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I've been photographing these record runs. I’ve tried almost every type of film available -and up to this year, the troubles I’ve had with reticulation, unnaturally exaggerated graininess and even softened emulsions were heartbreaking.
But this year, for the first time, I took Agfa Supreme to the speed wars: and to my delight I found that Supreme is the first film that stands the test of Bonneville’s rigorous temperature-changes. Where past experience with other films had taught me to expect reticulation, abnormal grain and every other imaginable trouble. Supreme took it and liked it to the extent of giving me some of the best pictures I’ve ever made of a record try.
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Sir Malcolm Campbell makes 301 rn.p.h.
But perhaps you’d like to hear something about how a person like John Cobb. Capt. Eyston or Malcolm Campbell goes about the business of setting a new land speed record. And “business” is decidedly the word for it: driving one of these wheeled bullets across the salt-beds at 370 miles an hour costs almost as much as an average motion picture production, and involves fully as much careful preparation.
To begin with, you must have a
car: and you can’t just walk into a salesroom and say “Wrap that one up for me!” On the contrary, you have to seek out one of the very few engineers in the world who can design a six-mile-a-minute speedster, and you design and build your car from scratch. Even the nuts and holts often have to be built specially for the purpose.
Campbell and Eyston both had huge juggernauts, as powerful as a racing airplane, and bigger and heavier than most trucks. John Cobb and his designer, Reid Railton, pinned their faith to a far lighter and less powerful design, trusting to aerodynamically perfect streamlining to do the work of weight and brute power.
Eleven-Year-Old Engines
One of the most surprising things about Cobh’s record-breaking “Red Lion” was the fact that his engines were over eleven years old. The car used two of them — one to drive the front wheels, the other to drive the rear wheels. They had begun their careers as airplane engines, known as the Napier “Lion;” each had twelve cylinders in three hanks of four, two arranged in the usual V-formation, with the third standing upright between the other two. Originally, if my memory is correct, these engines produced about 450 hp. each: but today, between modifications and the special racing fuels used, they produce considerably more power.
Over the low-hung chassis of the “Red Lion" is placed the demountable body, which is carefully streamlined not only to minimize air resistance, but to make the air-currents help to hold the car on the ground at high speeds. Following the experience of
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