The First American to 400 MPH: Mickey Thompson | MotorTrend

Mickey Thompson is the greatest hot rodder of all time so Mickey Thompson like you've seen the MT valve covers you've seen Mt tires we're talking about the same Mickey Thompson the guy who was the first American to go 400 miles an hour but the reason I say he's the greatest hopper hunter goes way beyond that this guy was on fire all of the time he did more things in hot rodding and more different venues than anybody anybody but the big deal and the thing is most famous for worldwide is being the first American to four hundred miles an hour and for a brief time actually the fastest man on the planet so let's talk about that it all began with the car known as the five five five streamliner now Mickey Thompson and his friend and mechanic forever Fritz Voigt they ended up building this car and it was supposed to be a streamlined dragster although it doesn't really look like one and had that complete body work on the thing and it was powered by two Chrysler Hemis and the jerry cans that were like in the engine compartment or for a total loss cooling system basically it would just check water out into those cans which just tells you how rudimentary this whole thing is and each Chrysler Hemi powered one axle SOLAS four-wheel drive it had quicks changes in both ends solid no suspension whatsoever it was just a marvel of engineering at the time they had built it as a drag car and they say that Mickey Thompson Fritz Voigt we're on their way to the drag races the NHRA nationals in Oklahoma and they were like hey you know what the Bonneville National Speed Trials are going on at the same time let's take the car to the Bonneville Salt Flats and run it just for tune-up purposes now I don't think that's completely true I think they were completely prepared for Bonneville when they left for home because they had some firestone Bonneville tires and they had some spun aluminum wheel discs for the thing they already had 555 painted on the side and the three numbers in a row like that is traditional for a streamliner they have CTA so they go out there and they start running this thing and first of all on gas then they put the engines on alcohol then they put the front engine on nitro and the rear engine state alcohol then both of them on nitro and in the process of doing all this and going faster and faster the land speed tires actually grew and they ended up rubbing the body and if you look at the photos of the car back home at Mickey Thompson's El Monte California house you can see where the sheetmetal is just completely cut out around the front and there's a square sheet metal cut out of the top of the rear of the body and they did that because those tires were rubbing but ultimately they set a record at two hundred and sixty six point eight six six miles an hour with this thing and set a higher top speed now let me explain this for a minute to set a record at Bonneville or in most land speed racing you have to make one run to qualify for the record meaning going faster than the existing record and then you have to run a second time to back it up and so sometimes you'll get a higher mile an hour on one of the other runs and you take the average of the two and that's the record well in this case that record was 266 and change but the top speed of the five five five streamliner was 291 or 0.1 1 7 miles an hour mind blowing at the time hot rod magazine said it was the single fastest hot rod anywhere and so that got Mickey's mind going he started thinking he was like you know what I can take the ultimate land speed record and at the time that was held by an Englishman named John Cobb and he had done it in 1947 his record was 394 miles an hour and change and because that whole to run backup thing he had made a faster run at 402 miles an hour and so Mickey knew that was his bogey he needed to go faster than 402 later in 1958 Mickey designed a pair of models for a new 400 mile hour streamliner concept and he began hunting sponsors Chrysler blew him off bunkie Knudsen at Pontiac didn't and this model shows the final design for the streamliner that would become known as challenger 1 the car would be four-wheel drive and powered by four engines at once potty accent four used 389 v8s and the crew of volunteers began to shape the chassis around them in Mickey's home shop in El Monte California here you can see the front axle with too quick and change ring and pinion use each engine powered one quick change so two engines powered each end of the car the skin was hand formed out of aluminum over a wooden bucket built by Mickey's dad I think the guy work in the hammer is done for who is also known for creating the body imagine the difficulty of planning linkage to open 32 throttle blades and to activate four clutches at once that was nothing compared to getting for 1937 LaSalle transmissions to manually shift at the same time the axles were rigidly mounted there was no suspension at all and they steered using ball ends like you'd find on a 3/4 ton 4x4 truck at a time Mickey once claimed in a TV interview that an ounce of tire rubber weighed nine thousand pounds when corrected for centripetal force four hundred miles an hour that meant custom magnesium wheels by Halla brand and special tires by Goodyear with really thin rubber and carrying a hundred psi spun aluminum discs covered the wheels for presumed aerodynamic advantage there was no wind tunnel soon those used 389 inch Pontiacs would be stroked to 414 cubic inches each and topped with mechanical fuel injection by mid 1959 the car wasn't nearly complete and would soon be painted light blue but would it work the 1959 test session was at Edwards Air Force Base in California that's the location of the neuron dry lake for hot rodders used to race even before World War two and where Chuck Yeager had flown fast in these feet of found nearly 12 years earlier Thompson would ride in a car nearly thrown his feet up at shoulder level and gauges between his thighs there was virtually no roll bar the test wasn't what she hoped for they went 250 miles an hour in second gear but the car spun out at that speed probably because of handling problems with the parachute even so the team had gathered the information that they want they were ready to leave the hard-packed dirt and silt of the dry lake and move on to the 11 mile track at the Bonneville Salt Flats now it's August a 1959 at the Bonneville Salt Flats and you can tell these guys have stepped up their game as a matter of fact there was a full jet that was there that landed on the salt and they parked underneath the wing of fir shade they had the thing all lettered to reveal that the name of the streamliner was the Challenger one it was still in its light blue trim it was all lettered up they were all raring to go but unfortunately they were only able to get the car to go 362 miles an hour now this was a devastating blow to Mickey and to Voight and to the entire crew but the world was able to see that something was going on and that Mickey was going to be able to make this happen Mickey needed better clutches better traction more power and more of bunkie Knudsen spotty act money and money was really an issue at this point this is where Mickey really began to become an astute marketer and in early 1960 he staged an event just for PR he went to March Air Force Base and took three FIA speed records previously held by the Germans and therefore winning hometown accolades the car was a Pontiac powered drag master chassis with a custom body once again by Don force and the car was called assault now it's August of 1960 and the Challenger one is back at the Bonneville Salt Flats for Speed week or the Bonneville Nationals now there are some important changes to the car it had been painted a much nicer blue it had wheel enclosures that were more for aerodynamics but most importantly and now had superchargers on all four Pontiac engines reports at the time were that it made somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 horsepower and a Goodyear film at the time said that the car weights 7,000 pounds now when they showed up at Bonneville unfortunately the track was junk as a matter of fact the local racer April Graham was killed at Bonneville that year trying to run his 300 mile an hour car over the rough surface and he rolled the thing and unfortunately perished but that didn't stop Mickey from at least making some test runs and they had string taped all over the car once again showing you what things were like at the time there was no wind tunnel what they would to escape the string on and they would go make a run and look at film or photos and see what the stream was doing and estimate what to do aerodynamically and they were able to make some changes to the car but the track was so bad that they didn't run during Speed Week for the record as a matter of fact they brought in a crew of hot rodding volunteers and the Utah Highway Commission if you can imagine that to smooth the track they were filling potholes they were taking waves out of it they smoothed it all out [Music] and then they came back in early September and they started making some runs with the Challenger one getting the thing tuned up working it out and finally on September 9 1968 opsin in the Challenger one went four hundred and six point six zero miles an hour exceeding everything Cobb had done exceeding that four hundred and two mile an hour run it made Mickey Thompson the fastest man on earth and the first American to four hundred miles an hour now the bad news remember that whole thing about how records have to go two ways well they went to back up the record and fail and there's a lot of more surrounding this too you'll often see reported that it lost a driveshaft Fritz Voigt the mechanic guy in his later years said that one of the transmissions didn't actually complete a shift and over revved and blew up but one way or another the car just wouldn't back up the run but ultimately it didn't matter because the legend was set you you

Channel: MotorTrend Channel

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Keywords: motortrend, motor trend, motor trend channel, motortrend on demand, motortrend full episodes, roadkill, roadkill garage, david freiburger, mickey thompson, history of racing, fastest ever cars, fastest ever land speeds, land speed records, 400 mph, 400mph cars, land speed, hot rod, hot rodding

Id: oxcHiGfX2Ho

Length: 11min 44sec (704 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 23 2020