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" The sun has just risen, and already the heat is shimmering over the dry lakebed. Craggy brown mountains loom over the towers and hangars of Edwards Air Force Base, the country&amp;#039;s main military flight-testing center. A plywood trailer sits on the heat-cracked mud, thick black wires running from it in a giant V toward a quartet of sensors in the distance. Every few minutes, the desert&amp;#039;s early-morning stillness is torn by a gut-thumping rumble as fighter jets take off on afterburners. A walkie-talkie crackles. &amp;quot;Turnaround team to control: burners lighting.&amp;quot; Matt Candy, a balding 40-year-old Brit in dark glasses, clicks his handset. &amp;quot;Control to turnaround team, confirmed burners lighting. Clear to run.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Turnaround team to control, car is away.&amp;quot; Through binoculars, the desert floor to the north is a vast mirror, the mirage reflecting distant peaks. After a long minute, a ball of dust appears, low in the sky. It grows longer, stretching out into a brown smudge. A green nub appears at its front, then lengthens as the vehicle emerges above the shimmering surface to reveal a long, low race car with a double fin in the back. The vehicle, named Inspiration, was brought to the lakebed two months earlier by the British Steam Car Challenge, a group that has spent more than a decade designing and building what it hopes will be the fastest steam-powered vehicle in history. Weighing 6600 pounds and capable of generating 3 megawatts of heat in its boilers\u2014equivalent to 1500 electric teakettles\u2014the sleekly sculpted car represents the apex of modern mobile steam technology. The big question: Can it beat a record set more than a century ago? Drawing closer to the observers on the lakebed, the steam car shoots between a pair of orange flags like a landborne torpedo. At last its sound can be heard, a whispery, high-pitched drone like an airliner passing far overhead. Just as the car races through the end of the timed mile, a sonic boom rolls over the lakebed. The thunderclap did not come from Inspiration. As the onlookers congregate around the timing trailer, the average speed through the traps pops up on a laptop screen: 104.202 mph. It&amp;#039;s a modest velocity by any measure, and certainly well below the mark that the team has been hoping to beat. Something must have gone wrong. Again. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s our car for you,&amp;quot; Candy says. &amp;quot;Reliably unreliable.&amp;quot;       cellspacing=&amp;quot;0&amp;quot; cellpadding=&amp;quot;0&amp;quot;&amp;amp;gt; Click to Enlarge  The title of &amp;quot;World&amp;#039;s Fastest Steam-Powered Car&amp;quot; might seem an arcane achievement, along the lines of &amp;quot;most powerful mechanical computer&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;tallest wooden skyscraper.&amp;quot; And indeed, nothing rides on the Brits&amp;#039; success or failure other than the pleasure of playing around with an obsolete technology and seeing if you can make it work. But there was a time when steam cars were cutting-edge. A century ago, steam was everywhere. It powered locomotives and ships and heated homes. In 1906 the fastest automobile of any kind was a Stanley Steamer, which driver Fred Marriott took to the then-astonishing velocity of 127.659 mph. But the age of the internal combustion engine was at hand, and soon steam was virtually a byword for obsolescence. Marriott&amp;#039;s record for fastest steam car stood forlornly until the 1980s, when a hobbyist named Jim Crank pieced together a steam-powered vehicle from spare parts and a driver named Bob Barber took the contraption to 145.607 mph at the Bonneville Salt Flats in 1985. That record, however, was not an official result because the world authority on land speed records, the Paris-based F\u00E9d\u00E9ration Internationale de l&amp;#039;Automobile (FIA), wasn&amp;#039;t present.  Meanwhile, a small but passionate underground was forming around the idea that steam power still had a vital role to play. One such enthusiast was Dr. Neil Richardson of the University of Southampton in England. In 1997 he was advising a group of engineering students on their thesis project and suggested they design a vehicle that could break Marriott&amp;#039;s long-standing record. Richardson brought their design to the attention of Lord Montagu, scion of Britain&amp;#039;s foremost motoring family. Montagu had just the person in mind to take the project forward: his nephew, Charles Burnett III. Burnett had been running a company that converts automobiles to run on propane and, in his spare time, setting speed records in offshore powerboats. Burnett took on the project and hired a series of designers to bring the idea to life.  A decade later, he has arrived on the sweltering sands of the California desert to make his mark on steam history.  border=&amp;quot;0&amp;quot;&amp;amp;gt; --&amp;amp;gt;  As the temperature climbs into the triple digits, the pit crew swarms around the car, sitting in the shade of a canvas canopy at the team&amp;#039;s encampment at the end of a taxiway. Mechanics remove rows of panels from the body and plunge into the internal workings. They quickly diagnose the problem: A large valve is stuck open, allowing steam to escape. Swapping it out for a new valve will be an all-day affair, a grueling undertaking in the August heat. Unfortunately, it&amp;#039;s all too typical of how the team has spent the past two months. Each day, they take advantage of the cool early-morning hours to run the car over the lakebed. The rest of the day they fix whatever turns out to be broken.  As the mechanics tackle the wayward valve, Candy walks me around the car. Near the front sit twin liquid petroleum gas (LPG) tanks, which feed into a heating unit that converts the fuel into a gas. This flows into burners in 12 suitcase-size boilers. The resulting flames reach 1900 F. Demineralized water flowing through coils of tubing in the boilers is heated to 750 degrees, becoming high-pressure, superheated dry steam. The steam emerges into a collection system that funnels the output through a turbine that connects directly to the rear wheels.  All told, the system runs through 16 gallons of LPG on every 3-minute run. Because it&amp;#039;s a total-loss system\u2014the steam, instead of being recirculated, is vented out of the turbine into the atmosphere\u2014the car goes through nearly 30 gallons of water as well. If the car ever runs out of water during a run, the boilers will melt and the whole car will likely blow up. &amp;quot;The first rule of Steam Car Club,&amp;quot; Candy says, &amp;quot;is &amp;#039;Always have water.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; The need to keep steam cars filled with both fuel and water is one of the reasons they gradually fell from favor. That, and the fact that it takes time to heat up the water and make steam. &amp;quot;Something feels wrong with your car if it won&amp;#039;t go within seconds of turning the key,&amp;quot; says Charles Mendler, an engine designer at Envera LLC who is not affiliated with the project. Those factors aren&amp;#039;t relevant for the record bid, but the Inspiration&amp;#039;s complexity is: Its parts have been scrounged from all sorts of unusual sources, including teakettles and power stations. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s an eclectic mix,&amp;quot; Candy admits, &amp;quot;and as a result there are a lot of failure modes.&amp;quot; That the project has come this far is a testament to the remarkable array of talent that has gathered on its behalf. The system designer, Jeremy Bliss, performed the same role on Thrust SSC, the car that set the absolute world land speed record of 763 mph in 1997. Mike Horne, the bodywork specialist, is also working on Bloodhound SSC, a new land speed record attempt that&amp;#039;s aiming to hit 1000 mph. The test driver, Don Wales, is the grandson of land speed titan Malcolm Campbell, and holds the U.K. electric car record. &amp;quot;In the U.K., we&amp;#039;re a small country, and everyone knows what everyone else is doing,&amp;quot; Wales says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s very incestuous and friendly.&amp;quot; Nearby, inside an air-conditioned trailer, Burnett relaxes on a plushly padded leather sofa. While it&amp;#039;s true that he descended from the peerage and summers in a castle in England, Burnett comes across as anything but a stuffy toff. Raised partly in Florida, the 54-year-old speaks with an American accent and rocks a pair of batik shorts and a Hawaiian shirt whose garishness perfectly matches his lobster-pink sunburn. Of Marriott&amp;#039;s elusive record, he says, &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s clear we can break it. It&amp;#039;s just the tweaks and the twiddles that you can get in anything that&amp;#039;s built from scratch.&amp;quot; Day after day, unsuccessful record attempts segue to long, hot days probing and patching the huge car&amp;#039;s innards. There are valves to replace, faulty sensors to troubleshoot. Until, finally, the day arrives when nothing goes wrong. In the predawn darkness of Aug. 25, the team assembles at the encampment, trailers the car to the starting line and makes another attempt. This time, the machine works flawlessly. Burnett hits 136 mph on the outbound run and 151 on the return, for an officially sanctioned average of 139.843 mph. Though still shy of Bob Barber&amp;#039;s run, it&amp;#039;s enough to earn Inspiration official FIA recognition as the world&amp;#039;s fastest steam car. The next morning, every newsstand in Britain is bedecked with triumphant headlines: &amp;quot;British steam-powered car boils 100-year-old record!&amp;quot; Later that day, Don Wales takes the driver&amp;#039;s seat and manages to do his boss one better, hitting a top speed of 159 and an average speed of 148.308 mph. Out of deference to the boss, the team will record Burnett&amp;#039;s time for the mile\u2014the prestige event\u2014and log Wales&amp;#039;s time for the kilometer. For an hour, the team celebrates in the encampment. Then it&amp;#039;s time to pack up and get off the lakebed. The steam car goes back into its shipping container for the long return journey to the U.K., where it will tour until it&amp;#039;s placed in Lord Montagu&amp;#039;s Beaulieu, Hampshire\u2013based National Motor Museum. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ve done what we set out to do,&amp;quot; Candy says. &amp;quot;It will never run again.&amp;quot;  Out on the course, FIA-\u00ADauthorized chief timing official James Rice rolls up the sensor wires and stows his gear in the trailer. In his 14 years as a land speed record timer, he&amp;#039;s recorded tens of thousands of runs, both at big meets and at one-offs where a single goes for a record. Of these world records, he says, the Inspiration holds a special distinction. &amp;quot;This,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;was the slowest one I&amp;#039;ve ever done.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/a6014/land-speed-record-seekers-revive-steam-power/>