After months of hard work and weeks of 20 hour days, the Spectre SpeedLiner made its first run at approximately 2:10pm on Friday October 9th. As we began to push Kenny down the salt in the Double Dually push truck, the car coughed, stalled, and then fired to life in a roar of twin-turbocharged Cadillac fury. He quickly pulled away and said the motor provided incredible acceleration, with endless torque.
Since this was the shakedown run Kenny was supposed to keep the speeds very low, but the way the car kept acceleration we knew he decided to tickle the throttle a bit. Then over the radio we heard the announcement: at the 3 mile mark (the full course is 5 miles) the car was going 287mph and accelerating hard. At n early 300mph, the SpeedLiner instantly became the world’s fastest Cadillac.
Then Kenny reported a malfunction in the fire system, which caused one of the fire bottles to empty all over the cockpit – soaking Kenny and making it very difficult to see. He pulled the chutes and coasted to a stop. The crew is feverishly working on the car now, inspecting all the hard parts, pouring over the data stream from the engine management system, cleaning all the fire supressent agent out of the cockpit and fixing the system itself. We’re hoping to have the car ready for a second run this evening or first thing tomorrow morning, and this time we’re going for the record.