Perhaps, Parrot, this is a different kind of record?
Have you beaten Scott's record to the pole if you drive there in a Land Cruiser? You will have the fadster time, sure, but the record? Morally, I think not.
Land speed records are all about technical issues of harnessing brute power, there is little human endurance involved in the "driving" itself, (bar exceptional levels of either bravery or foolhardiness). I don't mean to denigrate Campbell or Greenameyer's skills, but all they had to do was just hit the tit and hang on for a minute or two.
This record was all about a simply staggering feat of endurance, during which high levels of technical skill was all that kept either pilot (be it AH or Chalkie) from certain death. I think the fact that Chalkie achieved what he did at 61 is a pretty sure indicator that the levels of work and fatigue he encountered were vastly, hugely less than AH's. IIRC Alex Henshaw said in Flight of the Mew Gull that the fatigue was the hardest thing to cope with, and it was a 100% effort on his part to overcome it. He very nearly didn't. This from an exceptionally fit sub 30yr old. I just don't think the two flights are directly comparable from this point of view alone. Chalkie barely had to navigate - he had none of the stress forcing himself to stay wide awake and hand flying on limited panel (no AI) through the night holding a non-gyro compass course in the full knowledge that if he was just 2 or 3 degrees off, or his DR speed 3 or 4 Kts off he'd miss the airstrip and probably never find it. He also didn't have the reassurance of an ELT if he did come down in the Congo jungle. With autopilot and GPS you'd be able to doze or catnap as a solo sailor does. Chalk and cheese.
I don't mean to run Chalkie's achievement down at all, it's a stupendous feat, particularly at his age, technology or not. I am just uncomfortable with claiming the laurels with the help of that technology. That he has flown the sectors faster is not in dispute; whether he can honestly lay claim to beating AH's "record" is another thing altogether.
Bloody well done, anyway!
Amazing, though, just how little the aircraft and engine technology hasn't changed. The comparisons of a/c weight, fuel carried and used, horsepower and speed are astonishingly similar. Just shows how far they'd come in AH's time, and how little that science has changed in the intervening 70 years.