Is a 2000 Mph Car Actually Possible?

It's just another unexceptional small industrial park along the edge of the town of Apple Valley in Southern California's high desert. One cinder-block building is divided into nine 2000-or-so-square-foot work spaces with roll-up garage doors. In one unit, there's a cheerleader academy. In another, a heating and ventilation company. But unit No. 8 is full of aerospace hardware worthy of the Smithsonian. And it all belongs to Waldo Stakes. To Stakes, these parts aren't artifacts; they are the guts of his Sonic Wind Land Speed Research Vehicle, a rocket car he hopes will break the current land speed record of 763.035 mph and believes could potentially go as fast as 2000 mph.

Stakes is 56, but he could pass for a decade younger. He's a fireplug of a guy-tough like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas but without the menace. He's always on the verge of exploding with excitement, as if his own ideas are building up pressure inside him. Engineering terms run together in bursts of explanation and promised performance. He's a full-throttle optimist, certain that there's no challenge he can't overcome. The name Waldo, somehow, fits.

"The Sonic Wind Land Speed Research Vehicle will be the premier land speed car and the most powerful car ever seen on the planet," Stakes claims in his video tour of the project. "Nothing being built in Australia or Great Britain or planned by any nation will be able to touch this car in its velocity. And its stability will be second to none."

Stakes is a general contractor, but his career has never been the priority. In his small office, which overflows with drawings and designs, he reaches for a wooden model about 4 feet long that looks more like a dart than a car. It's the Sonic Wind. Stakes has been dreaming of it nearly his entire life and, since about 2003, spending nearly every waking moment trying to make it a reality.

Stakes's obsession with speed emerged during his knockabout Chicago-area childhood. "When I was 12 years old in 1967, I was eating some Cracker Jack, and the prize was a weirdly shaped little car," he says. "It was John Cobb's Railton Mobil Special-a car that went 394 mph in 1947. I couldn't believe a car could go that fast. By the time I was 14, I was already building model land speed cars and reading everything on missiles and rockets and aerospace that I could."

His formal education ended when he dropped out of Elgin Community College in 1974, but Stakes's passion for speed persisted. "When you study something for 40 years-and I don't mean just think about it, but study something-you can get to be pretty good at it," he says. "I have literally a thousand books on engineering and aerodynamics. Just everything."

Moving his family to Southern California in 1984 to be closer to the aerospace industry, Stakes was soon scouring scrapyards for parts he could use to build a rocket car. His most impressive find is a set of XLR99 rocket engines designed for NASA's legendary X-15, the stub-winged experimental plane that grabbed the flight speed record of 4520 mph in 1967 and has never let go. "Back in the '80s this stuff was considered scrap metal, and everyone was melting it down to recover the silver and gold from the brazed tubing," Stakes says. "But these engines weren't built that way. They're made from Inconel-X [an exotic alloy] and virtually indestructible. I think they cost $1500 each for four. I have two left. One for the car and a spare."

When it was pushing X-15 pilots such as Neil Armstrong past the boundaries of Earth's atmosphere, the XLR99 delivered up to 57,000 pounds of thrust, burning liquid oxygen and anhydrous ammonia. It's a throttled rocket, capable of operating between 50 and 100 percent thrust. Stakes is contemplating running it on a mix of methanol and liquid oxygen to produce up to 61,000 pounds of thrust.

Stakes also owns and plans to use two fuel tanks from a Redstone rocket, like the one that carried Alan Shepard into space in 1961, and pressure vessels from the Apollo spacecraft's service module. "This stuff is all well-tested and essentially fail-proof," he says.

Through the years, Stakes has worked on other land speed projects, including a BMW-powered streamliner motorcycle that set several records in the late '80s and an 1160-hp 1988 Ford Thunderbird that captured numerous records for cars with normally aspirated internal combustion engines. But Stakes is enough of a realist to recognize that the bar for admittance into what is now a supersonic club is set exponentially higher. "You can't just toss an old surplus turbojet engine into a homemade chassis anymore and go for it," he notes on a Sonic Wind website managed by his son Tone.

As Craig Breedlove explained in POPULAR MECHANICS while he was unsuccessfully chasing a 750-mph record back in 1965, shock waves, aerodynamic instability, transonic local airflows and other "fatal gremlins" can easily wreck a car at Mach 1 speeds (761.2 mph at sea level). More than 20 engineers are working on a British bid to smash the sound barrier and hit 1000 mph in the Bloodhound SuperSonic car, and even after years of research and $15 million, they're not sure what will happen to their vehicle above 800 mph. Stakes believes the Sonic Wind could easily reach these speeds and go well beyond, but he doesn't even have a computer in his cluttered office.

Nevertheless, he claims to know how to keep the Sonic Wind from wrecking or taking fatal flight at transonic and post-Mach 1 speeds. "The idea is to use all the forces acting on the car to keep it stable during runs," he says. "The Sonic Wind's body changes plane slightly in the nose area. This anchors shock waves over the front wheels to increase the negative lift. These shock waves, along with the shocks that will radiate downward from the rear bi-wedge tail fins, will also be used in roll control."

At least, that's the theory. It's a theory that could use a few years of testing and refinement in an advanced wind tunnel. It's a theory that a driver may not want to risk his life on.

At the moment, the Sonic Wind isn't much more than its parts laid out where they'd be positioned in what Stakes envisions as a seven-wheeled beast that's 47 feet 4 inches long and 7 feet wide. Stakes gets help from friends in the land speed community, as well as the occasional moonlighting rocket scientist, but he alone is responsible for the design, handcrafting the scale models and assembling the vehicle.

To any outside observer, Stakes's chances of completing his rocket car-much less breaking any records with it-might seem vanishingly small. It's tempting to remind him of the need for wind-tunnel testing, trained engineers-heck, even just a computer. But then, how many of history's breakthroughs sprang from the passions of similarly obsessed, deeply impractical men-the Wright brothers, Lindbergh, Cousteau... Listening to Stakes spin out his vision of speed, you want to talk some sense to him, make him concede that he's in over his head. But then you don't. Does every dreamer need to build the first plane or fly the Atlantic? Is it so wrong to chase a dream that might truly be beyond your grasp?

Not long after Popular Mechanics visited his tiny workshop, Stakes learned that his landlord was nearly doubling his rent. Undeterred, he simply packed up his parts, plans and prototypes to a small ranch he bought on the outskirts of Apple Valley, deeper in the Mojave Desert. He says he could have handled the rent but actually prefers his new location. It's isolated, with fewer distractions, and he can work outside. But he won't be able to walk across the street for lunch at Del Taco anymore. "The best thing about working alone," he says, "is that you don't have to ask anyone to make changes."

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/news/vintage-speed/is-a-2000-mph-car-actually-possible?src=rss

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