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There are only two ways to make a raceplane faster: more horsepower or less drag. Any airplane that could beat the Bearcat at the races would have no problem snatching the 3-km record. A devoted collector of airplanes, he created a warbird museum, and in 1988 commissioned Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites to design an airplane that would so dominate the Unlimited class that warbirds would no longer be competitive-and thereby saved from the sacrilege of heavy modifications for the Reno air races, not to mention the crashes that destroyed them.
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Bob Pond had trained as a naval aviator in World War II (though he never saw combat), and after the war he turned his family’s machine shop into a multimillion-dollar concern. Though it shared the same goals as Tsunami (victory at Reno the 3-km absolute speed record), Pond Racer was born under a different star. So when Sandberg invited Boland and Law to join the project that became Tsunami, they jumped. It was a hugely ambitious undertaking that nobody had yet attempted. While Boland and Sandberg saw Hinton set a new record of 499 mph, they saw something else: the possibility to go even faster with a clean-sheet, purpose-built design. Sandberg ran a company that rebuilt the Rolls-Royce V-12 Merlin engines that powered many of the Unlimited class racers. Red Baron owner Ed Browning had hired Boland and Pete Law, Lockheed Skunk Works engineers who had worked together on air racers since 1965, to modify the airplane for the Reno races as one reporter later noted, practically every Unlimited racer at Reno had been graced, in one way or another, by the magic touch of Boland and Law (see “Secret Pete,” Sept. Tsunami first flew in 1986, but the idea had been hatched seven years earlier under blue Nevada skies, as Bruce Boland and John Sandberg watched 27-year-old Steve Hinton set a new absolute speed record in a highly modified P-51, Red Baron at Tonopah. That no one in the last two decades has dared to follow in their footsteps is evidence that the three-kilometer absolute speed record is going to be one helluva tough nut to crack.
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Rarely have two aircraft designed for the same mission looked so different, and the truth is that both teams came much closer to their ultimate goal than is generally acknowledged. Proposals and prototypes popped up, with names like Shockwave and MachBuster, but there were only two serious contenders: John Sandberg’s Tsunami and Bob Pond’s Pond Racer. To break the absolute speed record and overcome the aluminum grip of ex-World War II fighters on Unlimited races (where, unlike in other classes, anything piston-powered and propeller-driven were then allowed), challengers would have to build an airplane from scratch and just for speed. By 1989, a 1946 F8F-2 Bearcat, Lyle Shelton’s Rare Bear, was uncatchable it set the propeller-driven three-kilometer speed record, 528 mph, and began a decade of dominance at Reno. Speed was now simply a matter of pumped engines, clipped wings, and a fitted canopy. When the National Championship Air Races started up again-in Reno, Nevada, in 1964-the only airplanes circling the pylons were Mustangs, Bearcats, and the occasional Sea Fury. Surplus warbirds that had been fast fighters became widely available. This story is a selection from the April-May issue of Air & Space magazine BuyĪfter World War II, jets took over as the world’s fastest airplanes, and the next fastest were cast aside.