Mr. & Mrs. Speedlove

The Bonneville Salt Flats of Utah rank high on any list of the world's most desolate places, but they have a special fascination for a special kind of fanatic: the speed demon. This fall's visitors have included a motorcyclist who flipped his bike at 150 m.p.h. and walked away from the wreck muttering: "I thought I had stopped." There was Betty Skelton, an advertising executive from Detroit, who set a ladies' land speed record of 277 m.p.h. There were the Summers brothers, Bob and Bill, who showed up with a car powered by four 600-h.p. Chrysler engines --one for each wheel. There were the Arfons brothers, Walt and Art, who showed up with two separate cars--because they have hardly spoken to each other in years.

Salt & Stabilizers. And then there was Craig Breedlove, 28, an ex-fireman from Palos Verdes, Calif., whose addiction to speed has cost him his life savings, one marriage, and very nearly his life. In 1963, Breedlove set a land speed record of 407 m.p.h. in his three-wheeled Spirit of America, then raised the mark to 526 m.p.h. last year before Art Arfons took it away with a 536-m.p.h. clocking. Breedlove wrecked the original Spirit by driving it into a salt pond, and this fall he was back at Bonneville with a four-wheeled, jet-powered monstrosity that looked like the product of a union between a pop bottle and a fighter plane. The car was powered by a General Electric J-79 engine (the same kind used in the Air Force's F-104), which Breedlove picked up in Charlotte, N.C., for $7,500--$170,000 below its original cost. Craig himself designed the car's aluminum and fiber-glass body; the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. agreed to foot most of the bill (about $200,000) and supply tires guaranteed to 850 m.p.h. Breedlove named the car Spirit of America--Sonic I, obliquely announced: "I'm not going to try to break the sound barrier--unless I have to."

He had all he could do just to stay on the ground. Trying for a record last month, Craig discovered himself airborne at 600 m.p.h. Both his braking parachutes blew clear off the car, and he finally managed to bring the runaway machine to a stop just 300 ft. short of the same salt pond in which he had drowned its daddy. Shaken but unhurt, Breedlove riveted two stabilizing wings on Spirit's nose, and last week he was back for another try. Waving to his crew, Breedlove pushed the throttle forward, and Spirit shot off across the flats, trailing a huge rooster tail of salt spray in its wake. "At first," he said later, "there was some vibration, and the car was moving around a little bit. But before I went into the measured mile, everything smoothed out. It was beautiful."

As Spirit flashed past, Head Timer Joe Petrali checked his timing lights, calculated that Breedlove had taken ex actly 6.613 sec. to negotiate the measured mile. That figured out to 544.382 m.p.h.--well above Arfons' old record. Since an official record requires two runs, Breedlove turned his car around, sped back past the timer at 566.394, for a two-way average of 555.-127 m.p.h. Breedlove had his record back.

And Mama Makes Two. Two days later, Breedlove's wife, Lee, showed that speed is a family affair. A 5-ft. 6-in., 112-lb. mother of five who had never driven anything faster than the family Mustang, Lee tucked her long black hair into her husband's blue crash helmet, strapped herself into Spirit's cockpit and roared off across the salt at 308.56 m.p.h. to break the ladies' record held by Betty Skelton. If anything, she took the experience more casually than Craig. "I wasn't a bit scared," she insisted. "You go so fast you don't have time to worry."

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