Land Mark

"It was a tremendous sensation whistling over the salt at 347 miles an hour. Whistling is the only word I know to describe it." Thus spoke mustachioed, 41-year-old Captain George Edward Thomas Eyston, British auto racer, after driving his seven-ton, eight-wheeled, 3,600-h.p. Thunderbolt 13 miles along a black line on Utah's famed Bonneville salt flats one morning last week. His time for the measured mile (preceded by six to speed up and six to slow down) was the fastest land mark ever made--*--36 miles an hour faster than the world's record (311.42 m.p.h.) he set on the same course in the same car last November. It could not go down in the record books, however, because the photoelectric timing device failed to register on the return measured mile, and two measured miles are required to strike an average.

To spectators who lined the course at a safe distance, Thunderbolt, zooming at nearly six miles a minute, looked like a flame (from the exhausts) streaking through a cloud of salt. At the finish of the run, 200-lb. Captain Eyston had trouble getting out of the cockpit. "I had a devil of a time," he chuckled. "The heat of the motor must have swelled my body."

Three days later, Captain Eyston tried again, succeeded in breaking his old record officially with an average speed of 345.49 m.p.h. First to congratulate him was his rival, Fur Broker John Cobb, another 200-lb. Briton, who was on the sidelines last week--waiting for his inning. John Cobb's car has a detachable aluminum body that weighs only 500 lb., can be dented by a man's fist and is placed over the driver like the cover of a roasting pan. Cooped in his pan, Driver Cobb hopes to go 400 m.p.h.

--*Fastest man has ever traveled is 440 m.p.h., a speed attained in the air by Italian Francesco Agello in 1934. Speed record on water is 129 m.p.h., set last September by Britain's Sir Malcolm Campbell, holder of the land speed record (301 m.p.h.) before Captain Eyston.

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