Motion 1

[1969 - 1970]

The car was created by Noel Black and partner Bert Peterson at their B&N Automotive shop, a twin engine Streamliner that was built to break the Land Speed Record at the time of 409+ MPH for wheel driven vehicles.

Nobody else approached the speeds Noel reached for over 20-years!

The car broke a rear axle between the 4 and 5 miles and crashed at 382 mph during the SCTA SpeedWeek event at Bonneville in 1970.
It is surmised that this caused the car to drastically experience unequal power distribution. Elmo Gillette, who was at the 5-mile when the crash occurred, said he heard one of the engines suddenly rev, Noel lifted, then hammered the throttle again, which led many to believe that Noel thought he'd hit a soft-spot on the salt and was just lifting when he thought it got loose.). This turned the flat-sided / topped streamliner into a wing when the car got sideways.  At that point the belly pan and every-other body panel came off of the car, including a tire and wheel, which physically broke one of the timing lights at the 5 mile at a speed of 415 mph.

Black died as a result of the crash.

Photos testing at Fremont

due to a lack of george washingtons to support the project, had no transmissions.

it had two hydraulic clutch cylinders on one peddle.

no trannies behind the clutches.

it also had unique forklift differentials giving the car a final drive ratio of 1-to-1.

(if motion ran over 400 mph with no transmissions and 1-to-1 going to the ground imagine the speed potential if noel could have spun those engines over 4000 rpm.)

we had to push the car at 80 mph to light the engines and noel needed to keep tossing in the clutch to keep from going too fast in the warm up area.  this was in the days when the warm up area was much longer and not nearly as regulated as it now is.

the film crew, there to document the attempt, put a tripod in the back of noel's old truck, which had a top speed of only 80ish mph.

burt would push off the 'liner as fast as his truck would go and somebody else drove noel's truck as fast as it would go with the camera in the back to get film.

we followed this procedure twice; once before we burned a piston and once after:

fire off the rear engine, burt would do his thing until he was happy with the way the engine was performing and click it off.

then, we would hand-push the car to turn it around, which took quite a distance.

then noel would fire off the front engine for burt to massage before shutting it down.

then, we would, once again, hand-push the car to turn it around.

this time noel lit both engines and burt synched-up the throttles.

even in the days of only 1000hp (maybe) for each engine it was quite impressive to stand between the two hemis while burt blipped both engines.

Gregory w. Gillette
aka: monty wolf

photos Gary Cole