Goal setting and achievement are pretty big parts of the car hobby. In most cases it is stuff like working towards getting your car into the 13s at the drags or looking shave a second off of your lap time on the road course. There are people who think lots bigger than that, though. One such person is California general contractor Waldo Stakes. Stakes is building a home cooked streamliner that he claims will go 2,000mph. The streamliner currently looks like a slender gathering of fuel tanks, but the guy seems pretty passionate and genuine about the whole deal.

Stakes us building the vehicle out of a pretty amazing array of parts from missiles and old NASA projects, along with actual pieces from the X-15 rocket plane which flew at more than 4,500mph in 1967. He got all of this stuff from government surplus auctions and junkyards in the 1980s. He certainly has some wicked power at his disposal, but he also has all the same potential project stoppers that killed every other attempt at an all out land speed record car other than the Thrust SSC, which holds the record at  763mph, set in 1997. If it were us, we’d build a car capable of about 780mph, so shooting for 2,000mph is a gutsy move.

Stakes does not seems to be encumbered with all of those pesky crew members, engineers, support staff, and fleet of mechanics that made the Thrust SSC team successful in running nearly 800mph, 15 years ago. Seeing the level of operation is takes to run the Poteer and Main Speed Demon, and other 400mph streamliners out there, the thought of some guy building one capable of going 2,000mph in his garage is wacky. It is certainly not impossible, but it is wacky.

Thanks for the tip Malc!

LINK: California Man Building 2,000mph Streamliner

Waldo Stakes streamliner

The Sonic Wind of Waldo Stakes