Timeline September 29, 1952

John Cobb attempts to set a new world water speed record

INVERNESS, Scotland, September 3—John Cobb, the Englishman who holds the world automobile speed record today tried out the boat in which he hopes to better the world water speed mark. The present speedboat record, 178.4 miles an hour, is held by Stanley Sayres of Seattle….It was the first time that Cobb had tried his craft, the Crusader, and the speed was held to 100 miles an hour. He is confident that the silver and scarlet jet-propelled craft can do 200.
—Associated Press

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John Cobb talks with his advisers before his fatal attempt at the world water speed record on dark Loch Ness.[/caption]

YOU MIGHT NOT EXPECT to find a shy, unassuming Englishman from Esher, Surrey, preparing to make history at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, but the renowned speed course was already familiar territory to John Rhodes Cobb when he climbed into his Railton Mobil Special racing automobile on September 16, 1947, determined to set a new world land speed record.
Several years earlier, also at Bonneville, Cobb had shattered the record speed of 312 miles per hour then held by his friend and rival George Eyston. Now he hoped to smash his own top speed of 368.9 mph. To rewrite the record book, Cobb needed to complete two runs through the mile-long, straight-line course; one in each direction. The official result of the trial would be based on an average of the two runs. On his first pass he registered a nearly unimaginable speed in excess of 403 mph, then coasted through the second run to finish with a new record average speed of 394.196 mph.
At one time in his life, Cobb held every existing land speed record on the books for races from one to 24 hours’ duration, yet this very successful speedster considered himself no daredevil. His motivation for testing ever-faster cars, he claimed, came not from a desire for fame or from an addiction to the adrenaline rush his exploits must have produced, but simply from a desire to test and improve automotive technology so that everyday vehicles might become safer and more efficient. Quite simply, he just loved cars.
Nevertheless, his decision in 1952 to take his skills to the water and attempt to add the world water speed record to the land speed mark he already held bears an unmistakable hint of adventure and daring. True, by comparison to automobiles speedboat racing was a ponderous affair. An American, Stanley Sayres, had set the current top speed ever recorded on water only a few months earlier, when he had averaged just over 178 mph—considerably less than half the speed Cobb had achieved on land. Racing on water, though, involved hazards not faced by automobile racers.
Reid Railton, the same engineer who had worked on Cobb’s racing automobiles, also designed the speedboat, Crusader, in which Cobb would challenge Sayres’ mark. Railton described the craft as “a very small seaplane hull with a couple of small floats or skis mounted on outriggers, where the tail normally is.” Cobb contributed £15,000 of his own money to the project.
In addition to Crusader itself, the other key element necessary for a successful trial was a suitable venue. The need for perfectly still water and room for acceleration and deceleration dictated a large inland lake sheltered from the weather. Cobb and Railton eventually settled on Loch Ness.
In July Cobb began a series of cautious tests at the controls of Crusader. The veteran automobile racer had never driven a speedboat before and found that handling his latest machine was like “driving a London omnibus without tyres on.” In a series of tests, he intentionally ran Crusader at less than full power, seeing how it would perform at speeds of 50, then 100 and then 150 mph.
The tests exposed a few minor flaws in the boat’s design. Crusader had been reluctant to skim across the surface of the water, rather than to cut into it. The rudder, too, needed some fine-tuning in order to keep the boat on a straighter course. Those imperfections were minor and easily remedied. More serious, the planing shoe, an aluminum beak attached to the front of the boat to protect the prow, had been slightly distorted during the tests, suggesting that it might fail at speeds exceeding 200 mph. Reluctant to postpone the attempt to break the record, Cobb uncharacteristically cut corners on safety, saying that he only needed to reach 190 mph to set a new record, so there was no need to push Crusader past the 200 mph limit.
Cobb’s reasoning was not entirely unjustified. No less troubling than the weak planing shoe were the deteriorating conditions on the loch as September wore on. Rains swelled the mountain streams that emptied into the loch, and the rushing water carried fallen branches and driftwood downstream, filling the loch with potentially dangerous debris and requiring a painstaking effort to keep the racecourse clear. At the same time, steady winds churned the surface of the water into ripples—no more than two inches from crest to trough but, even so, enough to cause trouble for Crusader. With the onset of autumn, conditions would only continue to deteriorate, so Cobb’s eagerness to get on with the main event at the earliest possible moment made sense.
That moment seemed to arrive on the morning of September 29. Crusader was fueled before sunrise, and support boats headed out onto the loch in preparation for the brief but historic trial. By the time everything was in place at about 8:30 a.m. a stiffer breeze had kicked up, bringing more ripples to the water and the day’s activities to an abrupt pause. After an hour’s wait, it became clear that the wind would not immediately subside, so Cobb’s ride was put off until after breakfast. While Cobb could wait comfortably on shore, though, he ordered the support boats to stay on station alongside the measured-mile racetrack. The vessels churned up a large wake wherever they went, and the waves they caused spread out across the loch and repeatedly rebounded off the shore, disturbing the surface for a considerable time.
After a further two hours, the winds died down and the surface of the water settled into mirror-smooth perfection. Moving with urgency while the calm lasted, Cobb had Crusader towed back out onto the loch, but as he moved the speedboat into position, the support boat that carried the official timekeepers inexplicably headed for shore. Cobb angrily ordered it back into position, but once again had to wait for the wake it had churned up to subside. Ten minutes passed, and then Cobb indicated that he was ready to go for the speed record.
His crew fired up the jet engine that powered his boat, and Cobb accelerated onto the course. Just as with land speed records, his official result would be based on the average of two runs, one in each direction. Crusader performed beautifully, but Cobb, perhaps encouraged by how well the boat was handling, discarded his plan to limit his speed to 190 mph. He neared the completion of his first run averaging more than 206 mph for the length of the mile, a figure that meant that his top speed must have reached as much as 240 mph. As he completed the southward leg of the course, however, Crusader bounced clear of the water, then nosed downward before disintegrating. The impact threw Cobb from the open cockpit, and he landed 50 yards away in the loch. Onlookers fished him out of the water almost immediately, but his neck had been broken, and he died before reaching the shore.
The next day the London Times reported:

At present it is not known what caused the accident. It is thought possible that the power developed by the jet engine was too much for the structure of the craft or that the floats may have struck a piece of driftwood. The loch rose two feet last week and the swollen rivers brought down much wood. A careful search had been made for driftwood at the week-end and the speed course was reported to be free from any such danger. It is believed more likely that the accident was caused by waves from the shore. Some observers said that the boat successfully crossed two waves, but that after striking the third it submerged and disintegrated when water entered the air intakes of the jet engine.

It was inevitable, given the venue on which the attempt had been made, that a more exotic theory would also be put forward. The loch’s famous monster, some suggested, had surfaced, perhaps to see what all the commotion was about, and got in Cobb’s way, causing a collision. It is an unlikely explanation, but if true, one can only hope that poor Nessie’s injuries were less serious than Cobb’s.
Although he had reached speeds far in excess of Stanley Sayres’ record, Cobb had not completed a second run, so officially Sayres’ record remained intact. Cobb’s only achievement on that fatal day was to add one more tragic chapter to the colorful and mysterious history of that legendary loch.