Icy Speed Record
Arrow also had a successful racing career, but her most famous instance was to come. She was crashed in September 1903 during a race, killing the driver Frank Day. However, Henry Ford bought back the broken car and repaired it with the intent of performing a speed run on a frozen lake. He renamed it 999, as the original red car had been retired already, and the press referred to it as the "new 999," "Red Devil," or a combination of the two.
On January 12, 1904, Henry Ford personally drove the rechristened 999 to a speed of 91.37 mph (147.05 km/h) on Lake St. Clair, a land speed record. It stood for only a month, but this was ample time to bring more good publicity for Ford's new company.
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Famous quotes containing the words icy, speed and/or record:
“Like to the Pontic Sea,
Whose icy current and compulsive course
Ne’er knows retiring ebb, but keeps due on
To the Propontic and the Hellespont,
Even so my bloody thoughts with violent pace
Shall ne’er look back, ne’er ebb to humble love,
Till that a capable and wide revenge
Swallow them up.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“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)
“The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of human history.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)