KEEPING THE SPIRIT ALIVE SINCE 1999
Arthur E. Arfons
3/2/1926 - 3/12/2007
99
Arfons began on the road to the land speed record by accident--almost literally. An avid pilot, he drove to the Akron airport one Sunday to discover that the road was blocked and lined with people. He thought there had been a plane crash, but it turned out to be a drag race on the runway. He was instantly converted to the sport. He and his older brother Walter put together a dragster that they called the Green Monster because they painted it with left-over green tractor paint. It could do only 85 mph. But the brothers kept working at it, building one Green Monster after another, culminating in a jet dragster that Art drove 342 mph at the Bonneville, UT, Salt Flats in the fall of 1960.
That was still more than 50 mph short of the 1947 record set by John Cobb. The brothers broke apart for unexplained reasons and Walter prepared a car for Tom Green, who raised the land speed record to 413.2 mph on Oct. 2, 1964. Three days later Art did 434 mph in the latest Green Monster.
Craig Breedlove raised the mark to 526.28 mph on Oct. 16, and Art regained the record with 536.71 mph on Oct. 27. Breedlove came back a little more than a year later, averaging 555.127 mph on Nov. 3, 1965.
Art was ready to re-take the record four days later, but a right tire exploded on his second run when he was averaging more than 577 mph. He survived, and made his last try on Nov. 17, 1966. By then, Breedlove's record was 600.6 mph.
Arfons was doing more than 600 mph when a wheel came off his car. Again, he survived without serious injury, but he never made another run at the land speed record.
He did occasionally do drag racing exhibitions, but after his car went out of control and killed three spectators in 1971, he quit entirely.
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Milt Marion 1909 - 1999 -
Richard John Beattie Seaman 1913 - 1939 -
Tony Gaze 1920 -
Johnny Moorhouse 1922 - 1999 -
Chico Serra 1957
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Lloyd Ruby 1928 - 2009
Often reffered to as the best driver never to have won the Indy 500, he led the 500 in five occasions. A works driver for Ford in sportscars he had better luck winning the Daytona 24 Hour race twice. He took partin two Grand Prix, once at the Indy 500 when it counted as a round of the World Championship and in the 1961 US Grand Prix. -
Bob Drake 1919 - 1990
Bob Drake was a privateer driver from Los Angeles who raced in the 1950s and early 1960s. -
Bruce Kessler 1926
Kessler was an American driver who shared a car in the 1958 Monaco Grand Prix with a certain B.Ecclestone! He went on to be involved in the trawler and television industries, even acting as a TV director for such notable shows as Knight Rider, The A Team and I Dream of Jeannie. -
Fred Wacker 1918 - 1998
Wacker was the first American to finish on the podium in a post-war Grand Prix he was also President of the SCCA in 1951. -
Phil Hill 1927 - 2008
The only American-born driver to win the Formula One World Drivers' Championship (Mario Andretti, an Italian American driver, won the World Drivers' Championship in 1978, but was not born in the United States). He also scored three wins at each of the 24 Hours of Le Mans and 12 Hours of Sebring sports car races.