World Speed Record Use
New airspeed records were set after the 1929 and 1931 Schneider Trophy contests, both achieved using the R engine. In the two decades before World War II, the quest to break the land speed record was hotly contested, particularly so in the early 1930s. Aero engines were often used to power wheeled vehicles to ever-higher speeds, chosen because of their high power-to-weight ratios: the Liberty engine, Napier Lion and the Sunbeam Matabele were among the engine types used in the 1920s. The Rolls-Royce R was the latest development in high-powered aero engine design at the time, and was chosen by several makers of land speed record-contending cars; the engine was also chosen for powerboats attempting the water speed record. One car and two boats successfully used the combined power of two R engines.
Read more about this topic: Rolls-Royce R
Famous quotes containing the words world, speed and/or record:
“Youth enters the world with very happy prejudices in her own favour. She imagines herself not only certain of accomplishing every adventure, but of obtaining those rewards which the accomplishment may deserve. She is not easily persuaded to believe that the force of merit can be resisted by obstinacy and avarice, or its lustre darkened by envy and malignity.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“There exist certain individuals who are, by nature, given purely to contemplation and are utterly unsuited to action, and who, nevertheless, under a mysterious and unknown impulse, sometimes act with a speed which they themselves would have thought beyond them.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“Society is the stage on which manners are shown; novels are the literature. Novels are the journal or record of manners; and the new importance of these books derives from the fact, that the novelist begins to penetrate the surface, and treat this part of life more worthily.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)