With Bonneville Speed Week nearing its end tomorrow, I’m still living on a salt high from our time at the event. As such I wanted to share one of the coolest Bonneville and land speed racing videos I have ever seen today. This is a film made about Art Arfons and the famous Green Monster series of cars he competed with at the drag strip and at the salt flats. Particularly it is about the monster that he drove to the LSR record while battling Craig Breedlove and a host of comers for that title in the middle 1960s. It documents the awesome story of how he came to own the J-79 engine (while it was still a classified military piece), how the car was designed (on a pad of paper while driving in his old bus), how successful it was, and ultimately how it was destroyed in a 600mph crash on the salt.

The story isn’t told by just showing you some old still photos, it is told through interviews with Art himself before he died, interviews with guys who worked on the all volunteer crew, and through some amazing period footage of his successes and of the wreck. The crash video is amazing because you don’t actually see the crash, you see the crew guys driving down while trying to find the car (it was miles off course) and then they discover the smoking wreckage and at least one of them bursts instantly into tears because it looked like Arfons stood no shot to live through the disaster, but somehow he did.

There are other great stories as well. One of the largely unsung heroes on the project was a man named Charlie Mayneschein who came up with the design of the car and was involved in virtually every step of its build. In one of the coolest stories on the video as told by Art, Mayneschein actually went for a 470mph ride in the car that Art didn’t know about until the end of the course. The car was built with a driver and passenger compartment on either side of the huge J-79 engine. While Art was strapping in, Charlie jumped into the seat on the other side of the car and Art didn’t see him until they both got out at the top end. He was freaked!

I often say that the videos we post are the coolest thing we have ever posted, but this is yet another vying for that claim. It is a good long video and the first 30 minutes are riveting as hell. You really need to check this out. You’ll hear and see things you have never heard or seen before!

PRESS PLAY BELOW TO WATCH THE COOLEST ART ARFONS VIDEO WE’VE EVER SEEN!

The Green Monster and the Land Speed Record with Art Arfons from Jeff Jones on Vimeo.