This video popped up while I was researching entirely different. When I was in high school, I was pretty sure that I knew everything, but I have never seen anything about these cars until now. If there is anyone who watched them run, feel free to chime in with your thoughts. Let me introduce you to "Silent Screams: The Weird And Fast Air Powered Dragsters of 1963/63".
That’s what made drag racing so good….. then. All the years superchargers ended up in the grandstands they were never banned… oh well.. Thanks Brian..
Just saw this myself the other day and it was news to me as well. I was a student of Hot Rod and other car publications but don't recall it being mentioned. Of course, I was 6-7 years old when this was going on, so I guess I just missed it. Fascinating story.
Compressed air propulsion is something which crops up every so often in France, for some reason. It falls down on thermodynamics every time.
Now that is cool. I wonder what would have been if the technology had been persued until now. I want to build one.
Air powered road cars have been experimented with for a long time, and still are. Also popular with model aircraft builders with CO2 powered reciprocating engines. Never seen it done with a turbine though. The video is great. https://www.hemmings.com/stories/ask-a-hemmings-editor-what-ever-happened-to-compressed-air-cars/
I seem to recall photos of these cars somewhere in my youth. But the Mickey Thompson car is the one I first thought of when I saw this thread.
Free market technology has developed the most efficient and practical transportation mode in the form of steel-bodied internal combustion engine powered vehicles. Plastic Corvettes notwithstanding!! All available technology using up-to-date physics, chemistry, and materials science is constantly applied to optimizing the basic system. Government mandated technologies are by definition inferior (massively in most cases!) to the former. Electric, hydrogen, air, propane, etc., vehicles are all bad choices for solid engineering, physics, chemistry, and economic reasons.
The Jalopy Journal
