Tailpipe Dream

On Oct. 4, 1983, Richard Noble went to the Black Rock Desert in northern Nevada, one of the flattest places in the world, hoping to break the world land-speed record of 622 miles per hour. An American named Gary Gabelich had set that record some 13 years earlier when he scorched across the salt flats at Bonneville, Utah, in a car named the Blue Flame. That day at Black Rock, Noble answered with his Thrust2, a turbojet-powered car, and blasted across the desert at 633 miles per hour, claiming the record for the UK for the first time since a brief two-month period in 1964—and establishing Gabelich's achievement as the last time to date an American set the mark.

Ed Shadle of Spanaway had mixed emotions about Green's success. While supportive, Shadle had to concede that his car, an aluminum-bodied monstrosity, couldn't compete. Shadle had started building it in the mid-'90s, thinking that, if funding came through, if everything ran properly, if the weather cooperated, he could possibly fire the car across the Black Rock Desert at a speed faster than 633 mph. But after Green's success, the 67-year-old Shadle admitted to himself that his car wouldn't measure up.

On a flight home from California, Shadle began chatting with his friend Keith Zanghi, who had also worked on the old car. What if, they wondered, instead of designing the body of the car themselves, they used something that had already proven itself to be aerodynamically capable—say, a jet! The more they talked about it, the more it made sense. Zanghi had seen a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter hanging in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., and thought it would make a great land-speed car.

The F-104 fighter is a smaller, lighter airplane with tremendous horsepower. Aerodynamically, it's one of the fastest airplanes ever designed. By the time the pair landed in Seattle, they had decided to move forward with the project, which they dubbed the North American Eagle. The idea was this: find an old F-104 fighter, chop off the wings, drop it on a chassis, fire it up, go like hell—and maybe, with a little luck, this fall they'll become the first team to drive a car faster than 800 mph.

But the attempt is not without its challenges. The costs are high, public interest is down, and sponsorship in the sport is next to nil. So why invest massive quantities of time and money for a 20-second ride? Shadle answers with the Mount Everest analogy: Why climb it? Because it's there.

"The difference between me and some of the others is I always have this motto that is 'Do what you say you're going to do,'" he adds. "So when I said I would do it, that's it. I'm moving forward with it."

Shadle grew up as one of four children in a small central Washington town called Malott, just south of Okanogan. His family was always into cars, his uncles flying around dusty dirt tracks in shaky stock cars. Speed was in Shadle's blood.

As a young kid in the late '40s, Shadle would perch behind the steering wheel of those jalopies as his family towed them behind their sedan to the next race. Then his father, a carpenter, couldn't find work. "The Okanogan Valley, when the wind starts blowing in the fall and it starts acting like it's gonna be winter, well, everything just shuts down," Shadle explains. "Too much of that."

So the family moved to Puyallup. It was there, in 1955, that a 14-year-old Shadle heard about the Soap Box Derby for the first time. He borrowed a set of authorized derby wheels—Chevrolet dealerships sold the only sets, to ensure fairness—and slapped together a racer. On 38th Street in Tacoma, Shadle and a handful of other kids barreled down the hill.

He doesn't remember much about those races, but he does recall that he walked away enamored with racing. So when he got his driver's license, he immediately picked up a "car or two to run around the streets with"—a '49 Ford and a '51 Studebaker. Three years later, he was spending Friday nights at Puyallup's Thun Field, racing grudge matches.

"You'd say, 'Hey, there's a guy over there with a '47 Ford with the straight pipes making a lot of noise. And I got my '49 Ford with my Flathead...hey, I'll run you.' So we'd go over and get in line."