Tampa Racing - Wash. State Team Eyes Land-Speed Record

Men with larger ballz than me.

A team of more than a dozen men have been spending their weekends on a 39,000-horsepower dream: to shatter the world land-speed record of 763 miles per hour with a former jet plane on wheels.

"The British have held the record for 20 years," said Ed Shadle, a retired IBM computer technician. "It's about time that a couple of boys from Pierce County bring it back to America."

Shadle, 61, is the co-owner and driver of the vehicle; the other owner is Keith Zanghi, 48, a Boeing plant manager. They've already invested $100,000 toward their dream, working out of a friend's hangar in west-central Washington.

Along with about a dozen teammates, they're hoping to reach the 800-mph milestone — well beyond the speed of sound — in the slender, custom-painted former Lockheed F-104 Starfighter that Shadle and Zanghi bought from a surplus aircraft dealer in Belfast, Maine for $25,000.

Their team, North American Eagle, plans to install a test engine this September and run low-speed tests at an old B-52 runway in Moses Lake two months later. The team hopes to make its bid for the land-speed record in the fall of 2004 at Black Rock Desert north of Reno, Nev., or at Cold Lake in Alberta, Canada.

The group says it still needs $500,000 to finish the vehicle and another $500,000 to hold the record-breaking session, which would require a camp for a 30-member crew for a month.