Let’s get one thing straight before we go any further: Art Arfons was a genuine American hero, and not just in the theater of speed. Arfons was a WWII vet and saw combat during the invasion of Okinawa.
Recognizing those accomplishments we can now take a look through our gearhead lens at a man who still stands as one of the great mechanical minds in the worlds of land speed racing and to some degree drag racing.
It was on the dragstrip that Art and his brother Walt first made headlines back in 1952 with their Allison aircraft engine powered rail called the Green Monster. Because of its massive girth it was not usually a contender for low elapsed time of the meet, but nearly always earned the top speed of the meet honors wherever it showed up. During that era of the sport the speed number was viewed as the more significant piece of the equation, so when the Green Monster set the national record at 145 mph and then went on to become the first dragster to run 150 mph in the quarter mile just a year or so later, it scared drag racing’s leadership (i.e. Wally Parks) so bad that airplane-engined machinery was relegated to exhibition status.
Art and his brother Walt spent much of the next decade racing each other all over the country in their exhibition cars, namely the first jet dragsters.
It would be the early 1960s and the Bonneville Salt Flats that would take the mechanical genius from Akron, Ohio from the pages of Hot Rod magazine to the pages of all the major newspapers in America.
In 1960 and 1961 Arfons was running an Allison-powered car called the Anteater, trying to break John Cobb’s record of 349 mph. Although he flirted with it, Arfons was not able to overcome the mark. He returned in 1962 with the infamous Cyclops, powered by a J-47 jet that had Arfons sitting directly in front of the air inlet of the 8,000hp turbine. The vehicle achieved 330 mph and still holds the record for the fastest open-cockpit vehicle. That’s right. He was out in the breeze at 330 mph.
We’re not sure who to thank for publishing the quote, but Arfons said of that car, “It was really a bitch, but I couldn’t put a canopy on it. If I’d have closed it in, I’d had taken air away from the engine. I was sitting right down in the engine. A friend of mine, Charlie Nesbitt, taped my glasses to my helmet ’cause it (the wind) was tearing my glasses off every time, If my head got turned, I couldn’t straighten it. Some fun.”
Disappointed that he did not achieve 350 mph with the car, Arfons set his sights on building (for the time) the ultimate machine for the record.
One of the most well known stories about Arfons occured during this stretch of time. He sat out the 1963 Bonneville event to work on the newest and meanest Green Monster to date. During that process he got a call from a Florida junk dealer offering him a smoking deal on a big jet engine, the biggest one he’d ever seen. Art, being a smart doobie, hopped in his truck and made tracks to Florida where he purchased a 17,500hp GE J-79 jet engine.
There were a couple small problems with this purchase, the largest of which was that the engine was still considered classified by the defense department. When Arfons contacted GE for a service manual in order to repair the damage to the engine he bought, GE called the government and some officials from the military showed up at his farm. They demanded the engine back, but Arfons showed them that he had obtained it legally, and even more than that, he’d repaired the damned thing without the service manual. Shocked and horrified were not strong enough words to gauge the reaction, apparently.
It is a bit mind-boggling to think of a guy in rural Ohio having the intuitive knowledge to repair what was then the most advanced and powerful jet engine in the world, just for kicks. It’d be like getting a hold of the space shuttle today at a junkyard and tuning the thing up just to see if you could.
Art tells the story better in his own words, “I didn’t try to chisel down the price. I never said nothing, just gave him the money and we put it in the bus. Of course, I didn’t even know at that point whether or not the engine would run.”
What he discovered was that the engine has swallowed something, wrecking havoc on the fan blades in the turbine. His solution was genius in its simplicity. Again, here’s Arfons: “There was no sense in trying to straighten out the blades, so I just pulled them out. I figured the engine had more than enough power without them. A few days after I called General Electric, told them I had a J79 and asked them to send a manual. The guy said, ‘you don’t have that engine. You can’t have that engine.’ And I said, ‘well, I sure do.’ The next day or the day after that a Colonel from Washington showed up at the shop and said that’s a classified engine and I can’t have it. I said I bought it; and showed him my sales receipt. The Colonel stomped out. Then I got a legal letter from the GE, a real nasty letter saying the J79 was made for Marine and Air Force use and it should never be put in a race car.”
He did it anyway, and by doing so entered himself into one of the most pitched land-speed battles in the history of land-speed battles; 1964 and 1965 were the peak of the action with Arfons and Craig Breedlove at the center of the storm. Arfons, the soft-spoken mechanical genius from a farm on Ohio was the perfect foil for the brash, outspoken, kid from flashy Southern California. Ultimately it was to be a prize fight fought at over 500 mph.
October 5, 1964 would mark the first salvo of the fight with Walt Arfon’s Wingfoot running 413.2 mph to lay claim to the record. Art fired back with a 434-mph shot. The next week, Breedlove went 468 mph and then a baffling 525 mph. Unfazed, and a week or so later, Arfons ran 536 mph and left the salt as the undisputed king, for the time being.
On the 2nd of November 1965, Breedlove went 555 mph. Arfons answered just five days later with 576 mph, but this time it would be Breedlove who would prevail and gain a measure of fame for being the first man go to 600 mph on land, which he did on November 15th.
On the 17th, Arfons vowed to keep his car on the wood until he went 600 mph but it never happened. After being clocked at north of 585 mph, the Green Monster pitched sideways and suffered a horrendous high-speed wreck, utterly destroying the car but, amazingly, not killing Arfons. It was an abrupt end to an LSR battle that will never be duplicated. The wreck was caused by a frozen wheel bearing.
Returning to the dragstrip to make exhibition runs and to further the development of jet dragsters, Arfons made a comfortable living canvassing the country. That all came to a tragic end in 1971 when Arfons crashed his Super Cyclops jet dragster, killing two IHRA staff members and a Dallas television reporter that was riding in the passenger seat of the vehicle. It was the last run that Arfons ever made on a dragstrip.
After that disaster, Arfons, a father and husband, decided to take his brand of turbine fury and utilize the grunt without the speed. He went tractor pulling and kicked everyone’s ass.
Arfons made a couple of LSR attempts in the late 1980s and early 1990s but neither were serious contenders for a variety of reasons. After those attempts, Arfons worked as a consultant on projects and tinkered his way into the golden years of his life.
The quiet genius from Ohio passed away in 2007. He was buried with wrenches in one hand along a jar of salt from Bonneville, and a copy of the manual to service a J-79 jet engine in the other.
The legacy that Art Arfons left behind is one that defines the American dream. He left the family mill business to join the service, was introduced to formal mechanics there and used that knowledge and an amazing gift for ingenuity and empirical thinking to battle the forces of big money.
The bottom line is that Art Arfons is a gearhead guy we have to know because people with far less talent have gotten far more recognition for doing things far less impressive than Art. The next time you see a shooting star streak across the night sky, squint hard because it may be the afterburner of a J-79 you’re looking at.
