Old Car

Henry Ford made the first automobile which could go a mile-a-minute. Its name was 999. It had spindling wire wheels, an exposed engine, a radiator which looked like part of an egg crate and perpendicular steering gear, like a truck. To get it started, the manifold had to be warmed with a blow torch. The November day in 1902 when 999 made its stupendous record at Grosse Pointe, Mich., the young man who drove it sat on a high open seat wearing a heavy double-breasted coat. His face, protected by goggles and deprived, by a windmask, of the cigar stump which was already as much one of its features as a nose, looked like a death's head. Driver Barney Oldfield had left school to be waiter in an insane asylum, left the asylum to be a bicycle racer, left his bicycle to work in the Ford auto factory. Last week Barney Oldfield, now 53, was at Daytona Beach, Fla., as was Sir Malcolm Campbell with his Blue Bird, a $115,000 twelve-cylinder, 1,400-h.p. Napier-motored racing car in which he hoped to beat the world's record he made last year--245.733 m.p.h.

Like 999, Sir Malcolm's Blue Bird is hard to start. It has two small motors for this purpose. After training for six months (not drinking, smoking very little) and after waiting two weeks for a day when the wide flat beach would be sufficiently dry and smooth, Sir Malcolm Campbell last week had Blue Bird brought from the shed in which he keeps it. His chief mechanic, Leo Villa, helped him start the motors five miles above the measured mile course. Sitting low, looking through a streamlined pocket of glass at a motor-revolution gauge which looks like a rifle sight on the profile of Blue Bird's is-ft. bonnet, he gathered speed going south along the beach. Nearing the grandstand at the start of the mile, the sound of Bine Bird's motor was first a low undertone to the warm purr of the surf, then a thundering roar, then a mighty shout of speed and wind as the car blurred past.

Seven miles down the beach Sir Malcolm turned and came back, fighting a wind that pushed his wake of black smoke away from the foam at the water's edge. His average time for the two trips was 253.968 m.p.h., a new record. Pleased, Speedster Campbell held out his arm to show reporters that it was not shaking, said he planned to make another record the next day. Two days later he made records for five kilometers, five miles and ten kilometers.

Barney Oldfield, after seeing Blue Bird perform, said he planned to beat Sir Malcolm's record with a 32-cylinder car built like an inverted canoe. Unlike Oldfield, who could not even ride a bicycle until he was 17, Sir Malcolm Campbell learned to drive a car when he should have been in school, learned about motors by tinkering a second-hand motorcycle. When he inherited -L-250,000 and a seat on Lloyd's (where his life and car are insured for a total of -L-20,000), he continued to experiment. In 1909 he built an airplane. In 1910 he went to see Maeterlinck's Blue Bird and was so much impressed that he gave the play's name to a 60-h.p. Darracque in which, next day, he won two races. In 1912 he had the narrowest escape of his life when a tire blew out at 100 m.p.h. Blue Bird broke a wheel, was saved from tipping over when the end of the axle, grating on a curb, held the car up till it stopped.

Knighted after his record last year, Sir Malcolm Campbell at 47 has spent nearly $400,000 on motor racing and on looking for an ideal spot in which to do it. Daytona's beach--20 mi. long and almost straight--is only 75 ft. wide at high tide, 500 ft. at low. It is less stony than the Verneuk Pan course in South Africa, where Sir Malcolm made a five-mile record last year, and straighter than go-Mile Beach, the best in Australia. Gloomy before a race, irascible, profoundly superstitious, Sir Malcolm patronizes as many soothsayers and fortune-tellers as he can find. He owns 18 dogs, shoots big game for recreation. When not looking for beaches, he sometimes looks for buried treasure. Three years ago he spent a month at Cocos Island, where -L-12,000,000 was supposed to have been laid down in 1821.

His present Blue Bird, rebuilt and repowered on the chassis in which he broke the late Sir Henry Segrave's record in 1928, has a motor exactly like the ones in British Schneider Trophy seaplanes, with twelve cylinders set in blocks of four. The radiator is separated from the motor, which could not stand a 250-m.p.h. wind-stream, so that the hood is shaped like a blunt crochet-hook. The huge fin at the back helps to weigh the car down, keep it straight at high speeds. Blue Bird's clearance from the ground is 3 1/4 inches. Its gasoline tank, which works by gravity at normal speeds, has pressure pumps to offset the momentum that would otherwise push fuel backwards away from the carburetor. At 2,300 revolutions per minute --speed of the Blue Bird's wheels at 245 m.p.h.--ordinary tire treads would be torn off by centrifugal force. Last week when he stopped his sand monster by starting the motor that applies the brakes, Sir Malcolm found, embedded in his specially constructed tires, several tiny bits of shell. When news of the new record reached his wife and two children in London, Lady Campbell said: "I think it's wonderful. ... I knew he was driving an old car and I was worried."

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