Adolf Hitler had a strong desire to prove Germany’s scientific, engineering, and sporting might. Much like the “sportswashing” some countries are accused of today, this was a public relations tactic employed by the Nazi party. Hitler pushed German brands Mercedes and Auto Union to new heights in Grand Prix racing, and to prove the newly constructed Autobahn was the height of German engineering, he encouraged the brands to develop FIA record-breaking racers to set new speed records on the superior roads.
In 1937, SS Hauptsturmführer and Grand Prix racing driver Bernd Rosemeyer set a pair of outright world records, achieving 138.675 miles per hour in the standing mile and 117.240 miles per hour in the standing kilometer, plus additional class records for engine displacement categories A, B, and C. He would die the following year in another speed record attempt, hitting 369 miles per hour flat out.
This is not his story. This is the story of the badass American racer who finally beat him.
On the morning of May 14, 1960, Michael Lee “Mickey” Thompson brought a Dragmaster chassis with an aluminum streamlined body, nicknamed Assault I, to the March Air Force Base in Riverside, California, with the express intent of demolishing Rosemeyer’s records. The runway was 14,000 feet long, plenty of space for the supercharged Pontiac-powered dragster to accelerate through the mile and slow down again. The car was fitted with a parachute and disc brakes, just to be sure. Thompson’s quest for records, and a chance to stick it to the Nazis, set the stage that day.
Thompson and his team had brought three different supercharged Pontiac V8s with them to the runway that day, setting up an effort to break as many records as they could in one day. Each engine was built for a specific FIA class, A, B, or C. According to reporting in the Los Angeles Times, the crew managed to take eight national and international class records for acceleration and top speed before lunchtime. In the afternoon, Thompson pushed for four additional records, setting twelve in a single day. Until the day he was murdered in 1988, Thompson always referred to Assault I as his favorite car.
Thompson’s Class A records for standing start in the kilometer (132.94 MPH) and standing start in the mile (149.93 MPH) are still listed by the FIA as held records, despite having been set 64 years ago.
Like Rosemeyer, Thompson wasn’t simply interested in setting acceleration records in the FIA’s arbitrary displacement categories. He wanted to go for outright fastest-man-on-earth glory, earning the land speed record. These attempts at March Air Force Base weren’t merely an opportunity to put an American boot on the legacy of the defunct Nazi regime, but a publicity campaign to help facilitate his run at Bonneville later in the year.
“A lot of people thought Mickey liked to go out and set records so that Mickey Thompson was in the record books,” friend and mechanic Fritz Voigt told MotorTrend. “But that wasn’t it at all. Mickey realized that to get people to pay attention to you, to get people to sponsor your ideas, you needed recognition. And records meant recognition.”
The plan worked. The American speed demon and publicity hustler got the attention of Pontiac and Goodyear. With their help, he got to work on his next project.
Thompson took what he learned from building the supercharged V8 in the Assault I and used it to increase the outright power of his now-famous Challenger I land speed streamliner. That car featured a gang of four Pontiac V8s, each with their own supercharger, pushing some 2,000 horsepower to the ground. Just a few months after breaking the FIA acceleration records, Thompson and his crew of volunteers headed to Bonneville to attempt cracking the 400 mile per hour barrier.
In September of 1960, Mickey Thompson became the first man on earth to exceed 400 miles per hour on the salt at Bonneville. While the outright land speed record was no longer attributed to the Nazis, this new top speed was symbol of American ingenuity. While Thompson ran a pass at Bonneville with a top speed of 406.6 miles per hour, he wasn’t able to back it up with a return pass necessary to put it in the record books. One of the engines failed on the return run, but it was still enough for him to become a favorite of Pontiac’s, and the American motoring enthusiast.
“Mickey was a rough driver, never real gentle,” Voigt said. “Coming back, you always went faster toward the highway, but when he went into Second with the four Cadillac transmissions, three engaged and one didn’t . . . it stayed in Neutral [thereby blowing the engine it was attached to when it revved up with no load on it] . . . we would have massacred the record.”
There are so many other incredible tales that could be told about Thompson, but this is one of my favorites. A guy and his friends in a garage in Southern California were capable of greater speed and engineering than the entire might of Hitler’s empire.