Doug Herbert
I got this info from my drag racing freinds little news on his streamliner and to get the wheel driven record below is the update
After the NHRA finals race I spent Monday visiting some friends in SoCal including Marty the Party and Marty Sr. After the visit with Marty I headed up to meet my friend Lyle Larson. Lyle is helping us with the land speed Bonneville car so we went up to visit the guys at Vortec superchargers and talked to them a little about possibly running superchargers on the land speed car instead of the twin turbos. This idea is still a bit up in the air but one thing that we know for sure is that the car will be powered by two, Dodge Viper engines that will make about 2000 hp each. The car is four wheel drive. My dad Chet Herbert has done most of the design on the chassis. Some of my other friends helping the project along are Ray Evernham, Chris Nachtman, Hans DeBot, Greg Fornelli, Michael “Fatback” McSwain, and Barry Dodson. Keith Adams is the project leader and has been working on the car for the past couple months, we are hoping to have it ready by summer of 2009 for a test session.
One of the coolest things I’ve done that I want to tell everybody about is going out to Bonneville with my buddy Hans DeBot and Keith Adams, who’s the guy doing the work building the Bonneville car. We took off and went on a trip to Bonneville and spent Thursday and Friday there and had a lot of fun. We met some of the guys out there, Tom Birkland, who has the land speed record now, at 417 mph. We talked to him quite a bit, also some of the SCTA officials. Lee Kennedy, the head tech guy from SCTA, he really took care of us out there. They were super nice to us, ran us around, and everybody showed us their cars. We had a great time!
The neat thing is the rules for the class; the class we’re racing is unlimited streamliner. The rules are really simple; the cars need to have four wheels basically. So it’s a lot of creativity, a lot of our own engineering. What I thought was really cool is that everybody’s car at Bonneville looks different, they’re all different, and they’re all special. It’s just kinda like the original hot rodding place, you just go up there and you go as fast as you can. For anybody that hasn’t seen that movie The World’s Fastest Indian, with Anthony Hopkins, I recommend going and getting that movie. Once you see that movie you’ll understand why we’re building this Bonneville car. I’m excited about working on the project; it’s going to be a great thing to set the land speed record.
