Racing and Records
At the 1981 Reno Air Races, the AMSOIL Racer, with Mortensen as pilot, finished third, after being assessed a penalty for cutting home pylon (due to the need to avoid a collision with the racer Sundancer). Due to roll control problems, Mortensen took the plane to Rutan's home base at the Mojave Airport for further design analysis and flight testing by Rutan Aircraft Factory pilots Mike Melvill and Dick Rutan. The aileron control system design was subsequently modified.
At the 1982 Reno Air Races, Mortesen and the AMSOIL Racer took second place, with an average race speed of 209.21 mph (336.69 km/h), just 0.3 seconds behind the winner, again Sundancer.
Mortesen then set out to break speed records. The first was the Class C.1.b (1,000-2,000 pound take off weight) 3 km closed course, which the AMSOIL Racer beat with a speed of 232 mph (373 km/h). The second record achieved was over a 75-mile (121 km) closed course, which was accomplished with a speed of 235 mph (378 km/h).
At the 1983 Reno Air Races, during one of the early heat races, Mortensen had to manoeuvre in order to avoid a mid-air collision with Sorceress, ending up entering that plane's wake turbulence only 35 feet (11 m) off the ground. With so little altitude to recover, the AMSOIL Racer hit the ground at over 200 mph (320 km/h), tumbling. The plane was completely destroyed, but since Rutan had designed the cockpit to withstand a 22g impact, Mortensen survived with only minor injuries.
The aircraft was rebuilt for static display, and was suspended over the Pylon Bar in the Reno Hilton (now the Grand Sierra Resort) in Reno, Nevada for many years. It now resides in the EAA Museum at Oshkosh, WI. The second aircraft that was licensed by Rutan was never built.
Read more about this topic: AMSOIL Racer
Famous quotes containing the words racing and/or records:
“Upscale people are fixated with food simply because they are now able to eat so much of it without getting fat, and the reason they don’t get fat is that they maintain a profligate level of calorie expenditure. The very same people whose evenings begin with melted goat’s cheese ... get up at dawn to run, break for a mid-morning aerobics class, and watch the evening news while racing on a stationary bicycle.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“What a wonderful faculty is memory!—the most mysterious and inexplicable in the great riddle of life; that plastic tablet on which the Almighty registers with unerring fidelity the records of being, making it the depository of all our words, thoughts and deeds—this faithful witness against us for good or evil.”
—Susanna Moodie (1803–1885)