Wingtip to Wingtip at 45O mph! 3O Feet Above the Ground! Sideways!

[seemslikeadream]

It's the world's fastest motor sport, and next month at Reno its two superstars will face off for the first time ever. Can they make air racing relevant again?

By Carl Hoffman | August 2004

Wingtip to Wingtip at 45O mph! 3O Feet Above the Ground! Sideways!
Win Reno, Go Supersonic

As Darryl Greenamyer approached the last turn in the final Sport-class race of the 2003 National Championship Air Races in Reno, Nevada, he heard a sound. It was a roar, really—so loud it seemed to come from inside his plane, just behind his head. Greenamyer was flying 40 feet above the ground at something faster than 320 mph. But Rick Vandam was passing him.

Over the course of 38 years, Greenamyer has won nine championships at Reno. There is nothing he hates more than second place.

This was air racing, not auto racing, and so the incursion was happening in an ever-changing three-dimensional space, Vandam coming from slightly below and to the right, on the "outside" of the track. "I couldn't see him, but I could hear that he was really close," Greenamyer says. He had blown out his souped-up racing engine in a heat race the day before and had stayed up all night replacing the cylinders with stock parts. And now here he was, hobbled, underpowered, getting passed. The two planes hit the turn. Greenamyer banked hard to the left around a pylon—his plane was almost sideways—looked down, and saw Vandam's shadow pulling ahead on the outside. "Here goes my second engine," Greenamyer thought, driving the throttle forward and praying that Vandam wouldn't be able to turn as tightly (or fly right into him), and that his stock engine would hold. It did. Greenamyer won the Sport class by 1.9 seconds.

"It was actually an exciting race," Greenamyer says, somewhat incredulously, six months later, standing next to his shiny red plane—minus wings and engine—in his San Clemente, California, workshop. "And I don't intend to let it happen again." He is 67 years old, a compact man with white hair, dimples and twinkling blue eyes. He looks harmless. But Greenamyer is a former Lockheed Martin test pilot who, back in the 1960s and '70s, flew the CIA's A-12 spyplane and its successor, the SR-71. When many of us were listening to Grand Funk Railroad on our eight tracks, Greenamyer flew from California to Florida in 58 minutes. He broke the piston-engine speed record in 1969 and the low-altitude jet speed record in 1977. He once tried to take wing from a frozen lake in northern Greenland in a World War II-era B-29 that hadn't been flown in 48 years. He is notorious for doing things in and with airplanes that ordinary people wouldn't even think of, and he has won the fastest division of the world's fastest motor sport more times than anyone.

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http://www.popsci.com/popsci/aviation/article/0,20967,663604,00.html