Land Speed Record Set – Dale’s Daily Data [VIDEO]

When you watch NASCAR racing in person it just blows you away how fast the cars are going.  Sometimes they reach speeds of nearly 200 miles an hour.  But then if you compare it with open-wheel Indy type cars – they almost look slow.  Indy cars sometimes get up to speeds of 225 to 230 miles an hour.

Then there’s drag racers – usually on a quarter mile track – the top fuel record set last year in Las Vegas was just over 325 miles an hour.

That’s not even close to the land-speed record.  It was on this date in 1965 that 28-year old Californian Craig Breedlove drove an average of 600.6 miles an hour across a one mile stretch of the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.

His Spirit of America car was powered by a surplus engine from a navy jet.

Just the year before Breedlove was nearly killed when the parachute that helped slow the car snapped off.
The car went off the track, thru a series of telephone poles and into a pond.  But he survived by escaping thru
the car’s hatch on the roof.

Since Breedlove’s record in 1965 – it’s been surpassed several times.  The current record set in 1997 is just over 766 mph – and that’s faster than the speed of sound. 

SOURCE: HistoryChannel