History Short: The First 300 mph Automobile!

A Brief History

On September 3, 1935, Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah was the scene of an historic automobile event, the first ever car to achieve a documented speed of over 300 mph.  Sir Malcolm Campbell, motor journalist and race car driver, piloted a Rolls-Royce V-12 powered Campbell-Railton Blue Bird to a new land speed world record, a record he himself already held since March of 1935 in the same car.

Digging Deeper

Campbell had set new world land speed records in his Blue Bird five times, and in other cars four more times, making him a nine time world land speed record setter.

The current land speed record is held by Andy Green with his ThrustSSC jet powered car at just over 760 mph, set in 1997.  The fastest production car ever sold is the Koenigsegg Jesko Absolut from Sweden, boasting 1600 horsepower and a top speed of about 310 mph, costing a cool $2.8 million.  The Bugatti Chiron challenges that claim with an equal projected top speed.

Question for students (and subscribers): What is the fastest you have ever driven a car?  Please let us know in the comments section below this article.

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Historical Evidence

For more information, please see…

Campbell, Malcolm. My Thirty Years of Speed. Daredevil, 2023.

John, Barry. Quest for Speed: The Epic Saga of Record-Breaking on Land. Evro Publishing Limited, 2020.

The featured image in this article, a photograph of Sir Malcolm Campbell, is in the public domain in France for one of the following reasons:

• Its author (or the last of its authors in the case of a collaboration work) died more than 70 years ago (CPI art. L123-1) and did not benefit from any copyright extension (CPI art. L123-8, L123-9 and L123-10)^[1];
• It is an anonymous or pseudonymous work (the identity of the author has never been disclosed) or a collective work^[2] and more than 70 years have passed since its publication (CPI art. L123-3);
• It is the recording of an audiovisual or musical work already in the public domain, and more than 50 years have passed since the performance or the recording (CPI art. L211-4).

You can also watch video versions of this article on YouTube.