To go much more rapidly, we require technology, mainly in the form of mechanical propulsion. We had steam trains for the entirety of the 19th century and the motor car for its final few years, but the quickest examples of each did not exceed 100 mph until 1904, with the Wright brothers’ maiden flight taking place the year before.
After that, the rate at which humankind started to go faster accelerated hard. Alongside the development of computing, telecommunications, and industrialized warfare, the rapid increase in the speeds we could achieve became a defining measure of the 20th century. In 1997, at the very end of that century, a car (in the loosest sense of the word) crossed the face of the Earth at supersonic speed for the first time, setting a land record of 763 mph, which has never been beaten and possibly never will be. In 1976, a Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird set an airspeed record of 2,193 mph, which has also never been bettered. In 1969, the Apollo 10 capsule reached a reentry rate of 24,791 mph: the fastest humans have ever traveled. The prototype Maglev trains can now run at 375 mph. Technology has created or transformed gravity-fueled pursuits such as skydiving, tobogganing, downhill mountain biking, big-wave surfing, and snow sports. In 1930, the world ski record stood at 65.7 mph. Today it is 158.8 mph. Gravity and mountains haven’t changed, but skis certainly have.
The quest to go ever faster is undeniable, but what fuels us to attain these numbers? Some of the impetus is rational and market-driven. Clever engineers naturally want to outdo their rivals. With regard to military aircraft and civilian transport, faster is generally better, and governments and wealthy individuals are prepared to pay for it. The top speeds of the most advanced hypercars are now entirely academic, achievable for only fleeting moments on one of the very few test tracks built for the purpose. But in the days before speed limits, the performance of a luxury car was actually of use to its owner. A 1930s Bentley or Bugatti could compress the time it took to get from your factories on the Ruhr to your villa in Antibes. Beginning in the 1970s, a supersonic transatlantic flight on the Concorde wasn’t just a status symbol: It gave you back a working day.
We’ve also strived to go fast (and faster) for less logical reasons, such as the odd desire to set a new record even if it means risking your life, or for the simple, visceral, physical, and psychological pleasure that going fast brings. I’ve never been among the elite few with any realistic hope of seeing my name in the record books, but I have tested cars for 25 years and have, on many occasions, exceeded 200 mph: in McLarens, Ferraris, a Bentley, pretty much every modern Bugatti, and most terrifyingly in a Ruf CTR Yellowbird. Every time I’ve done it, I’ve asked myself why I was taking the risk. I didn’t need to. I know what it feels like. I’m not going to learn much about the car. I have two young children. I might die. But still, I do it. My heart rate increases and my breathing gets short and shallow, despite the fact that I am sitting almost perfectly still in the driver’s seat and actively trying to minimize movement. Any action I make is magnified by the huge and increasing speed at which I am traveling, so steering corrections must be tiny and precise. My instinct tells me to brake, but my conscious mind keeps my foot on the accelerator.
If that doesn’t sound like fun, you’d be right. It isn’t fun at the time: The exhilaration comes afterward. Our reaction to speed varies with the psychological strain it imposes. My experience of driving fast cars lies at the uncomfortable end of that spectrum, but it starts with simple pleasure. Richard Stephens is a senior lecturer in psychology at Keele University in the U.K. and has studied and written about the effects of speed on the brain. “I think speed is just inherently enjoyable,” he says. “I can’t think of anything you can break down our enjoyment of speed into further. Once children learn to walk, they will run, because running’s simply more fun. You don’t really need to look much beyond that.”
There is a chemical element to the gratification we derive from the sensation of speed. Riding a roller coaster or doing a tandem skydive doesn’t require any skill but will trigger the release of the hormones and neurotransmitters associated with risky activity and which we find enjoyable. Adrenaline is the fight-or-flight hormone, raising the heart rate and blood pressure and preparing you to take possibly life-saving action. Endorphins reduce the pain of the catastrophic accident your animal instincts think must be inevitable but naturally improve our mood as well. They also encourage the production of dopamine, the “reward” hormone, which provides a sense of happiness and pushes us to do something again. Together, these three chemicals create that rush we derive from speed: the exhilaration, the hyperawareness, the impression of being somehow more alive in that moment, and the desire to feel that elation once more, even if it means again overcoming your terror at stepping out of that plane or diving off that high board.
But Stephens also argues for a deeper psychological explanation of the blissful tingle we get from speed, the one we experience only when we are in control, such as when skiing, driving a fast car, or flying a jet at low altitude. Some of his current academic research revolves around the notion of a “flow state,” in which we meet the demands of a challenging or dangerous task with our physical skill and mental composure—and find satisfaction in that equilibrium.
My instinct tells me to brake but my conscious mind keeps my foot on the accelerator.
For most of human history, “there was quite a low cap on the maximum speed you could go,” he says. “It’s only relatively recently that we’ve been able to exceed that, and it’s risen exponentially from the late 1800s to now.” But he thinks we’re almost built for it: “We have these massive brains and really finely tuned control over our very dexterous hands, so we can end up in this flow state” at very high speeds.
Stephens relies on three different brain networks to explain how flow works: “The frontal executive network directs our resources towards our activities or goals. The default-mode network is basically what our brain does when it’s not doing anything. And the salience network is like an alarm bell going off, saying that you probably shouldn’t be doing this and there are better things you could be doing. For me, flow is when our salience network goes quiet. In flow, you’re very much in the moment. You’re fully immersed in the task. You are optimally challenged. You stop noticing time passing. Your salience network goes completely silent, and it’s a very enjoyable position to be in.”
That sensation will be familiar to anyone who has skied a challenging run or driven a fast car on a racetrack with sufficient ability to relax and revel in it. But there’s a big difference between those who chase speed for fun and those who do it professionally, whether as athletes, military pilots, or record-breakers. As the demands placed on your brain and body rise, you exit the flow state and enter what Stephens calls a clutch state, where you are actively marshalling your mental and physical resources to cope—a perfect description of what I’ve experienced while high-speed testing. “Obviously, past a certain point, speed gets scary,” he says. “We probably want to slow down, unless we’ve got external pressures, such as competing and wanting to win.”
Tiffany Cromwell is a hugely experienced and successful Australian professional cyclist and Olympian and currently the road captain of the Canyon//SRAM Zondacrypto team. There are few sporting activities more thrilling than dropping down an alpine pass at 60 mph on a road bike, but few more perilous, too. Cromwell’s partner, the Finnish Formula 1 driver Valtteri Bottas, races at over 200 mph, but his clothing and car and the circuits he drives on have been carefully optimized to protect him if he crashes at those speeds, and there hasn’t been a fatal accident in Formula 1 since Jules Bianchi’s in 2015. By contrast, Cromwell wears only a helmet and a thin layer of Lycra, and the roads on which she competes make almost no concession for her safety, often with a rock face on one side and either a metal barrier or a precipitous drop on the other. Tragically, almost every season brings the death of a professional cyclist, often while descending.
We have these massive brains and really finely tuned control over our very dexterous hands, so we can end up in this flow state.
Cromwell subscribes to that distinction between flow and clutch states, and despite the hazards and 17 years of going fast for a living, she still gets a charge from hurtling downhill on two wheels. “Some riders fear the descents, so they’re more stressed and don’t enjoy the thrill of going fast, as maybe they’re getting above their capabilities,” she says. “Downhill skiers go faster than us and also don’t wear much clothing, but snow doesn’t cut you up. Asphalt does…. Even though our peak speed isn’t as high as in some other sports, we can definitely mess ourselves up a lot more if we come off.”
Cromwell finds that the intellectual intensity of competition can mute the visceral aspects of flying down a steep slope. “In the race, there’s less space to enjoy the speed because you’re so focused on the job you have to do that you’re not thinking about anything else, or you’re trying not to crash,” she says. “But for me, because I enjoy it, I do sometimes get that sensation in the race, that feeling of being on the limit of your equipment and of your skill set, but just nailing it and getting down a descent perfectly. We are always trying to crack the hundred-kilometer-an-hour mark [ just over 62 mph], which I have gone close to. When you travel that fast with zero protection, it’s scary, but when you have that control and that trust in your equipment and your abilities, it’s hard to describe the feeling.”
Few people know more about going fast than Wing Commander Andy Green, formerly of the Royal Air Force, and few people seem to derive less pleasure from doing so. If you want to set a new land-speed record, you need the opposite of a racing driver or anyone who gets a kick out of going fast, because they might try to push the vehicle beyond what it is safely capable of. Instead, you need to work up to that goal in slow increments—and have the judgment and the courage to back off if something doesn’t feel right. You want a computer in human form: egoless yet with the extraordinary cognitive and physical capacities required to execute a complex series of procedures in a short space of time while pulling up to three Gs, keeping the rocket-powered car in a straight line while covering four football fields in a second, and having enough spare mental-processing power to analyze the car’s behavior and how it might be improved for the next run.
You need Green. He’s a proper hero: He graduated from Oxford University (where he was on the rowing team) with a summa cum laude degree in mathematics before joining the RAF as a fighter pilot—flying F4 Phantoms during the Cold War and Tornado F3 jets in Bosnia, Iraq, and the Falkland Islands—and later becoming its chief of staff of the operation to depose Libya’s Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi. He also captained and coached the RAF’s team for the Cresta Run, the world’s steepest skeleton-toboggan course—on which riders reach speeds of over 80 mph while going downhill headfirst with their faces inches from the ice—and held the armed forces’ course record for years.
Put all of that together and maybe it’s unsurprising that in 1997 he became the only person to break the speed of sound on land with that 763 mph run across Nevada’s Black Rock Desert in Thrust SSC, a British-made jet car. But it is surprising that a man who has spent his professional and sporting careers going fast, and faster than anyone else on Earth, claims not to have any innate talent for it nor to enjoy it much.
There’s a combination of reasons he ended up doing all these things, he says, “but I would put right down at the bottom, almost scoring zero, any natural ability at speed. I had to work quite hard at it. I’m sure I remember saying in a couple of places in my flying days that I’m not a natural pilot, and that’s true of about half of us.”
“Same with the Cresta Run,” he continues. “I was utterly terrible at first, but as a fighter pilot, I was supposed to be good at things that are speed- and control-related. I was annoyed that I couldn’t do it. I went back and tried harder—and was even worse in my second year. In my third year, it finally clicked, but it took an awful lot of physical and mental battering and the humiliation of just being rubbish.”
He is doubtless being modest. Richard Noble, the previous land-speed-record holder at 633 mph in Thrust 2, once recalled being astonished by how Green was able to provide a calm commentary while going supersonic in Thrust SSC. “Whereas all I could do in Thrust 2 was hang on and try to keep the thing in a straight line,” Noble told me years ago.
“There is a tiny part of your brain going, ‘This is exciting,’ ” Green says. “But if you take any time at all to go, ‘Yeah, this is great; I’m really enjoying this,’ you are not focusing on the next event and likely to get into trouble. So by all means enjoy it, but only if you’re using a small spare part of your brain. I got far more satisfaction out of coping with something difficult like that and making sure that my driving was up to the standard that the engineering team expected of me and doing it precisely and accurately and coming back with as much data as possible. That’s much more satisfying than sitting there going, ‘Wow, this is cool.’ ”
Green’s record has stood for nearly 30 years, and there are no serious, funded attempts to break it. The Bloodhound project, which he was part of, aimed to exceed 1,000 mph, but it faltered for lack of money, and Green stepped down as driver in 2023. The airspeed record for manned flight with conventional jet engines has not fallen in almost 50 years now, and we’re unlikely to see supersonic commercial passenger aircraft in the near future. Scramjets and hypersonic gliders have since gone much faster, but lacking living, breathing pilots, they don’t capture our attention in the same way. There is a certain ghoulishness about record attempts: We require human jeopardy.
Times and priorities change. We will always enjoy the thrill of speed on the slopes or on racetracks, but could our obsession with speed records be waning, as our interest in the physical, mechanical engineering behind them is replaced by fascination with virtual advances in fields such as artificial intelligence?
If you want to set a new land-speed record, you need the opposite of a racing driver or anyone who gets a kick out of going fast.
“I’m not going to fall into the same trap that Malcolm Campbell did in 1935, when he climbed out of Blue Bird after his 301 mph record and said, ‘I don’t believe anybody will ever drive faster than that,’ ” Green says. “But it is possible that the land-speed record was very much a thing of the 20th century. It’s now an incredibly difficult conversation to have with most businesses. Even if you say, ‘This is going to be carbon-neutral with fully synthetic fuel,’ they’ll still say, ‘It’s got flames coming out of back, so we can’t support that.’ ”
But if Thrust SSC turns out to be the last one, he adds, “it’s recognition of what a remarkable achievement it was, head and shoulders above any other single step anybody had taken, by proving it was possible to go supersonic on the ground and do it repeatably and safely.”
Green’s priorities have changed, too, and the world’s fastest human plans a slower retirement. Speed might be addictive, but not to the guy who has experienced more of it than anyone, at ground level at least. “I don’t think I ever was obsessed by speed, but it certainly appears that I’m not now,” he says. Since retiring from the RAF, he has never been back to the Cresta Run. “I have no desire to strap on all the body armor and the helmet and then hurl myself down the ice run and hope that I don’t end up back in the clinic. To be honest, I’d rather go sailing.”
Authors
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Ben Oliver
Ben Oliver writes about cars and the car industry for newspapers and magazines around the world. His work has brought him awards including Journalist of the Year, the AA Environment Award and the…
