Dan Tuttle dropped me a line to say that Noel Black's twin-engine car actually wasn't a Top Fuel car but that it was a Bonneville Streamliner nicknamed the Rhinoceros, in which he was later killed. "Reportedly, the car was well above 400 when it lost its belly pan," he said. "Apparently [this photo] was another test, probably at Fremont."
the car broke a rear axle between the 4 and 5 miles. it is surmised that this caused the car to drastically experience unequal power distribution (my father, elmo gillette, was at the 5-mile when the crash occurred. he heard one of the engines suddenly rev, noel lift, then hammer 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.), which 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.
I was able to find mention of the car in "Landspeed Louise" Noeth's book, Bonneville: The Fastest Place on Earth. Noeth says the Rhinoceros name came from the body bumps to accommodate the engines.
the name of the car was
"motion I". anyone who referred to
motion as "the rhinoceros" was a detractor, photojournalist, magazine reader or someone not-in-the-know, which probably explains noeth's incorrect statement.
Drag racing historian Bret Kepner tells me that the car was created by Black and partner Bert Peterson at their B&N Automotive shop and was never designed to be a dragster at all. "It was purely a land-speed record vehicle that because of its bizarre chassis and drivetrain configuration needed extensive testing, and the dragstrip was pretty much the only place to do it," he wrote.
a more accurate reason: running
motion at the drags was a method of grabbing a few extra bucks to finance the project. i do think i remember hearing fremont as one of the venues where bert and noel ran the car. they also ran it at bonneville raceway (or whatever the name of that dragstrip was/is) in salt lake just before speedweek in 1969. since bert was a longtime drag race promoter and strip owner, i'm sure it was quite easy for them to book the car at any number of norcal dragstips. my association with bert and noel (and involvement with motion I) didn't come about until 1970, a year after they last ran the car on pavement.
kepner is correct:
motion was never intended to be a top fuel dragster. it was intended to set the wheel-driven land speed record at 450 mph.
