined Challenger I set a U.S. mark of 332.8 last year, and has been improved since, and Arthur Arfons, a speed-happy mill-and-feed man from Akron, whose car is undergoing final wind-tunnel tests this week. Even a jet will be run at Bonneville. Owned by Nathan Ostich, a 50-year-old Los Angeles physician, and powered by a B-36 bomber engine, it has enough horsepower to top 500 mph.

But beating them all to the starting line was the most improbable of all the record challengers—Athol Graham.

Graham was a mechanic in a Salt Lake City garage 10 years ago when his nagging itch to break Cobb's record became a magnificent obsession. He didn't believe that the building of a high-speed racing car required the technical help of major corporations and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Confident of his mechanical genius and ability to shop and barter, he set out to build a car by himself.

In the first five years he accumulated three Allison airplane engines and a new Cadillac. He quit his job in 1955, sold the Cadillac and opened up his own garage in the outskirts of Salt Lake City. There, when he wasn't repairing a balky carburetor on a customer's family sedan, he began putting together his dream, the City of Salt Lake.

He swapped the three Allison engines for one Rolls-Royce engine, then traded the Rolls-Royce to a hydroplane owner who had a supercharged Allison he didn't like. The Allison was finally enough engine for Graham.

He bought a war-surplus P-51 fighter for $250, took the cockpit for his car and sold the rest for $200. He got two aluminum belly tanks from a surplus B-29 and used sections of them for the car body. He intrigued the Firestone Tire & Rubber Co. with his theory that small tires (33 inches high) were better than big ones for speed trials ( Campbell's are 52 inches high), and it agreed to provide them. The only other aid he got was from a chemical company which gave him $3,500 to help defray the $1,000-a-day cost of time trials at Bonneville.

Last December Graham first tested his car on the Flats. With only four miles of the 12-mile course usable, he reached 344.7 mph. It was an incredible performance for a car that had cost him an unbelievably low $2,500. "Ingenuity is a great equalizer," he said afterward.

Graham was to make his initial record try this week at 9 a.m. Monday. He had "reserved" the Flats for four days, but he said that he would "go all out on the first run." There was a two-hour delay. The left front wheel wasn't fitting properly. Mechanics bent out the fender, adjusted the tie rods, and Graham was ready.

He kissed his wife (his four children were not at the Salt Flats), adjusted his crash helmet, strapped himself into the seat and moved off to the starting line. Minutes later the City of Salt Lake was a wreck. Found far from the remains of the car, where it had rolled after breaking off at the hub, was the left front wheel.

Graham's approach to his car's construction had been, superficially, a prudent one. He burned aviation gasoline, calling other higher powered fuels too risky. He used two-wheel drive for added control, and he placed the cockpit ahead of the engine to reduce the risk of injury should there be an accident. "Why add to the danger," he said last week, "when there is danger enough already."

Athol Graham was no fool. The qualities of determination, ingenuity, perhaps even genius, that he displayed in his 10-year project are the same ones that opened the West. Graham's fault was that his reach was beyond even his very great skill—or perhaps that of any one man.

No 400-mph car can be built on a do-it-yourself basis. The tolerances are too fine, the risk too great. In proving this, Graham became the first man to die in 25 years of record runs at Bonneville.