On the wings of speed
Published in Sunday Times South Africa, June 2000, writer unknown

In 1929 Malcolm Campbell came to South Africa to try to become the fastest man on four wheels. Tim Couzens remembers his attempt at Verneuk Pan in the Northern Cape.

In December 1898, on a straight road near Acheres in France, Count Gaston de Chasseloup-Laubat had recorded a speed of 39.24mph in his electric car. When he heard this, Camille Jenatzy, a Belgian who also produced cars powered by electricity, was incensed: this would ruin his business if his cars were outperformed. So he challenged his competitor to a duel - with cars.

On January 17 1899, the two met on the same stretch of road. The winner was to be the fastest over a kilometre, not from a standing but, as it were, from a running start. Thus was born the land speed record for the flying kilometre and, later, the flying mile.

The first car to take on the record seriously in Britain after World War One was the 350hp V12 Sunbeam designed by Louis Coatalen and powered by a Manitou naval aircraft engine. In 1922, it had defeated Count Zbarowski's famous Chitti-Chitti-BangBang, which had a Zeppelin engine mounted on a Mercedes chassis. The following year Guinness bettered Hornsted's long-standing record on the banked track at Brooklands. The car attracted the attention of the man whose name would come to be synonymous with the land speed record: Malcolm Campbell.

Although he became a hero to the British public he was not an easy man to live with, as his three wives discovered. His granddaughter Gina writes in her autobiography, Bluebirds , that he was a self-opinionated man who was often unkind and dictatorial to his children. He once told his son Donald: "You're never going to be as good as me. We aren't built the same way - you haven't got the guts that I have."

Campbell bought a Peugeot and then a Darracq, both of which he unhappily called "The Flapper", an unpropitious name for cars he wanted to fly. But the night before he won an important race at Brooklands he went to a theatre in London to see Maeterlinck's The Bluebird , and after that all his record breaking cars and world record breaking boats were called "Bluebird" and painted blue.

The Sunbeam so impressed him that he cajoled Coatalen into lending it to him in an attempt on the land speed record at Saltburn in Yorkshire. But his first three assaults on the record were dogged by misfortune. At Saltburn the stopwatches used were not officially recognised. At Fanoe Island in Denmark, having bought the Sunbeam, he easily surpassed Guinness's mark but once again the timing was not recognised. The same thing happened a third time at Saltburn. There was a further trauma at Fanoe: Bluebird, at full tilt, lost a tyre, which crashed into a crowd of spectators inadequately controlled by officials (despite Campbell's explicit warnings) and killed a young boy.

In 1924 the time to beat was 145.89mph, set by Ernest Eldridge in his Fiat called Mephistopheles. Campbell, convinced that his Sunbeam was capable of better, was on the lookout for a more suitable track than he'd found up till then.

The Laugharne headland in Wales is the beginning of a seven-mile stretch of beach leading arrow-straight to the small town of Pendine. When I went there one March day the sun shone, the wind blew and the rain fell - a typical Welsh day. Pendine is a very pleasant little coastal resort basking in the past. The land speed record was broken there many times and it has a Museum of Speed. The Beach Hotel is still there, little changed. Run by the hospitable Ebsworth family in the '20s, it was a base and haven for Campbell, his brilliant mechanic Leo Villa and the crew. "Their liberal portions of ham and eggs," wrote Villa in his book Life with the Speed King , "will remain unforgettable." The main bar room was "liberally festooned with whole cured hams". They have gone now but the floor has a carpet festooned with racing car designs, and the welcome is still rough and hearty.

It was at Pendine on September 25 1924, in the teeth of high winds and soft sand, that Campbell broke the land speed record for the first time in his Sunbeam. The following year he was the first man to go faster than 150mph.

But he had rivals dogging him. First Major de Vane Segrave topped Campbell's record in a new Sunbeam. Then Parry Thomas, who had redesigned the Higham Special he had bought from Count Zborowski and renamed it Babs, lifted the record to 168.07mph in April 1926. But Thomas pushed himself and his vehicle too far the following year as he sped down the sands away from the Beach Hotel. One of the driving chains in Babs broke, the car somersaulted and burst into flames. The chain had virtually decapitated its driver. Babs was buried in the sands at Pendine but has since been resurrected and now goes on a yearly pilgrimage round the tourist spots of Wales. The death of Thomas, however, was a sober warning to Campbell and Segrave.

Now that the race was to be first to 200mph Pendine was no longer considered suitable so the search was again on for a better venue. Much to Campbell's annoyance Segrave took the record to 203.79mph at Daytona in Florida. Campbell had by now rebuilt and streamlined Bluebird and added a 900hp Napier Sprint Lion engine designed for the British entry into the Schneider Trophy air race. On his first visit to Daytona, Campbell achieved a mean speed of 206.95mph.

But he was not happy with Daytona and began to look further afield.

As a youth he had been riveted by the romances of Rider Haggard, particularly by King Solomon's Mines , so it was not difficult for him to consider a track in Africa. After reconnoitring an unsuitable site in the Sahara, a plane crash in the Atlas mountains and an episode at the mercy of Riffian bandits, he settled on Verneuk Pan in the then northern Cape.

Campbell arrived in Cape Town on the Caernarvon Castle in February 1929 with his Napier-Arrol-Astor Bluebird. In his first interview he said: "Verneuk Pan is the most interesting experiment I have ever made." He even anticipated making the record attempt within 10 days. But on his way from Mouille Point to the Queen's Hotel he lost his dispatch case with important papers in it. Campbell was a superstitious man. He should have taken note of the meaning of the pan's name - to trick, mislead or swindle.

The task facing the people preparing the track was a formidable one. The pan was a long way from anywhere (Brandvlei was the closest door, nearly 100km away) and the roads were flinty and torturous. On and near the pan puffadders and scorpions throve in a land where the temperature could rise to 42°C in the shade. Water had to be transported from miles away and labour had to be imported.

But there was no shortage of excitement. Campbell's camp had been set up with tents, shelters, fires, waterbags, stews, canned fruit, tea and even a gramophone. Local traders from Brandvlei and Kenhardt anticipated a killing as spectators in their hundreds were expected to flock in. Licences for a couple of bars were issued. Orders for petrol by local garages were trebled. Newspapers set up stands.

One of the first spectators to arrive was a lady in neat riding breeches and a khaki shirt, with plenty of knitting in anticipation of a long wait.

When Campbell flew to the pan a week after arriving he was - at least in public - pleased with what he saw: "Verneuk Pan is the most wonderful stretch of flat country I have ever seen." He was ready, he said, and Bluebird was ready.

But he and everyone else had underestimated the pan's artful dodginess. The track, starting from a ridge on the fringe and striking into the heart of the brown saucer, was to be 16 miles long. But it was laid out directly west-east and looked straight into the rising sun. Dust devils chased over the pan and mirages, more entertaining than the cinema, created phantom trees and ghostly men on stilts. Many of the workers, poorly paid and sleeping in the open, sickened in the heat or deserted. Worst of all, razor-sharp stones, fatal to tyres at high speed, littered the area and when they were removed the small walls around them crumbled and holes appeared.

The anticipated day when "the flash in the pan" was to occur was postponed repeatedly. Things were not helped when the light plane carrying Campbell crashed into a tree at Calvinia. He suffered only cuts to his nose and lips but the experience was unsettling.

These delays meant that at times things seemed to go backwards. For the waiting journalists any distractions were pounced on. When a tortoise took to the track they determined to test Aesop's fable of the tortoise and the hare. They named it Bluebird II. The next day it covered 20 yards 7.5 inches before it lodged a complaint against the track and retired into its shell. Whether it would continue depended on whether it felt like it.

The delays exacerbated another concern. When Campbell came to South Africa 207mph was the target he had to beat. He was confident he would do so. But every day he expected bad news from Daytona: it came on March 11. Segrave had pushed the record to 231.36mph in his Golden Arrow.

In his heart of hearts Campbell knew he could not better this, especially in the present Bluebird and at the relatively high altitude of Verneuk Pan, where he would lose 11% horsepower. But he was not one to give up. Finally, on Sunday April 21, he decided to make his attempt on the record yet again.

Once more he had to summon up his courage. Several men had died or were to die in pursuit of speed records - Thomas, Lee Bible and Campbell's own son, Donald. The danger was ever-present. His wife denied that he had an iron nerve. On the contrary, she said, he was hypersensitive, overanxious and meticulous in preparation, with a brain that worked at a terrific speed in moments of crisis.

The margin of survival was so fine. "One slip of his hand," she said, "one swerve, and he would be whirled to all eternity."

A strong wind and a bumpy track delayed his start and it was only at 5.35 in the evening that he set off eastwards on his first run, trying to beat the Angel of Death by outpacing it.

By the time he had completed both legs he had stripped the rubber off the tyres and destroyed all eight of them, at a cost of £120 each. "Gad, it was a rough track," he remarked.

His mean speed for the measured mile was 218.45mph. He had beaten the speed he had come to South Africa to beat but he was six weeks too late. He had been "verneuked".

Four days later he decided to take Bluebird on its last-ever run. He had only one set of tyres left anyway. His aim was to break the world 5km record (held by Segrave at 202.61mph) and the five-mile record (held by Eldridge at 140.61mph). At 5am on Friday April 25, under the moon and in the early light, Bluebird looked superb. At three minutes to seven her nickel-plated nose glinted like a silver eye as she started her last run along the white line that stretched beyond sight.

When he returned the water was boiling and he had a terrible headache from fumes in the cockpit. He hadn't cracked the record he wanted above all else but he had two new world records: 211mph for the 5km and 212 mph for the five miles.

In a radio broadcast before he left South Africa a week later Campbell was gracious, perhaps diplomatic, in his disappointment. Verneuk Pan, he suggested, could "be made the speedway of the world" and he promised to return the following year "in a monster car which I am going to call the Springbok".

He never did.

In a new Bluebird designed by Reid Railton and powered by a Rolls-Royce aircraft engine, Campbell broke the land speed record four more times at Daytona.

Then, in 1935, at Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah he became the first man to exceed 300mph on land.