I first met Craig at Black Rock Desert when we were running Thrust2 in 1983. He kind of busted in on us when we were in a technical meeting in Bruno’s Country Club in Gerlach. We became great friends because we’d come up the same way, fighting the same sort of battles.
We were in trouble with Thrust2 because of the huge loads on the front axle; we had some 6000lb of static weight there and at around 629mph ‘Ackers’ [designer John Ackroyd] was getting very worried about the drag from the ruts we were digging, and that we might never get the record. Craig persuaded him to change the incidence of the car. But with no time for further windtunnel testing we just had to take a gamble. And it was a hell of a gamble because with slightly nose-up incidence as we reached transonic speeds around 630mph the download came off the front of the car far more
