The Yeager of 2 wheels. RIP
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The Yeager of 2 wheels. RIP
Don Vesco died recently. A direct successor of the true land speed record heroes such as Cobb, Seagrave and Campbell he persued the true, ie the wheel driven records until his death. Pistons and turbines, yes, rockets and jets, no.
318mph on 2 wheels, 468mph on 4!!!!!(wheel, not rocket driven mind)
A purist, a real fuel-head. What an inspiration!
I hope "The Times" will not object to this reproduction of their superb obit.
The Times. London. Friday Dec 20
Don Vesco
Motorcycle racer and high-speed vehicle pioneer who set a new wheel-driven land speed record at the age of 62
In a life devoted to making wheels turn faster and the terrain-bound vehicle move at ever greater velocities, Don Vesco pushed relentlessly against the envelope of motorcycle and car performance for more than 30 years.
His world land speed record for wheel-driven cars of 458.443mph, established last year when he was 62 in the bullet-nosed Turbinator at Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah, would be regarded as being a true world record for cars by many old land speed record purists.
For such diehards, the Englishman Andy Green’s 1997 record of 763.085mph might be discounted, having been achieved in what they regarded as little more than a wingless jet aircraft that did not take off. Colonel John Stapp had, after all, achieved speeds of more than 600 mph as early as 1947 with a sled built by the aircraft manufacturer Northrop and powered by an 8,000lb static-thrust rocket engine. Such feats left motorcar buffs cold.
The essence of all Vesco’s attempts was the transmission of engine power, whether piston or gas turbine, directly through the wheels. He was the first man to ride a motorbike at more than 250mph in 1970, and he went through the 400mph barrier in a car in 1998.
Don Vesco was born in 1939 in Loma Linda in Southern California, where, in a motor-mad atmosphere, he graduated from racing scooters round the block to dismantling the engines of model aircraft to find ways of making them rev at higher speeds. His father John was well known in the San Diego area for racing Model T and Model A Fords at weekends, and Don and his brother Rick — who were later to design the worldbeating Turbinator together — helped him at weekends.
Don Vesco first came to prominence when he won the 1963 US Motor Cycle Grand Prix — forerunner of the Daytona 200 — at the Daytona International Speedway in Florida. Thereafter he concentrated not so much on racing as making motorcycles go faster. He broke the 250mph barrier in 1970, exceeded 300mph on a Yamaha Silver Bird in 1975 and three years later pushed the record to 318mph on a Kawasaki turbo. This mark stood for 12 years.
By the mid-1980s, Don and Rick Vesco were looking for ways of breaking the wheel-driven car speed record, as nobody seemed to be challenging their two-wheeled feats.
This record had stood at 409.277mph since 1965, when it had been set by Bob Summers. Many feared this milestone had marked the end of an era in land speed racing — free-wheeling, jet-powered land vehicles had carried the land speed record beyond the 600mph mark, Craig Breedlove raising it spectacularly from 468.72mph to 600.6mph between October 1964 and November 1965.
Rick Vesco set to work to design a new four-wheel-drive vehicle named Project 425, a title indicative of its intended speed. Powered in its first incarnation by two Chevrolet engines, and then by two turbo-charged Offy four cams, the car ran at Bonneville for several seasons. But Project 425 never quite came up to the Vescos’ expectations. And when in October 1991 Al Teague squeezed out a few more decimal points to extend Summers’s record to 409.968mph a challenge seemed unmistakably to have been issued.
Teague’s car was, like Summers’s, a piston-engined vehicle. Feeling that piston engines could not be made to perform any better, the brothers looked around for a gas-turbine solution to the problem and chose a Lycoming T55 helicopter engine, of the type used to power the C47D Chinook, as their next power plant.
Project 425 was rechristened the Turbinator and the vehicle was first shown, though not raced, at Bonneville in 1996. To the lay observer it looked no different from its predecessor, though large air intakes for the hungry gas turbines gave the game away.
By the next season the Turbinator was showing its mettle by achieving a flying kilometre (in a single direction) at 438.897mph, and in 1999 Vesco achieved 427.832mph over a mile at Speed Week and then at the World Finals at Bonneville. But a mechanical defect prevented him from returning to repeat the run in the opposite direction within the hour, and so it could not count as a world record.
In 2000 the Turbinator was not ready in time for Speed Week, and heavy rains washed out the salt flats course the World Finals that year. But at the World Finals in 2001 the Turbinator showed what a wheel-driven car could achieve when Vesco drove Turbinator on two-mile runs at an average speed of 458.44mph.
Vesco was convinced that he and the Turbinator could push the wheel-driven world record above 500mph “given the proper salt texture”. Indeed he and his brother were both energetically involved in the “Save the Salt” conservation effort at Bonneville. Cancer robbed him of the chance to make a fresh record attempt.
Don Vesco, world wheel-driven land speed record holder, was born in Loma Linda, California, on April 3, 1939. He died of cancer in San Diego on December 16, 2002, aged 63.
or see www.thetimes.co.uk
318mph on 2 wheels, 468mph on 4!!!!!(wheel, not rocket driven mind)
A purist, a real fuel-head. What an inspiration!
I hope "The Times" will not object to this reproduction of their superb obit.
The Times. London. Friday Dec 20
Don Vesco
Motorcycle racer and high-speed vehicle pioneer who set a new wheel-driven land speed record at the age of 62
In a life devoted to making wheels turn faster and the terrain-bound vehicle move at ever greater velocities, Don Vesco pushed relentlessly against the envelope of motorcycle and car performance for more than 30 years.
His world land speed record for wheel-driven cars of 458.443mph, established last year when he was 62 in the bullet-nosed Turbinator at Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah, would be regarded as being a true world record for cars by many old land speed record purists.
For such diehards, the Englishman Andy Green’s 1997 record of 763.085mph might be discounted, having been achieved in what they regarded as little more than a wingless jet aircraft that did not take off. Colonel John Stapp had, after all, achieved speeds of more than 600 mph as early as 1947 with a sled built by the aircraft manufacturer Northrop and powered by an 8,000lb static-thrust rocket engine. Such feats left motorcar buffs cold.
The essence of all Vesco’s attempts was the transmission of engine power, whether piston or gas turbine, directly through the wheels. He was the first man to ride a motorbike at more than 250mph in 1970, and he went through the 400mph barrier in a car in 1998.
Don Vesco was born in 1939 in Loma Linda in Southern California, where, in a motor-mad atmosphere, he graduated from racing scooters round the block to dismantling the engines of model aircraft to find ways of making them rev at higher speeds. His father John was well known in the San Diego area for racing Model T and Model A Fords at weekends, and Don and his brother Rick — who were later to design the worldbeating Turbinator together — helped him at weekends.
Don Vesco first came to prominence when he won the 1963 US Motor Cycle Grand Prix — forerunner of the Daytona 200 — at the Daytona International Speedway in Florida. Thereafter he concentrated not so much on racing as making motorcycles go faster. He broke the 250mph barrier in 1970, exceeded 300mph on a Yamaha Silver Bird in 1975 and three years later pushed the record to 318mph on a Kawasaki turbo. This mark stood for 12 years.
By the mid-1980s, Don and Rick Vesco were looking for ways of breaking the wheel-driven car speed record, as nobody seemed to be challenging their two-wheeled feats.
This record had stood at 409.277mph since 1965, when it had been set by Bob Summers. Many feared this milestone had marked the end of an era in land speed racing — free-wheeling, jet-powered land vehicles had carried the land speed record beyond the 600mph mark, Craig Breedlove raising it spectacularly from 468.72mph to 600.6mph between October 1964 and November 1965.
Rick Vesco set to work to design a new four-wheel-drive vehicle named Project 425, a title indicative of its intended speed. Powered in its first incarnation by two Chevrolet engines, and then by two turbo-charged Offy four cams, the car ran at Bonneville for several seasons. But Project 425 never quite came up to the Vescos’ expectations. And when in October 1991 Al Teague squeezed out a few more decimal points to extend Summers’s record to 409.968mph a challenge seemed unmistakably to have been issued.
Teague’s car was, like Summers’s, a piston-engined vehicle. Feeling that piston engines could not be made to perform any better, the brothers looked around for a gas-turbine solution to the problem and chose a Lycoming T55 helicopter engine, of the type used to power the C47D Chinook, as their next power plant.
Project 425 was rechristened the Turbinator and the vehicle was first shown, though not raced, at Bonneville in 1996. To the lay observer it looked no different from its predecessor, though large air intakes for the hungry gas turbines gave the game away.
By the next season the Turbinator was showing its mettle by achieving a flying kilometre (in a single direction) at 438.897mph, and in 1999 Vesco achieved 427.832mph over a mile at Speed Week and then at the World Finals at Bonneville. But a mechanical defect prevented him from returning to repeat the run in the opposite direction within the hour, and so it could not count as a world record.
In 2000 the Turbinator was not ready in time for Speed Week, and heavy rains washed out the salt flats course the World Finals that year. But at the World Finals in 2001 the Turbinator showed what a wheel-driven car could achieve when Vesco drove Turbinator on two-mile runs at an average speed of 458.44mph.
Vesco was convinced that he and the Turbinator could push the wheel-driven world record above 500mph “given the proper salt texture”. Indeed he and his brother were both energetically involved in the “Save the Salt” conservation effort at Bonneville. Cancer robbed him of the chance to make a fresh record attempt.
Don Vesco, world wheel-driven land speed record holder, was born in Loma Linda, California, on April 3, 1939. He died of cancer in San Diego on December 16, 2002, aged 63.
or see www.thetimes.co.uk
