Performance
The car began shakedown testing on 20 July 2006 on the runway at RAF Wittering with the lower-power 600 bhp version of the JCB444 engine, the team slowly ramping up the speed to prove the chassis and engines. They eventually achieved a speed of over 200 mph on 30 July 2006. Two days later, the car was disassembled ready to be flown to Wendover Airport, Utah, former home of the B-29 'Enola Gay' on 8 August. On 13 August, after several days spent re-assembling and re-testing the car, the Dieselmax made its first official run on the Bonneville Salt Flats as part of Speed Week, eventually attaining an average speed of 317 mph to take the SCTA-BNI event record for an 'AA/DS' Diesel Streamliner.
On 22 August 2006, after being re-fitted with 750 bhp 'LSR' versions of the JCB444 engines, the JCB Dieselmax car broke the official FIA diesel engine land speed record, attaining a speed of 328.767 mph (529 km/h). 24 hours later the JCB Dieselmax car broke its own record, achieving a speed of 350.092 mph (563.418 km/h) over a distance of 1 mile on 23 August 2006. Before attaining these speeds, the Dieselmax was pushed from behind, by a JCB Fastrac, until it hit 30 mph where it engaged first gear. Before the JCB Dieselmax records, the diesel land speed record was 235.756 mph (380 km/h), set by American Virgil Snyder, in the Thermo King streamliner on 25 August 1973
Read more about this topic: JCB Dieselmax
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—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
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“What avails it that you are a Christian, if you are not purer than the heathen, if you deny yourself no more, if you are not more religious? I know of many systems of religion esteemed heathenish whose precepts fill the reader with shame, and provoke him to new endeavors, though it be to the performance of rites merely.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)