Art Arfons and the Green Monster. Still image from video below.
Say the name Craig Breedlove and most with a passion for speed will be quick to point out that he’s a multiple-time land speed record holder, immortalized in the Beach Boys’ song, Spirit of America. Say the name Art Arfons, however, and only a handful of motorsport fans will be able to place him as a three-time land speed record holder who was locked in a tense, multi-year battle with Breedlove on Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats. Forty-eight years ago today, Art Arfons took his Green Monster jet car to a two-way average speed of 576 MPH at Bonneville, temporarily snatching the record from Breedlove and establishing his third and final land speed record.
As author Samuel Hawley explains in Speed Duel: The Inside Story of the Land Speed Record in the Sixties, setting a speed benchmark may have been easier than keeping it. On November 2, 1965, Breedlove had driven his Spirit of America: Sonic I to a two-way average speed of 555.127 MPH, but next up with a reservation on the salt was Art Arfons and his Green Monster jet car. Arfons’ time on the salt didn’t start until November 7, which gave Breedlove two options: relinquish the course early and give Arfons good weather in which to set a new record, or use the remaining time on the salt and hope that Arfons would be rained out. Time booked had to be used in an attempt at a record, so Breedlove chose to put his wife Lee in the Sonic I to set a women’s land speed record. Mission accomplished with a 308.56 MPH average, the Breedloves next used a Shelby Daytona Coupe to set multiple speed and endurance records, utilizing every second of their allotted time at Bonneville.
The stall tactic looked like a good one, as rain was forecast for Bonneville in the coming days. Arfons knew that his window to establish a new record would be a narrow one, but that fit his overall philosophy on land speed record racing, which he equated to a game of Russian roulette. “The more times you pull the trigger,” Arfons was quoted as saying, “the greater your chances of blowing your head off.”
Arfons had plenty of experience with pushing his luck a bit too far. During a run in late October of 1964, he’d experienced a blowout at a speed north of 500 MPH, yet managed to retain control of the Green Monster. Not only did Arfons avoid a potentially deadly crash that day, but he also managed to run a two-way average speed of 536.71 MPH setting a new land speed record in the process. Arfons, it seemed, had a way of turning misfortune into fortune.
With a limited amount of dry weather in November of 1965 to top Breedlove’s 555.127 MPH, Arfons knew he’d need to be fast right out of the gate. Opting to run on the shorter hot rod course to avoid wasting the time needed to re-grade the international course, Arfons set out on a “practice” run shortly before noon on November 7, 1965. As soon as Arfons lit up the afterburner on the Green Monster’s J-79 jet engine, it became readily apparent that he was going for the record, practice be damned. Throttling back midway through the run, Arfons had still managed a one-way pass of 575 MPH; a return run at the same speed would be enough to grab the record back from Breedlove, with little time left in the 1965 season.
By 12:23 p.m., the Green Monster was prepared for its return run. Like Arfons’s initial sprint down the salt, this would be a fast one. Though he was concerned about tire failure, he tried not to show it, pushing the car all the way to an indicated airspeed of 625 MPH before rolling out of the throttle. At first, all seemed normal, and it appeared as if Arfons would easily take the record; his second pass was surely faster than his first.
Then, the Green Monster’s right rear tire exploded, at a speed somewhere north of 600 MPH. Arfons, fighting to keep the car pointed down the salt, hit the button that would trigger the chutes and slow the car, but there was no response; fragments of the exploding tire had torn the chute from the back of the car. Equally bad, the cockpit was filling with smoke as a result of the right front tire’s contact with the car’s bodywork, and Arfons had no oxygen mask. Rapidly running out of options, Arfons raised the driver’s canopy, but the high speed flow of air ripped the canopy off its hinges. Though he could now see, the news was mostly bad; the black line used to mark the course was nowhere in sight, meaning Arfons was skimming across ungraded salt, with no way of avoiding obstacles in his path.
Thumbing the release for the reserve parachute, Arfons waited to be thrown forward into his harness. Though the car slowed, the force was not as great as Arfons expected; the Green Monster’s second parachute had also been damaged by flying debris. Still, the drag was enough to slow the car to the point where Arfons could apply the disc brakes and, eventually, stop the car. Ending his run perilously close to the dike topped by Breedlove in the original Spirit of America, Arfons climbed out of the car to the astonishment of a Tooele County sheriff’s officer. Only later would he learn that, despite the high-speed tire explosion, he had taken the land speed record back from Breedlove with a two-run average of 576.55 MPH.
His record would be short-lived, as Breedlove would return a week later to chalk up a new record speed of 600.601 MPH. Arfons would return for another attempt in the fall of 1966, but this would end only with the biggest crash of his career. While the list of those who have set speed records is a short one, the list of drivers who have survived a crash at 585 MPH is even shorter, topped by Art Arfons.