Black Rock, famous again

The New York Times has an article by Guy Guliotta about the Black Rock desert in Nevada, and it's not even about Burning Man:

When Ed Shadle was growing up, you could buy a junker for a couple hundred dollars, pound out the dents, drop a big engine in it, paint it candy apple red, take it to the outskirts of town and race from stoplight to stoplight until the cops told you to go home.
Mr. Shadle, a retired IBM field engineer, is 67 now, and he is still racing. So, a bit over ten years ago, he and his good friend Keith Zanghi bought a junker in Maine, pounded out the dents, customized the exterior, dropped a big engine in it and painted it red.
Except this junker was a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, the real thing, the single-engine Mach 2.2 interceptor that ruled the skies in the 1950s and 1960s. “In a post-9.11 world we probably wouldn’t have been able to get one,” Mr. Shadle acknowledged. But in 1999 they drove this one away for $25,000.
And next year— on July 4th, perhaps— they intend to take the North American Eagle to the hardpan desert at Black Rock, Nevada, and run it through a measured mile to set a new land speed record of about 800 miles per hour, 45 miles per hour faster than the speed of sound. Mr. Shadle is the driver.
The Eagle has stiff competition. Late last year, Richard Noble and Andy Green of Britain, who broke the sound barrier on their way to setting the current record of 763 miles per hour in 1997, announced the beginning of Bloodhound, a new three-year project to build a jet-and-rocket car capable of 1,000 miles per hour.
Bloodhound enjoys private-sector sponsorship, university technical support and the endorsement and some education financing from the British government. The Eagle, on the other hand, has about 44 volunteers giving up weekends and vacations to build the ultimate hot rod.
Angels have contributed vitally important hardware and expertise to Eagle, but like the rest of the team, they do it mostly for fun. Mr. Zanghi said he and Mr. Shadle had bankrolled Eagle for about $250,000 over the last decade with one thought in mind: “What we want,” Mr. Shadle said, with a slow drawl and a near-grin straight from central casting, “is to go fast.”
That was the idea on a recent wintry Saturday at Spanaway Airport, a small, privately owned landing strip a few miles south of Tacoma, Washington. The Eagle arrived around 10 a.m. in its customized tractor-trailer, and within an hour sat resplendent on the tarmac. From nose to tail, it is 56 feet long, weighs 13,000 pounds and is powered by a single General Electric LM1500 gas turbine, better known as a J79 when it flew in F-104s. The engine is a loaner from S&S Turbine Services, a Canadian firm that rebuilds J79s for repressurizing natural gas wells. The current engine has been souped up to generate 42,500 horsepower, but the one Eagle will get from S&S for the record run will top out near 50,000 horsepower.
The rules are simple: clock the racer through a measured mile, turn around and do it again, then average the two speeds. Mr. Shadle said Eagle would need eleven miles for each run: a mile to warm up to 250 miles per hour; four miles to light off the afterburner and get up to record speed; a mile in the speed trap; and five miles to stop.
The vehicle must have at least four wheels— two of them steerable— and be back at the original start line within sixty minutes. And that’s it. “You race Formula One or Nascar, the rule books are as thick as the Bible,” Mr. Shadle said. “For this, the rule book is a half-page long.”
But consider the challenges. Rubber tires turn to molten licorice at anything above 350 miles per hour, so the Eagle uses custom-built, single-billet aluminum alloy wheels, grooved for traction on soft surfaces. They will not work on asphalt or concrete. The brakes are special alloy magnets that generate 4,700 brake horsepower as the magnetized drum approaches the moving aluminum wheel, slowing it gradually without ever locking up.
The big imponderable is the sound barrier. In the sky, the shock wave simply dissipates. But on land, it bounces off the ground and can flip a racer into the air. Since each car is unique, the problem has to be solved differently every time. Computer modeling is important— but only up to a point.
Mr. Noble of the Bloodhound project is well aware of the challenge. “We’ve done it once, and now we have to do it again,” he said in a telephone interview. “The forces are huge— fifteen tons were pressing downward on the front of the vehicle when we set the record. You spend an enormous amount of time on the aerodynamics.”
There is no way that cozy Spanaway Airport, rimmed by evergreens and bathed in an icy drizzle, would accommodate an Eagle test run. In its fastest trial to date, Mr. Shadle reached four hundred miles per hour last year at El Mirage dry lake bed in Southern California’s Mojave Desert and almost ran out of track, and early this summer he expects to run at more than five hundred miles per hour at Edwards Air Force Base.
But, for the record run, the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, where winter rains puddle on a clay surface and dry in summer to a level hardpan, is the surface of choice. The dry clay is kind to aluminum wheels and will absorb a significant part of the supersonic shock wave. And there is plenty of room.
The Spanaway visit, Mr. Zanghi explained, was a bench test to prepare for Edwards. The team needed to check recent fixes to Eagle’s electrical system, calibrate the turbine-powered “start cart” that gets Eagle’s engine up to idle speed, and try out new pyrotechnics to deploy the drogue and deceleration parachutes. The chutes failed at El Mirage (the brakes did not), so the team has switched to air bag detonators from derelict cars— about $25 apiece at junkyards.
Eagle sat at the end of Spanaway’s runway, about fifty yards from a line of fir trees separating the airport from the rest of the neighborhood. Team members ran a cable from Eagle’s arresting hook to the trees, and moored the racer to the biggest trunk— about thirty inches in diameter. When the engine gets up to speed, the big tree shakes like a rosebush in a hurricane. It has withstood this insult before, even though Eagle scorched the entire tree line last year, turning it brown for months.
Mr. Zanghi explained all this as preparations unfolded. Wires ran from the Eagle to a custom-made van, where engineers monitored the electrical sequences. The start cart sat on the infield next to the tarmac, joined to Eagle by its air hose. The start cart gets Eagle’s engine up to about thirty percent power. Then Mr. Shadle pushes the throttle to one hundred percent. Without the cable holding it to a tree and with enough running room, the racer could reach perhaps 400 miles per hour in this configuration. To go any faster, Mr. Shadle would need to light the afterburner.
Mr. Zanghi is 54, a shortish, low-key man with a buzz cut and spectacles who caught racing fever as a 12-year-old when he saw Craig Breedlove’s Spirit of America, then the world land speed record-holder, on display in a Chevy showroom in Seattle.
Mr. Zanghi started crewing for dragsters and funny cars after high school and even went to college for a while, but dropped out to start his own business building specialty trailers for heavy equipment. He met Mr. Shadle in the mid-1990s when he volunteered to work on a land-speed racer team. Mr. Shadle was a part owner. It was a discouraging moment. The Noble team, with Andy Green driving, had just gone supersonic with their racer, ThrustSSC, at Black Rock, and “the car we were working on became instantly obsolete,” Mr. Shadle recalled. “I told Keith, I want my money back, and we’ll just build our own car. We shook hands on it.”
Mr. Shadle at that point had been racing for more than fifty years, starting with horses, then Soap Box Derby cars, hot rods, motorcycles, airplanes, and anything else he could get his hands on. His wife made him quit motorcycles in the 1970s, but he still has an Ossa Stiletto in the garage.
The partners thought an F-104 might do for the land speed record, and Mr. Zanghi became convinced after spending an afternoon gazing at one hanging from the rafters at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. If you didn’t have enough money to build a racer from scratch, why not use someone else’s design?
It took Mr. Shadle more than a year to find the one in Maine. The Air Force sold it to a Los Angeles company to use as a template for spare parts, and it was later junked. The engine had been removed, half the plates were ripped off and the rest were decorated with graffiti and bird droppings. “It was about two months from being turned into beer cans,” Mr. Zanghi recalled.
The Eagle team clipped the F-104’s wings and ailerons, welded new plates, stitched the fuselage together with thousands of new rivets, and hustled sponsors at air and auto shows. Mr. Shadle and Mr. Zanghi did not have the money to buy a J79 outright, but S&S Turbines leased one to them for almost nothing.
Steve Green, a Canadian specialty machinist, made the team a set of aluminum wheels, and Jerry Lamb, an inventor, designed the brakes. Ed Drumheller, and engineer who for decades was a participant in the nation’s manned space programs, provided high-speed parachutes. Mr. Drumheller was at Spanaway, along with two dozen team members and an equal number of relatives, friends, and passers-by.
With Eagle ready to go, Mr. Shadle gathered everyone for a safety briefing. Nobody stands behind the racer, everybody wears earplugs, and “there will be no hats, no pens, no glasses,” he said. “If your glasses go in there,” he added, pointing at one of Eagle’s cavernous turbine intakes, “your head will follow.” He paused and smiled: “Let’s go make some noise.”
And, after a few false starts, they did. The earth shook, trees wobbled, ears protested and the heat from a jet engine burning eighty gallons of kerosene per minute briefly turned a dreary Spanaway morning into springtime. And after the engine shut down, the chutes spit flawlessly from their containers with an anticlimactic kapop. Cheers and hugs all around. Mr. Shadle opened a soda and smiled: “We’re going to Edwards,” he said.