NEED FOR SPEED
That was way back in the aptly named ‘Roaring Twenties’ and early Thirties, with Sir Malcolm raising the bar, topping 300mph in 1935.
The bug ran in the family. His son Donald Campbell went on to hold the world land and water speed records at the same time during the 1950s and 60s, before coming to grief in his speedboat Bluebird on Coniston Water in the British Lake District.
That was in 1967, less than 40 years after Henry Segrave died attempting the record on nearby Windermere.
In Daytona, you can still walk on – even drive on – the same stretch of sea-washed sand where Sir Malcolm, a British army major, cracked the land speed record.
Even more remarkably, you can still see his original Bluebird – it’s “like a rocket on wheels” – in the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America, located at Daytona Beach International Speedway Circuit, the home of the hugely-popular sport of NASCAR.
The bullet-shaped, all-blue vehicle is in pride of place, amid the souped-up vehicles used to race round the 100,000-seater stadium which was built nearly 60 years ago an iconic home of car racing. Next to Bluebird are the very tyres used in Sir Malcolm’s record-setting run down the beach.
Each one, made specially by Dunlop back in the day, cost $1,500. They could be used only once too. The friction between the rubber and the sand shredded them in no time.
Little wonder that before the two Brits made the battle their own, only the super-rich could make an attempt. In 1903, American manufacturer Alexander Winton raced his colleague Ransom E Olds, the two men tying at 57mph. But over the next 30 years or so, the records tumbled as the motor car developed – and the Brits came onto the scene.
At the same time, another motorsport took off, in the form of booze runs during those American Prohibition days of the 1920s and early Thirties.
Decades on, the informal racing of bootleggers transferred from the mountains of the Carolinas to the land speed record ‘track’ on the beach at Daytona.
Another chapter in racing was beginning.