{"id":46766,"date":"2014-07-07T20:01:41","date_gmt":"2014-07-07T19:01:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/issue_content\/art-and-his-designs\/"},"modified":"2019-07-20T05:39:41","modified_gmt":"2019-07-20T04:39:41","slug":"art-and-his-designs","status":"publish","type":"issue_content","link":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/archive\/article\/march-2008\/100\/art-and-his-designs\/","title":{"rendered":"Art and his designs"},"content":{"rendered":"

When it came to setting Land Speed Records, no one did it quite like the late Art Arfons
\nBy Richard Heseltine<\/strong><\/p>\n

He\u2019d faced down danger before but this was different: not only Plan A but Plans B, C, and D had been exhausted. The right rear rubber had detonated just past the final Bonneville speed trap. Art Arfons was scorching the salt at over 500mph, strapped into a home-built car in which his total investment was just $10,000. Remarkably the Green Monster stayed true, but drainage ditches and telegraph poles lay past the end of the course. The junkyard genius deployed the parachute \u2013 only for a dragline to snap. Killing the jet engine until he could safely scrub off enough speed to release the back-up, he was still travelling at over 400mph when his reserve \u2019chute disintegrated within moments of being popped. He tried the brakes but the hydraulic lines were shot. There was no choice but to ride it out. Coming to a halt some half a mile later, the ever-modest speed freak was unruffled, elated even. It was October 1964 and he\u2019d just taken back the Land Speed Record with a two-way average of 536.71mph. <\/p>\n

Arthur Eugene Arfons epitomised the right stuff. Preternaturally brave and endlessly self-reliant, this son of a Greek immigrant father and half-Cherokee mother survived countless crashes that by rights should have claimed him. Improbably, he lived life at full tilt comfortably into his seventh decade and only eased off the gas relatively recently. He died on December 3, 2007, aged 81, and was buried in his hometown of Akron, Ohio, along with a jar of Bonneville salt, a manual for a J79 jet engine and a spanner in each hand. His is a story that defies convention and perfectly illustrates how lateral thinking and a lot of willpower can go a long way.<\/p>\n

They had to. Growing up during the Depression, Arfons worked alongside his two half-brothers in the family mill after school was over. At 17 he enlisted in the US Navy, training as a diesel mechanic and seeing action in the invasion of Okinawa, returning home after a three-year stretch. By 1952 he was married and a father but that year would prove a watershed: he and his half-brother \u2013 and future rival \u2013 Walt discovered drag racing. While serving his country, Art had learned to fly and bought a training plane for $500. One weekend he and Walt turned up at the local airfield to make a flight only to find the landing strip blocked by cars racing each other. <\/p>\n

They were hooked by what they saw that day, swiftly cobbling together a contraption powered by an ancient Oldsmobile V8 and hand-painted with a coat of green tractor paint. Mocked by a track announcer at their first meeting only weeks after discovering the sport, the tag \u2018Green Monster\u2019 became a constant for virtually all of Art\u2019s subsequent creations. Even those that weren\u2019t green. <\/p>\n

A year on, the duo lashed together an altogether more extreme dragster with six wheels and a monstrous 450bhp Continental radial engine housed out back: it would do until a blown Allison V12 \u2013 all 27 litres of it \u2013 became available. \u201cI traded a $50 electric motor against it,\u201d Art recalled in 2002. Ever more elaborate machines followed, Arfons winning the 1954 World Series of Drag Racing and becoming one of the first drivers to reach 150mph in the quarter mile with his four-wheel-drive Green Monster 6, the half-siblings having by now parted ways. Art famously beat the hitherto dominant Floridian Don \u2018Big Daddy\u2019 Garlits on his home turf in 1959, and aeroplane engines were subsequently outlawed from frontline competition. Match-racing Walt Arfons\u2019 creations in exhibition events paid the bills but ended in mutual enmity \u2013 a situation not helped by the fact that their workshops were situated side-by-side.<\/p>\n

No matter, Art had bigger fish to fry, his Allison-powered Anteater chasing the Land Speed Record in 1960. Intended to resemble his idol John Cobb\u2019s Railton Special, this distinctive creation was unsuccessful in several attempts, making a best of 313.78mph in \u201961 with a burnt-out clutch.<\/p>\n

That year Arfons and his fellow hot rodders were given a wake-up call by the arrival of Dr Nathan Ostich\u2019s jet-propelled Flying Caduceus. While it didn\u2019t claim the ultimate prize, this contrivance clearly represented the future. Arfons used his connections in army surplus to land an engine out of a B-47 bomber for his next challenger, the resultant Cyclops making 338.791mph at Bonneville in 1962 \u2013 on remoulds. And with an open cockpit.<\/p>\n

Four jet cars had turned up in Utah that year, Craig Breedlove\u2019s among them. In 1963, the charismatic Californian smashed the 400mph barrier. Knowing that he couldn\u2019t match his rival\u2019s budget, Arfons did what he did best: he started scavenging. After locating a J79 jet engine that produced 17,500lb of thrust (compared to the J47 in Breedlove\u2019s Spirit of America that made 5200), he handed over just $700 and dragged it home. It had failed after a shard of metal had been sucked into the intake and damaged 60 turbine blades and should have been scrapped \u2013 a point not lost on the government after Arfons contacted General Electric for a manual. A day later a senior Air Force colonel arrived in Akron demanding the engine be returned: it wasn\u2019t intended for civilians. \u201cI showed him my receipt and said it was junk and you guys threw it away,\u201d Arfons later recalled.<\/p>\n

Predictably, GE refused to help so Arfons stripped the engine and made repairs himself. Then, needing to test it, he strapped the jet to a chassis chained to two trees behind his workshop \u2013 and lit her up. The engine was eventually found 50ft away after it had incinerated a chicken coop and mowed a path through woodland. The fuzz weren\u2019t impressed. Nor his neighbours whose foundations had been rattled. <\/p>\n

Suitably emboldened, Green Monster 11 was cobbled together with a \u201937 Lincoln front axle, a \u201955 Packard steering rack and a \u201947 Ford truck rear end. The 6500lb device may have looked ungainly but it recorded 434.02mph at Bonneville in \u201964 to take the three-day-old Land Speed Record set by Tom Green \u2013 who\u2019d been driving Walt Arfons\u2019 Wingfoot Express. Eight days later Breedlove raised the bar to 526.28mph before crashing out. The salt crust was damaged and bad weather was on its way but Arfons didn\u2019t want to wait another year to drive again. Part-way though the following bid, he was forced to abort after the passenger canopy flew off. His next outing saw an average of 515mph. With time running out, he took his wild ride with a flailing tyre on that remarkable 536.71mph run.<\/p>\n

Not to be outdone, Breedlove returned to Bonneville a year on with Spirit of America: Sonic 1 and on November 2 reclaimed the prize at 555.127mph. After an interminable wait while Breedlove\u2019s team went after countless other records, Arfons took to the salt later that month. He\u2019d exceeded 600mph when a tyre exploded. His cockpit filled with smoke and, unable to see, he punched out the canopy: with his face seared by the air stream, Arfons broke the record at 576.553mph. Within a week, Breedlove reached 600mph and the race was over.<\/p>\n

There would be other attempts and equally hairy rides, including a crash at over 600mph in 1966 where a tyre was apparently found four miles away from the wreck, but Arfons would never hold the title again. Unbowed, he changed tack and had a stab at the Water Speed Record instead, typically without much in the way of sponsorship. After only one aborted attempt, our hero wryly concluded that he \u201cdidn\u2019t much like water\u201d. <\/p>\n

But he did still like jets, helping launch the sport of tractor pulling and building a raft of turbine-powered mud pluggers, campaigned late into the last century. He even returned to the hallowed salt in 1989 \u2013 at the age of 65 and a decade after triple heart bypass surgery \u2013 with a leftfield two-wheeled device, but vibration issues hobbled his bid. Another attempt a year on ended in a sickening accident at over 400mph, and came just two weeks after his nephew Craig had perished after crashing his jet-powered hydrofoil. Arfons would likely have kept on returning, but as he commented at the time, \u201cmy wife would likely divorce me\u201d.<\/p>\n

Nobody before or since has gone faster for less money than Art Arfons. His \u2018can do\u2019 spirit and lack of guile endeared him to millions, even those of us who weren\u2019t alive to witness the \u2018summer of speed\u2019 as he battled \u2018Brave Speedlove\u2019 to be the fastest man on earth \u2013 but wished we had been.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":706,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","categories":[],"tags":[22263,40353,167,40356,226,521,36905,218,61184,35860,810,40351,22606],"issue_decade":[121591],"issue_year":[121626],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue_content\/46766"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue_content"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/issue_content"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/706"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46766"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue_content\/46766\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":231094,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue_content\/46766\/revisions\/231094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46766"},{"taxonomy":"issue_decade","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue_decade?post=46766"},{"taxonomy":"issue_year","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue_year?post=46766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}