‘At any moment I might fade out’: archives reveal fearless era of land speed record breakers

Malcolm Campbell’s Blue Bird car tears across the Bonneville salt flats in 1935. Photograph: FIA/Bill Shipler

With the Bonneville salt flats in Utah echoing to the sound of a new land speed record achieved by a British team, the timing could not be more apposite. The historical legacy of the challenge of pushing the envelope of pace is being dusted down and made public in the form of an extraordinary archive from more than a century of record-breaking machines and their singularly driven pilots.

On Tuesday, JCB’s Hydromax car took the hydrogen-powered International Automobile Federation (FIA) land speed record, reaching 406.320mph at Bonneville.