His speed races made him a national celebrity and inspired a Beach Boys song, “Spirit of America,” in which singer Brian Wilson recognized him as “a daring young man” playing “a dangerous game,” a reference to the risks it faces. for speed demons like mr. Breedlove, who once crashed into a lake, and his friend Donald Campbell, who died in 1967 while trying to break the world water speed record.
Mr. Breedlove, who likened his record speed runs to “walking on a limb to see how far you can go without breaking it and then pulling back just in time,” was 86 when he died April 4 at the his house in Rio Vista. , California. She had cancer, said family spokeswoman Louise Ann Noeth, an author and public relations specialist.
When he was 13 years old in Los Angeles, Mr. Breedlove was so fascinated by cars that he convinced his parents to help him buy an abandoned 1934 Ford coupe for $75, on the condition that he not drive it until he got his license. The car needed a lot of work, but with the help of his high school shop teacher, who donated a supercharger for the engine, he was soon competing in races in the Mojave Desert, where he set a course record when he go 148 mph.
The year he turned 21, 1958, he traveled to Bonneville, where he got behind the wheel of a belly tank racer, an aerodynamic car made from a modified aircraft drop tank, and arrived at 236 mph.
Mr. Breedlove just wanted to go faster.
As he put it, he grew increasingly determined after hearing President John F. Kennedy declare in his 1961 inaugural address, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for the your country”.
“I knew I couldn’t go to the moon or cure cancer, but I knew how to go really fast,” he told the New York Times in 2012, “and the most patriotic thing I could think of was to take the limitless “. land speed record away from the British.”
An Englishman, John Cobb, had held the record since 1947, going 394 mph through the Bonneville salt flats. (The record is determined by taking the average speed of two runs in opposite directions, to eliminate the effects of wind.) Mr. Breedlove thought he could go faster with the help of a jet engine and spent $500 to acquire a surplus J47 turbojet, the same engine used in fighter jets like the F-86 Sabre.
With the help of friends like Walt Sheehan, an engineer at Lockheed, he effectively designed a wingless fighter plane. The car rode on three wheels instead of four (there was some debate as to whether it was an automobile, a motorcycle, or something else) and was sponsored by oil companies Shell and Goodyear, who helped cover the cost of $250,000 reported.
“It was handmade,” said Mr. Breedlove in Sports Illustrated, “but I mean done with hand tools, a small file and a screwdriver.”
On August 5, 1963, Mr. Breedlove dethroned the British, setting a new land speed record of 407 mph. “I think I can go faster,” he said, and he made the prediction right, return to the salt flats for the next few years as he battled rival driver Tom Green and two half-brothers, Walt and Art Arfons, who traded places in the record books with the help of their own jet-powered cars.
Mr. Breedlove broke the 500 mph mark in October 1964 when he averaged 526 mph at Bonneville. A year later, he reached 600.6 mph while driving a new four-wheeled version of the Spirit of America, called the Sonic I. His grip on the record was permanently loosened in 1970, when North American pilot -American Gary Gabelich went 622 mph.
At the time, sponsors were reluctant to support Mr. Breedlove to go faster, and they decided that the risk of injury and death was too great.
Mr Breedlove had already survived a near-catastrophic crash during his record-breaking run in 1965, when his brake parachutes broke and he burned out his brakes. To avoid hitting a canal, he tried to make a U-turn, he said, only to run into a line of wooden poles. “I thought they might hold me back,” he told the Los Angeles Times decades later, “but I cut through them like toothpicks.”
His car went over a berm and into a lake. Just before hitting the water, he detached the top of the vehicle, allowing him to get out and swim to shore. The video showed it making jokes a few minutes after the arrival of his support team. “What a trip!” he said “For my next trick… I’m going to set myself on fire.”
He also had a question for his companions: how fast had he been going?
“I kept thinking,” he later recalled, looking back on the moment he realized he was headed for the water and facing potential death, “if I’m going to go, I might as well have the record”.
Norman Craig Breedlove was born in Los Angeles on March 23, 1937 and grew up in the Mar Vista neighborhood. Her parents worked in Hollywood, her father as a special effects technician and her mother as a dressmaker turned dancer. They separated when Mr. Breedlove was young.
At the age of 17 he married Margaret Toombs, with whom he soon had three children. He worked as a welder and firefighter in Costa Mesa to support the family before he stopped focusing on the land speed record, a pursuit that led to the collapse of his marriage.
His second wife, Lee Roberts, was more responsive to his careers, supporting him with money from her job as a carhop at a drive-in restaurant. Mr. Breedlove persuaded her to get behind the wheel of the Spirit of America—a tactic, incidentally, designed to keep a rival driver from speeding across the salt flats that day—and in 1965 she went over 308 mph, winning the title of the fastest woman in the world.
Mr. Breedlove later worked in real estate while keeping an eye on the land speed record, dreaming of one day becoming the first person to officially break the sound barrier in a car. That feat went to British racer Andy Green, who set the current record, 763 mph, while racing across the alkaline flats of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert in 1997.
By then, Mr. Breedlove had invested in building a new five-wheeled Spirit of America, a dart-shaped car that he believed was capable of going more than 800 mph. He reached 675 mph before skidding and overturning in the Black Rock Desert, and later sold the damaged car to millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett, who died in a plane crash in 2007 before he could run on the record speed
In 2003, Mr. Breedlove married his sixth wife, Yadi Figueroa. She survives him, as do two children, Norm and Dawn; a stepsister; five grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren. Another daughter, Chris Breedlove, died in 2008.
Mr. Breedlove was inducted into the American Motorsports Hall of Fame in 1993, the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in 2000, and the Automotive Hall of Fame in 2009. He was then 70 years old and , while he was no longer in the cockpit. seat, he was still looking to organize one last sprint with his friends, hoping to lead another team at the top of the record books.
“We do it for the same reason that Columbus set out to explore an ocean that people told him he left on the shore,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1997, explaining what drove him and his colleagues “It is human nature to explore. We are modern explorers.”
