Concept
Texas Mile
The Texas Mile is a special event where cars race to see how fast they can go over a mile. It's different from drag racing, which is all about quick starts over a shorter distance.
Part
front bumper
The front bumper is the part of the car at the front that helps protect it in case of a crash. It also makes the car look good and can help with how the car moves through the air.
Term
drifter's stitch
The drifter's stitch is a way to fix a broken bumper using zip ties. It's a simple and cheap method often used by people who race cars, especially in drifting.
Concept
drag races
Drag races are competitions where cars race in a straight line to see who can go the fastest. It's a popular type of racing that you can see at events with both beginners and experienced racers.
Concept
pit pass
A pit pass is a special ticket that lets you go into the area where the race cars are worked on. It gives you a chance to see the cars up close and maybe meet the drivers, which is different from just watching the race from far away.
Concept
Formula One
Formula One is a type of car racing where teams race very fast cars on special tracks. It's known for having some of the best drivers and the most advanced car technology.
Concept
land speed record
A land speed record is the fastest speed a car has ever gone on land. People try to break this record by driving on flat areas like salt flats where they can go really fast without obstacles.
Car
Thrust SSC
Thrust SSC is a special car built to go really fast on land. It holds the record for the fastest speed ever reached on land, going over 763 miles per hour.
Term
quarter mile
The quarter mile is a distance of 1,320 feet that cars race to see how fast they can go. It's a popular way to test how quickly a car can accelerate.
Term
dragster
A dragster is a car made for racing in a straight line as fast as possible, usually over a quarter mile. They are built to go really fast in a short amount of time.
Term
half mile
The half mile is a distance of 2,640 feet that racers sometimes use to see how fast their cars can go. It's longer than the quarter mile, so cars can reach higher speeds.
Brand
Bugatti
Bugatti is a brand that makes very fast and expensive cars, famous for their speed and luxury.
Brand
Lamborghini
Lamborghini is a car brand that makes very fast and flashy sports cars, often seen as a symbol of luxury and performance.
Brand
Ferrari
Ferrari is a famous car brand that makes high-speed sports cars, often associated with racing and luxury.
Brand
Koenigsegg
Koenigsegg is a brand that builds very fast and technologically advanced sports cars, often competing for speed records.
Term
0 to 60 miles per hour
0 to 60 miles per hour means how fast a car can go from a complete stop to 60 miles an hour. It's a way to see how quickly a car can speed up.
Term
instant torque
Instant torque means that electric cars can get power right away when you press the gas pedal, making them feel very quick compared to traditional cars.
Term
0 to 60 speed
0 to 60 speed tells you how fast a car can go from a complete stop to 60 miles per hour. It's a way to see how quick a car is.
Car
Ford Mustang
The Mustang is a famous car made by Ford, known for its sporty look and powerful engine. The 1968 model is a classic version that many people love and sometimes update with new technology.
Term
electric vehicle speed record
An electric vehicle speed record is the fastest speed that an electric car has reached over a certain distance. It shows how fast electric cars can go and how they are improving over time.
Term
horsepower
Horsepower is a way to measure how powerful an engine is. The higher the horsepower, the faster and stronger the vehicle can be.
Term
turbo
A turbo is a part that helps an engine get more air, which makes it more powerful. It can help a motorcycle or car go faster than it normally would.
Car
Ford Gt
The Ford GT is a super-fast sports car made by Ford, designed for speed and performance. It's famous for its cool looks and powerful engine, and it recently made headlines by going over 300 miles per hour, which is incredibly fast for any car. People talk about it because it's a symbol of what modern cars can achieve in terms of speed and technology.
Company
M2K Motorsports
M2K Motorsports is a company that works with cars, often improving their performance for racing or other purposes.
Concept
modified car
A modified car is a car that has been changed from how it was originally made. People often do this to make the car faster or look different.
Term
300 miles an hour
Going 300 miles an hour means the car is incredibly fast, much faster than most cars you see on the road.
Term
top speed
Top speed is the fastest a car can go. It's an important number that shows how powerful a car is.
Term
aerodynamics
Aerodynamics is about how air moves around things like cars. Good aerodynamics helps cars go faster and use less fuel by reducing wind resistance.
Term
modifications
Modifications are changes made to a car to make it better or different. This can mean adding new parts or changing how it looks.
Part
5.4 liter V8
A 5.4 liter V8 is a powerful engine with eight cylinders that helps the car go fast. It's larger than many other engines, which gives it more strength.
Term
dyno videos
Dyno videos are recordings of cars being tested on a machine that measures how much power they produce. Sometimes, these tests can go wrong and cause the car to break parts, which is why they can be exciting to watch.
Term
X-ray
An X-ray is a way to see inside things without opening them up. In this case, it's used to check tires for any problems before putting them on a car.
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Welcome to Car Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio.
I welcome to Car Stuff on your host, Scott Benjamin.
And I am Kurt Garren.
Well, we've got one today that I think is going to peak your interest
and hopefully the interest of a lot of our listeners as well.
We're going to talk about a very specific event.
It's kind of, I think, it's one of a kind.
I've never heard of an event like this,
any other place in the world, really.
It's different than a drag race, but it's called
the Texas Mile, and it has a lot of similarities to a drag race.
But this is a unique competition of speed.
And it's worthwhile for us to dig into this.
And I do want to tell you, Kurt,
just so that you're not taken off guard by this.
But we have done a previous episode of this,
this archive goes back all the way to 2008.
And back in August of 2012,
we did an episode that really was kind of the ins and outs
of the Texas Mile, and kind of what it's all about
and where it was and everything.
And the record holders that were the current record holders
and how some strategies, I guess,
to get the best time and whatever.
We just had a whole bunch of topics that were we covered in there.
Of course, all of that's changed now since 2012.
And I mean, seven years later,
you can imagine that not only is technology,
grown in leaps and bounds, you know,
since then, you know, the guys building the cars
are learning a lot more and they're growing faster and faster every year.
There's been some notable events that are things,
I guess, events you can call it events, I guess it happened.
And there's even been a change of venue since then.
I mean, just real quick.
And I want, I'll be honest with you,
we're going to jump into the topic a little bit later.
There's a little bit of other stuff that I want to talk to you about
before we start here.
But I want to talk to you just a second about what you,
what's your gut feeling about the Texas mile?
I mean, just like a general,
when you first heard about this,
initially I compared it to a drag race.
But as I looked into it a little bit more,
I drew vast differences between this particular type of racing
and a drag race.
First of all, it's a time trial type setup.
It's not, two cars aren't competing against each other.
It's more like a qualifying event
and a drag race would be more than a head-to-head race.
But what, I mean, we'll get to the specifics of that.
But getting to specifically what you thought when you first saw
maybe a car going, I'm going to say,
above 200 miles per hour, that's not the record, by the way.
We'll tell you what the record is later in the show.
But let's see, the first time you saw a car
achieved 200 miles per hour in one mile from a standing still.
I mean, it's crazy, isn't it?
Yeah, it is crazy.
I'm used to seeing drag races in a quarter mile,
very different types of cars.
It's not over in a few seconds,
so there's a lot of factors that come into play.
Cooling is one of them.
We saw some interesting cooling tactics, didn't we?
Yeah, normally they would cool the car with air flowing
through holes in the car.
That's not the way to go fast.
You want to make the car as slick as possible,
so there's other techniques that they use to cool the engines down.
That's a good way to put it.
I like how you said that because you can't have a ton of openings
and vents, and I guess full face of a vehicle that you normally would have.
You're trying to minimize that because these are modified cars
that we'll talk about.
And there are different tactics that these racers employ
to go and do what they do on these,
well, it's two weekends a year.
And again, all of this we're going to get to, I promise,
because the Texas smile is definitely an interesting and unique event
in a lot of ways.
And you can see my notes are crazy again today.
I have a pile of notes in front of me
and for new listeners or listeners that aren't familiar
with my note system, I'm very analog.
Before we begin.
I've got a kind of a banged up front bumper on my car
and it's got a crack in it right now.
So I'm looking to do something that's called,
this is the term I've seen used for it,
called the drifter's, I think it's called the drifter's stitch.
Is that was zip ties?
It is.
Okay, I've seen that before.
Okay, yeah.
And you know what, it's surprisingly easy to do
and surprisingly holds really well.
I've done it already on this repair just in a minor way,
but I did it in a very, not half hazard.
I mean, it looks good.
You can't even see them hardly.
That's there.
It makes the crack and the bumper disappear really.
It holds everything together.
It's just, you drill a couple holes on each side of the crack
and then run a zip tie through and you do that a couple of times.
It looks like stitches that you would put in somebody's body.
Head, arms, wherever.
You get a cut.
It's a lot like that.
Oh, my voice cracked there.
That's kind of funny.
Yeah, like anybody would go and get stitches at the doctor.
It's very similar for your bumper and it's a low cost,
easy way to do repair.
I mean, you know, I guess it depends on the color of the vehicle.
I've got a dark, dark blue vehicle, so I'm using black zip ties.
And you know, the wound in the bumper pretty much disappears.
It's really nice.
And I think I need, maybe at the most like two more stitches
to make this whole thing work.
How many are in there at the moment?
Right now I've got three.
Three.
Three.
And I need two more.
I've just discovered that the supporting structure behind it
was jostled just enough that it's not quite holding up in the corner.
So I need to add some to the corners.
I know this is all very specific to me and my car.
But I wonder if anybody else out there has either done this drifter's stitch
or has heard of it or anything like that.
If you haven't looked at it online, you look at some photos online.
And you'll see some good versions of it, some bad versions of it.
It looks kind of neat.
It looks like a Frankenstein kind of repair made to a car.
But it works in a pinch and it definitely is not going to cost you a whole lot of money.
It makes a huge improvement in the way the car looks after a minor incident.
I've had a minor incident in my car.
They employ this technique a lot of north, I believe.
Oh, is that right?
Yeah.
What do you mean?
Well, that's where I've seen it.
Okay.
Like where?
Boston.
It snows a lot there.
So maybe you hit things a little more often.
The one I saw last was I didn't count.
But it looked about like 40 stitches in the corner of a bumper.
That's impressive.
Yeah.
No dent.
It was just a straight crack.
Mm-hmm.
It's weird.
It's about 40 zip ties holding it.
It almost looks like a decal that somebody's put on the car doesn't it?
I had to look close to appreciate it completely.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's interesting.
And that's a great theory behind why maybe you would see this more in the north.
I guess that's true.
I can't go get a new bumper every time you need a little something.
So what happened Scott?
What happened?
What happened?
You want to tell us the story?
Or is it too painful?
I will tell you.
You know what?
Yeah.
I had a little incident here in the office area in the parking structure.
Bumped a wall.
Just a kind of column or was it one of the columns?
Oh, now you're going to make me tell the whole story.
No, I'm not going to.
No, it wasn't.
It wasn't a column.
No, it was one of the ramps.
But anyways.
There's so much damage on those columns down there.
And I'm wondering who's doing it all.
Because that was a first for me and hopefully, hopefully now it's been the last.
But okay.
To me, this is like, this is really personally upsetting because I try to keep them looking
almost new inside and outside as long as I can.
And I've been pretty successful with it my whole life.
This little minor incident with the front is really, really upsetting to me.
And I, you know, I know you can take it to the body shop and just have it be done with
it, but it's expensive.
I don't know.
Maybe it's too much inside baseball about my own vehicle, but I think a lot of people
find themselves in the same position and look into that, you know, that drifter's stitch
if you want to for a simple answer or an inexpensive answer.
Yeah.
Maybe try it yourself.
Yeah.
It's an option.
Maybe you could even practice on, you know, a junkyard bumper or something if you want
it to, but it's very easy to do, very, very simple to do.
And a lot less money than taking it to a body shop.
A lot less.
Yeah, okay.
Well, listen, I probably have wasted more than enough time.
I think maybe it would be a good time to take a break and we can come back.
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car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual.
Fascinating, it's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
Uh, Lemu, is that guy with the binoculars watching us?
Cut the camera, they see us.
Only pay for what you need at LibertyMutual.com.
Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty.
Saving's very underwritten by Liberty Mutual insurance company and affiliates excludes Massachusetts.
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That's what it sounds like when you plant more trees than you harvest.
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to protect our forests from fires.
Keeping the forest fire resistant, synonymous with keeping the forest healthy, and we do
that through planning more than we harvest, and mitigate those risks through active management.
It's a long-term commitment.
Visit workingforestinitiative.com to learn more.
And we're back, and then your host Scott Benjamin, and across from me, is Kurt Garin, how
you doing, Kurt?
I'm doing well, Scott.
How are you?
Still hanging in there, huh?
Okay, good.
I'm going to keep checking in with you just to make sure I'm still here.
Until finally, you know, one day I'm going to say, you know, I'm your host Scott Benjamin
and one day you're going to say-
I'm just going to jump right in.
You're going to be like, and I'm Kurt Garin and today's a beautiful day or whatever
I don't know.
Something like that.
It is.
It's a real beautiful out there.
It actually is.
It's a really nice day.
You know what?
Now that we're talking about beautiful days, I guess we probably should mention that it
will probably be a beautiful day in late October in Texas, just guessing, when they are running
the next edition of the Texas smile.
This is an event that runs twice a year.
They run it in March, which is no problem for them.
There's going to be no snow, of course.
You might have rain issues.
I don't know if they ever have or not.
And then there's another one in October.
So it's run twice a year every year and this year they are running it at a new place.
Actually they have for a couple of years now called the Victoria Regional Airport in
Victoria, Texas.
And they've completed this race since-
And I keep calling it a race.
I don't mean to do that.
It's- we should just say event, maybe.
And just call it an event or-
To speed event.
Yeah, and it's weird.
They call it-
Here's the funny thing is they put it in the genre of auto show.
And it's not an auto show by any means.
I don't know why they did that, but I see it more as like a contest or even-
A test of your vehicle or an exhibition.
An exhibition of speed, maybe.
Yeah.
A proving ground.
Yeah, I think a lot of people do look at it as a test event.
Yeah, sure.
I think that's how they view it.
I mean, it's a chance for them to go out and just show what they can do, show what they
can put together.
It's not a show in the traditional sense where you walk around the car and peek in and
look at the interior, but you can see it run down the track.
Which is nice.
Yeah.
I mean, it's nice to be able to do that because a lot of times you don't see cars in motion.
You go to a car show and you see all these fantastic vehicles, but they're all parked.
Yeah.
You might get to hear them start off or watch them pull onto a trailer or something
like that.
But this is one where you get to go and see them actually run.
It's like, you know, going to the drag races, like where it's amateur and pro and you know,
it's kind of a big mix.
And yeah, I guess any day at the track really, but you don't get quite as up close and personal
when you're at the typical race track, unless you spring for the optional pit pass and,
you know, get to go and walk around the vehicles and get a little more hands on or
not hands on, but just, you know, closer to them and talk to people.
Let's just kind of go through some real simple basics of this whole thing.
And then we'll move on to some specifics because there's some interesting specifics,
I guess.
Most notable change, I guess, is the change in venue.
I mean, this is its third home since 2003.
It's been run since 2003.
It began in a place called Goliad, Texas.
Goliad, and I looked up how to pronounce Goliad, that's, that's correct.
Goliad, it was ran there until about, I think, March of 2011.
So it ran there for a good long time around eight years.
The funny thing about this is that it started with only about 35 people, it was, began
by a couple out of the Houston, Texas area, a guy named Jay Mattis and his wife, Sharon
Mattis.
And they had a company I think that they called JNS Mattis Motorsports Incorporated.
And I'm sure that that's still around, I think, I think it is in some way.
Of course, a couple still, still around there, they're still running this thing.
It started, again, 35 participants and almost no spectators because no one really knew
about the event.
It wasn't how, you know, heavily promoted it.
I guess the people that participated probably told friends, maybe, and that was about it.
But very few people showed up to that.
It's a lot different today, I mean, they've changed venues three times.
The second move after they went from Goliad, they went to, the town's name is Beville, Texas
and the, the forum or the, the actual venue is Chase Field Industrial Complex.
Then they finally relocated just in 2017 to the new place that they're running, which
is the Victoria Regional Airport, which is in Victoria, Texas.
Now these are all kind of around the Houston area, which makes sense, you know, from where
the couple began.
And they don't want to move it too far, I guess, because it's, you know, it's a, it's
a regional specialty event.
But these number of spectators has gone up immensely from this.
The number of participants has gone up incredibly from, from the first days, just to, it's become
a huge, huge thing.
It's one of the only places you can go and enter your car and test it out in an event like
this.
Of course, there's regional drag strips that you can go to every Thursday night or whatever
and see what you can do.
But to get on a mile in a straight line, have professional timing equipment and medical
staff and just everything there for you to do this, it's, it's rare that you find out.
How much is it to, to sign up?
You know, I was looking at number.
I, I mean, my average person can't do it anymore.
Well, I don't know.
I mean, I wouldn't be so sure for an event like this, because it's, it was like they
try to keep it somewhat open at least.
Well, let me just, I'm just going to just let it out here.
I, why not?
Why hold back on this?
But here's a, here's a, just an idea of what you're paying for these.
You know, it's not, it's not a high dollar event like you would think.
I'm looking right now at some information that came from the Texas Mile website, which is
TexasMile.net.
So if you want to go there and, and look up all this information, you can, but just to get
an idea of how low dollar this whole thing is tickets for, it's a three day event.
It's a whole weekend.
If you're a, I mean, just a spectator, $25 per person for all three days.
You just get a wristband for $25.
It gets you in for three days of activities.
And now that you can, even if you, if you wanted to, you could stay on site, you can camp
there, I guess, on the, on the, on the property, which is really cool for a very low price.
I mean, I know it sounds, well, just compare this to renting a hotel room, but one night is
only 60 bucks.
If you want to, you want to stay two nights is 120, three nights is $160.
And that's if you want to set up, you know, a motor home or a camper on site and stay there.
I don't know if they allow tents, the, you know, the information wasn't specific about
that.
You can contact them and find out.
And I'm not trying to sell tickets for them or anything like that.
I promise.
But it says they do not sell out of tickets, but I guess they, they never run out.
But the number of spectators here, and, you know, oh, I should say that kids under 12
are free.
So that's a bonus too.
And I think that they're, yeah, so $25 or free is really the price point for something
like this.
I don't know what the registration is for the drivers.
It can't be a whole lot of money.
There's, there's shaded seating, there's bleachers, but they say you probably should bring
a folding chair if you want to just kind of hang out and, you know, one of the grassy areas
and watch and catch everything because it is a long day.
I mean, they start in the morning early, goes all the way until dusk, I would guess.
You know, it's not sunset, but dusk.
So it's, it seems like a good mix of cars to a good mix of shops that are really into
the speed.
And then just average folks with nice cars, I just want to go out there and run the mile.
There's a healthy mix of both amateur and I would call them professional, like these people
that do the high speed runs are professional race shops, professional engineers.
Absolutely.
They're in shops, building cars to specifically run in this event.
And we're going to talk about one car and specific that's what was built.
The record holder, of course, we'll get to that later in the podcast to promise, gosh,
I'm all over the place.
I apologize curtain and listeners because I'm just skipping all over the place.
But I feel like there's just, there actually is a lot of new information.
You know, the spectators and the number of, of entrances is something we should talk
about because I just kind of breathed over that a moment ago.
And I said, you know, back in 2003 and Goliad, they had 35 participants and almost no
spectators.
There are very few people there outside of the timing individuals and, you know, the staff
that operates it and the participants.
There were very few people there outside of that.
Well, now as of 2018 or at the 2018 event, I think it was the March event.
They had something like 2600 spectators at this thing.
So it's really grown in popularity.
I can only assume that it will go up with social media, you know, reach and all that, you
know, that they're kind of able to garner more attention from this community and from,
you know, people that are interested in this sort of thing and not just from the United
States, but everywhere.
People come from, you know, from Mexico, from Canada, from Saudi Arabia, from France, they're
from all over the world now participating in this thing, which is really cool.
And the number of participants, they went from 35 again in 2003.
It's climbed steadily.
Now they allow something like 250 or more participants tonight.
One thing about this particular event, when you throw it back to the beginning of spectator
type racing, which I guess goes back to the beginning of the car, the fact that you
can watch these cars do this thing and maybe it's something that you can go and watch with
that hope of maybe one day you can get your car out there and do it.
Unlike going to a professional sports car race or Indie car or NASCAR, you can't really
dream of doing that if you're just the spectator, the fan.
Yeah.
Well, like you said earlier, that this is a nice, healthy mix of people that have built
a car in their garage and want to bring it out and try it.
It could be a really kind of a hot street car that they have just never been able to really
push to the maximum, to the limit.
And it also could be like these shops that specifically build cars for this event, with
the one mile run in mind, and that's the main goal, and that's all they do.
They just do that with that one car, and they might have a customer that comes in and
says, I want to be in this.
Here's my budget.
Here's the car I want to start with.
Here's whatever.
They have lots of sponsors and all that.
It's a lot like professional racing would be for some people, but what you don't see
is you don't see like a Formula One team pull up with their F1 car and run this mile.
You don't see, and honestly, they would probably be beaten by some of the guys that build cars
in their own garage, which is unbelievable to me.
It's such a strange contest, and maybe we should talk about just like, I hope I'm saying
this right way, the right way, but some of the uniqueness of this event, because there's
so many things about it that are different.
First of all, it's a full mile run.
It's not a quarter mile like you would find in a drag strip.
It's not a long distance run either.
It's a full, I guess a mile is a long distance, but you start a standing start.
A standing start, not a rolling start, as the speed record would be, for example, like
the land speed record.
Generally, they want to get up to a certain speed before they start the car.
When we start talking about times, they're not times, rather, because that's another thing
I want to talk about.
But when we start talking about top speeds in this one mile, you've got to remember it's
a car that's going zero miles per hour, the clock starts, as it crosses that one mile
mark, all they're measuring is just the speed, not the time.
That's unique in that if you're going for a top speed run, typically, if you're out
in Utah on the salt flats, or any desert run, or anything like that, we've talked about
the thrust SSC and the land speed record attempts, and we'll probably talk many more times
about stuff like that.
But they have the advantage of having this ramp up, I guess, a long, long run.
It could be miles long to ramp up to the speed.
Then there's a timed mile, and then they have a long way to shut down.
This one is just that mile.
You don't get to start at 180 miles an hour, and then try to get to 250 miles an hour.
If to start at zero and try to get to 250 miles an hour in that short amount of space,
the speeds are measured along the way and displayed to the spectators.
So there's great big boards that have LED readouts that show the speeds.
I believe it's a quarter mile, and then another at a half a mile, and then they give them
the final mile speed.
I don't think they bother with three quarter mile speed.
If they do, I haven't seen it in any of these videos.
But one of the things that strikes me is even the quarter mile speeds are about what you
would expect from a dragster.
You watch the private teams at drag strips, and you get about what you would think out
of that.
That mile speed goes up considerably.
I mean, they're going really, really fast, a lot of them are at this point.
Then you have the mile speed, and what's shocking to me a lot of times is the difference
in speed.
You said this to me off air.
The difference in speed, you would not expect it to jump up so much between the half
mile and the full mile, but it does.
Yeah.
Well, even between the quarter mile and the half mile, I look at it as the first quarter
mile, they try to get the car to hook up, as opposed to drag race, you want it to hook
up right away.
Yeah.
The first quarter mile is getting everything stable, because you're going to start going
much faster, and cars that aren't necessarily designed to go that fast, or at least from
the factory.
No, they're not.
I guess the point I'm getting at is from the half mile to the end, that's when they're
really applying the power and trying to keep everything stable, and just, it's interesting,
how much you could, trying to hook up all that power to the pavement in a half a mile
is interesting to watch that increase and see.
Oh, I agree.
And what we're accustomed to seeing from the production car speeds, when we watch these
record attempts from whether it be Bugatti, or Lamborghini, or whoever is running the
air Ferrari, or any of those that run with these top-end speed records, or KonaSeg, or
any of those.
They get to a certain point in those cars.
They relatively slowly increase speed after about, I think it's like, after, right around
200 miles an hour.
That's when things start to get a little dicey on it.
Yeah, well, especially between like 250 and 300, I mean, super incredible.
Again, watching one of the production cars do it attempted in a very professionally-made
YouTube video that's done in Germany, and again, I'm going to get to it, but we kind of
have already talked about it.
The guy says, and this is the way he put it out paraphrase.
He says, you know, a lot of people or most people will, at some point, be able to achieve
150 miles per hour in their life in a car.
And I don't know about most, but a lot.
And again, this is the guy from, he's a German race car driver, so he probably has a skewed
view of what people can do on that.
Let's say a few people are going to go 150, but then he says, you push it a little bit
more and you go 180 miles an hour, and that's a lot different than going 150 miles an
hour.
So you wouldn't expect it.
He said, if you go from 180 to 200 miles an hour, that's like a whole different world.
He said, like, it's something that you only can get to your experience, like, you don't
know what that feels like until you've done it.
And then he said, once you go from 200 miles an hour to 300 miles an hour, it becomes
like this ridiculous, just, I don't know, just a mess.
Like, it really messes with your head, is what I mean, like, it's not, things aren't
happening when you would normally perceive them to happen.
It's much, much faster and it just doesn't make sense to your brain.
You can't even comprehend what's happening because everything is flying past you at such
a great rate of speed and we're not talking about being in a desert area where these runs
are made, these production car runs are made.
They're made on a track in Germany that has trees near it and guard rails and cameras
and everything all over the place.
And lines on the road, it's a lot different.
You get that real sensation of speed.
Getting back to the Texas mile, it's not just cars because we're just talking about cars
right now.
It's cars, sports cars, it's motorcycles, it's trucks, it's purpose-built race cars that
come out and do it and electric cars, electric cars, yeah, there's all kinds of categories.
They have this electric car, the fastest, I need to make sure I phrase this right because
I'm sure there's nuance.
Oh, I bet there are yet.
Don't worry about this one.
Don't worry about this one.
The world's fastest accelerating modified road car, 0 to 60 miles per hour and 1.797.
It kind of makes sense for electric, I guess, to be the fastest because it has instant torque.
Every bit of the torque is available, the second you push that accelerator.
However, I'm going to have the surprise that they're measuring 0 to 60 speed.
That must be just kind of their own thing.
Probably, yeah.
But the top, I think I know which one you're talking about, this is an older car that they've
retrofitted with electric cars.
This is a 60's model Mustang.
A 68.
A 68.
Yeah.
That's back.
And they call it the zombie 222.
And I wonder, you know, okay, because they call it the 222, I wonder if that's their goal.
If that's what they're shooting for.
That one actually has the electric vehicle speed record in the Texas mile at 178 miles per
hour.
And it did that back in March of 2015 and it hasn't been beaten since.
178 miles per hour is pretty darn impressive for, think about the aerodynamics of a 68 Mustang
fast back.
Imagine pushing that up to 178 in just one mile.
I mean, that's impressive.
Yeah.
That's the impressive part.
Yeah.
If you had 10 miles, maybe you could get it up to that speed.
Yeah.
You know, you have to have a safe area to do it and all the testing and everything, you
know, to go along with it.
But I think the one mile thing is probably the most important, or the most, I don't know,
the most, yeah, maybe the most important number in this whole thing.
Yeah.
Really?
Did I ever run the Texas kilometer?
I don't think they have, no.
Not in Texas.
You get shot if you even, if you even mentioned the kilometer in Texas, but, you know, we
should, you know, we should say this though.
And I know we've been just doing miles per hour here because we're a US based show.
But I guess for anyone who's interested, the top speed, if you, if you're talking about
going 300 miles per hour, if 300 miles per hour is something like 483 kilometers per hour,
and the distance that we're talking about here would be, if you're doing, you're, you're
getting in a vehicle to 483 kilometers per hour in just 1.6 kilometers of roadway.
If you want to look at it that way.
So it's, those are the types of distances and speeds we're talking about.
If you've been confused by the mile per hour thing or, you know, having to go to your,
your conversion chart and rapidly, you know, punch in numbers before we take a break,
I want to say one more thing.
And I only want to do this because I don't like to end on a sad note.
And I think we should talk about something a little bit sad, well, it was sad, but it's
not breaking news.
I guess it didn't happen just now, something a lot of people probably already know about.
And we'll come back with some happy news in just a moment.
But one of the guys that we talked about in the previous podcast in the car stuff episode
in 2012, we were talking about him just breaking the record, you know, he had, he had just
achieved a record of something like 278.6 miles per hour at the, at the Texas smile.
And he was a current record holder.
He was on a motorcycle.
His name was Bill Warner.
Of course, we were talking about him in the present tense.
He was still around doing what he was doing.
But unfortunately, Bill Warner died not much later.
The very next year in a motorcycle accident, doing, of course, doing what he does and
there what he did, which is a, you know, achieving land speed records.
So he broke the record again.
He broke the 300 mile per hour barrier in 2011 at a different event, I believe.
And then that is when, actually, you know what, that's when we had our podcast right after
the 311.
So we were, you know, owing an eye and about the, you know, getting past 311 miles per
hour on a motorcycle on pavement at that time.
And again, some specifics I can go into in just a second.
But just after that in July of 2013 is when he died, again, not breaking news by any means,
but I think that we need to mention it because of, you know, the focus that we had on him
and the first podcast that we did.
This bike at the time that he was riding had something like 650 horsepower on a motorcycle.
It's a high booster and they call it a conventional motorcycle, you know, where the, the rider's
exposed.
It's a traditional motorcycle, I suppose, however, when you look at it, I mean, it's modified
because it did have a turbo did have panels put on it.
So it's kind of like, I guess a street modified high a booster with, uh, with a turbo, streamline
a record is a lot faster.
It's like another 70, 80 miles an hour faster than this.
So, you know, once you enclosed the rider becomes much more aerodynamic.
He was in an open bike and again, he passed away.
I believe it was in, yeah, July of 2013 and it was well he was trying to break, um, break
a record in, I think he was in Maine, only 44 years old, but we've heard of land speed record
people.
That's how they die.
They kind of know the, the risks and the, the dangers involved in that and they accept
that.
And I'm sorry to hear that, you know, he passed, but I figured we should just mention it,
you know, that that's somebody who we've lost along the way.
I want to get into some happier news.
So let's, uh, let's, let's finish up by talking about the current record holder at
the Texas smile in just a minute after we take a break.
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We're back, and I'm your host, Scott Benjamin.
And I am Kurt Garin.
Oh, you got a Kurt.
Great.
You called me off guard a little bit, but I'll jump in there real quick.
I had to run over to the mic from the computer.
Y'all there couldn't see that.
Fantastic.
Well, you're quick.
Quick on your feet.
Exactly.
Good work.
Good work.
I did me to catch you off guard.
Faster than this 4GT we're about to talk about.
Oh, yeah.
Maybe.
Right.
All right.
So here's the deal.
All right.
The current record was just broken recently.
Now, this is, we're doing this podcast in 2019.
We are in between events in 2019.
So there's already been the March of 2019 event,
and there's going to be the October of 2019 event.
We're doing this in September, so right before this.
And it's always the last week in March and the last week
in the October.
Yeah.
So if you want to plan for it in your schedules,
or you want to look up, you know, maybe a time
when you can travel down to the Houston area,
and maybe catch this thing live, definitely do that.
I mean, it's a worthwhile thing, and you can go to, you know,
I'll give you the website so you can go and look at it.
What was it?
Texas, Texas Smile.net.
Yeah, Texas Smile.net was the site.
So check that out if you want to.
Again, we're not selling tickets or anything.
So it's just an awesome event.
Yeah.
Do it.
Go see it if you're in Texas.
Hey, do it if you want to.
I don't care either way.
I don't care either way if you go.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't mean to be flipping about it,
but I don't care.
Yeah.
You'd like to go.
I personally would love to be there and witness one
of these because I think it just, it's just awesome.
I would have loved to have been there last March to see this.
Yes.
Okay.
So last March, something incredible happened, right?
Right.
Okay.
So what happened?
Well, a Ford GT broke the 300 mile per hour mark at the Texas Smile, 300 miles per hour.
Now, it's three, I think the actual record, I mean, just, it's just barely above it.
It's 300.4.
Yeah.
Okay.
300.4.
And I know that's nitpicky, but when you get to those speeds, that's going to be important.
Right.
It matters.
And 300.5 next year, and that will matter.
299.9 is not 300.
That's how it is?
This is a current record that's held at the Texas, Texas, Texas Mile, and it's by a company
that built this car specifically for a customer that wanted to do this or for themselves.
I don't know if it's in the cells or customer, not sure, but the, yeah, the focus has always
been on the company.
Anyways, the company's name is M2K Motorsports.
And the car itself is a, is a first generate, I shouldn't say first, it's a version of the,
the GT, the Ford GT that was put out back in the mid 2000s.
So it's a 2006 Ford GT, not the current one, not the, not the, you know, $400,000 one.
It had a Gulf livery, which I think is really cool, you know, the blue and orange.
The number on the car is significant.
You know, the number on the car just by the number on the car that they ran this year
is 293, 293 was their previous record that they had made back in, I want to say it was
2017.
Yeah, it was 2017.
So 2017 is when they ran 293 miles per hour and they were thinking like, oh, we are so
close to this.
We're really, really close to this.
And I saw an interview that was done by the owner of this company on a local channel.
It was, it was done on KPRC.
They interviewed the owner of the shop and he said, you know, back when we started this
whole project, the goal was something like 235 miles an hour.
That was like the record and that's what they wanted to beat.
They wanted to go 235.
He said 300 miles per hour is, it was never even a dream at that point.
But as the years progressed, they decided that we've got to keep up with, you know, exactly
what's going on and, and, and keep up the speed with the current records.
And, and we tune this and tweak that and, you know, reengineered this part and make
this a little more dynamic underneath the car or, you know, whatever, they did a lot of
work on the vehicle.
I know I'm just paraphrasing this in a horrible way, simplifying what they did exactly.
But they brought the car back just two years later and they ended up topping 300 miles
per hour.
And they did it in a series of, of several runs.
And I kind of see it as, as I think that Texas mile people have confirmed, these were
kind of like, shake down runs for them.
They knew that they could get close to 300 or 300.
They were hoping for it.
Of course, big celebration when they did hit it, but the early runs were nowhere near
that speed.
The, the early runs were relatively low speed and, and of course, they weren't sandbagging
because there's nothing, nothing to be gained from that.
But over the course of a three day weekend, you know, they ran and I think I want to say
it was four runs.
The first run was something like 175 miles per hour, somewhere near there.
The second run, they really, they, they, they amped it up at this point 240 miles per
hour in the next run.
And that puts them already in an elite group, I guess, because the 200 mile per hour club
is a big deal.
Texas mile.
If you can get your car to go 200 miles per hour, that's, that's pretty impressive.
By any standard, really.
I mean, I think that's cool.
So they're already in that, and they had been before with their 293 or whatever.
The next run, they say the third and final run, but I think there was a fourth run.
I think there was another one stuffed in there somewhere that, you know, maybe didn't
go so well that they didn't even report.
The third and final run, which they're claiming is a third and final run, was the one
that they reached, they finally reached the 300.4 mile per hour mark.
And I'll tell you this.
I learned this along the way, and this is so impressive to me.
You know, we talked about the difference between quarter mile, half mile and full mile.
At the half mile mark on the 300 mile per hour run, they were already going 240 miles per
hour in a half mile.
So that's incredibly fast already.
They're already topping, you know, what a lot of cars do in the full mile at the half
mile.
And then not only that, they gained 60 miles per hour in between the half mile and the
full mile.
And to gain that, I'll tell you in just a minute why that isn't so impressive to me.
But to gain 60 miles per hour in that relatively short amount of space, and I know that time
doesn't come into this, but we're only talking about a run that, you know, from beginning
to end is like maybe 22 seconds, 21 seconds somewhere around there.
That's the full length of time it takes them to go one full mile.
So really, really impressive.
I mean, it's just unbelievable that they were able to do that, but again, it took them
two years of engineering and refining and changing things around to be able to get that
extra seven miles per hour out of this vehicle.
And you know, they were just working at it all the time, you know, trying to really amp
this thing up to get it to that 300 mile per hour mark, because that's a huge milestone
for them.
They're always going to be in their record books as breaking that and doing that.
So that's kind of infamy for them, I suppose.
And one interesting thing to me is that it isn't necessary, I mean, it's a race car, but
it's not necessarily a purpose built dragster type car.
No.
It's a say standard 2006 4GT.
Yeah.
If you can call it standard, right?
Right.
Right.
It's a car's body itself is not engineered like a dragster would, for example, it's a road
going car.
And so therefore it has these built in limitations to overcome such as holes for the production
car would have for cooling and things like that.
Yeah.
And tire width.
I don't know if they mess with anything like that.
I think that they had to.
I want to tell you just a little bit more about the car itself, you know, about the
engine and just a tiny bit more, because I don't know a whole lot about it, just a little
bit.
And then I want to like make this comparison between the production vehicles that are trying
to achieve 300 miles per hour and then what this company has done.
Yeah.
But it's important to remember that the car that's hitting the air is basically the 4GT.
It's not designed from the ground up to go fast, it was built upon an already existing
car.
The engine block is I think a stock engine block as well.
All that stuff to me is cool because it's not completely custom.
Exactly.
Not completely custom.
It's modified.
It's modified.
I think it's in a tasteful way, I guess, as well as trying to get it.
You know, the car is a classic.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, for sure.
It's cool to see this classic car go 300 miles an hour.
Yeah.
It is.
I mean, it's, you've said a mouthful here.
I don't even know where to begin.
It's fascinating to me that they can take that design and push it to that extreme.
We were talking about the Bugatti, the production car that did 300 miles an hour.
And it was designed with this in mind.
The body reshapes itself at certain speeds.
Doesn't happen on this car.
Yeah, no.
And there's so many little nuances to what we're talking about here.
And I know we're not going to do it justice by having this just good.
We can have a different discussion, I think we should someday, about these modified versus
production car requirements, standards, whatever, the arguments against and for and all that.
I think that there's a lot there that we can talk about a ton.
I know we've already mentioned a few, but yeah, when you start talking about tires that
have to go 300 miles per hour, you're not going to go down to the general tire store
and pick those up.
No.
It is an extremely sleek looking car.
You look at the 2006 Ford GT and it has the appearance of a race car.
It really does.
But it's not a custom built dragster.
It's not a car that was built to go 300 miles per hour.
I don't know what, I'm going to spitball here.
I'm not going to even begin to know the actual number, but let's say that the car was designed
to go 190 miles per hour.
That was the top speed and that's what they thought would be maximum on this.
They didn't test the aerodynamics beyond that for this thing to take off in the air at
a certain speed.
That's what happens.
When you mess around with the aerodynamics of a vehicle, it becomes a wing and you become
airborne at a certain point.
Small airplanes and large airplanes can fly at these speeds and do fly at these speeds.
Keeping the car on the ground is a huge issue.
There's so much that goes into these cars and the modifications that they have to make
in order to do this.
A couple of things that MK2 Motorsports did to the Ford GT to keep it stock if you want to
put it that way.
I'm laughing when I say this because when I read this next paragraph, I'm reading from
an article that came from a site called The Drive and it was written just after the record
was broken.
On March 25th of 2019, if you want to go and look at this article, you can do that.
It's on the drive.
It's all about the 300.4 mile per hour run and it says, and I'll just read this one paragraph
directly here.
But it says, well, the MK2 Motorsports prepped Ford GT retains the stock 5.4 liter V8 from
the previous generation Ford GT.
So you're right.
It is a stock block and it's stock engine size, I guess.
It's been, well, they say, seriously amped up to deliver stratospheric horsepower that
not even a dyno can handle.
The guess on this car is 2500 horsepower.
Now, 2500 horsepower in that car that originally, I don't know what it had probably.
I'm going to, again, I'm going to guess.
I don't have the stats in front of me.
Maybe 500, 600 horsepower at the most.
There's somewhere around there, ballpark, to put 2500 in there.
This is only a guess, by the way, because when they said on a dyno, it's hard to strap
a car down in a way in such a manner that you can test it beyond somewhere roughly around
2000 horsepower.
It does exceed 2000.
They think it goes up to about 2500, but it's nearly impossible to keep it on the dyno
at that point.
I mean, with chains and everything, it's chain straps.
We've all seen those dyno videos of cars breaking the straps, or breaking the chains,
and just cataclysmic failures that happen.
Horrifically expensive accidents that happen in shops, and you don't want to be those
people.
They do your own the car or hook the car up.
You don't want to be either one of those on either side of that, but 2500 horsepower is
an estimate.
Of course, reaching 300, and we've talked about the, it's quite an achievement, I think
we can all agree, right?
The question that was posed by the author of this article is a good one, and he says that
typically these types of records that are set by private companies or private tiers,
I think, is what they call them.
Typically, the manufacturers don't get too rattled by these.
They don't say like, well, jeez, we're building $500,000 supercar.
Why can't we get ours to go 300 miles per hour?
They don't say that to themselves.
It's like a different sphere that they're operating in, because they know they're not going
to create a 2500 horsepower car that is specifically built for one event in order
to break that one record, and then that's it.
A car company, a big company, do you think about the money that they would have to unload
on a project like that, and the teams and the testing, and it becomes a logistical nightmare
for them to do that?
Bugatti has done that in a sense.
The question here at the end of this article is kind of funny, because they're saying it's
an impressive feat to reach 300 miles per hour anyway, and to do it in one mile is even
more impressive, and then just that it's a private company that was able to do it out
of some, and I'm going to say a little shop, but it was a motorsport shop.
Will they take any notice of this?
Will Bugatti take notice of it?
Will Conaceg take notice of it?
Will they be kind of ruffled by this one?
And again, this is written in March of 2019.
Well, in August of 2019, in August 2nd, that's when Bugatti made their 300 mile per hour
run, and I know they were working on it long before that.
It doesn't just happen in a couple of months like that.
It doesn't work that way.
But it was a production car, and it wasn't in a mile.
Yeah.
Yeah, and so many other.
OK, the tires.
So their tires are really specific in that, remember, they were X-rayed before they even
put them on the car in order to make sure they're free of imperfections.
And they're not, I don't think that they're doing that with these, you know, these tires
on this Ford GT.
I just don't think that it's happening that way.
Yeah.
I know if they're extreme quality and everything's well balanced and, you know, broken
in and perfect, it's absolutely perfect, but they didn't go as far as to X-ray the tires
before they made their run.
These are tires they have to glue on to the rims.
Apparently tires don't hold up very well at these speeds for very long.
So we're talking, you only have a short amount of time on a set of tires at these speeds
until they just become obliterated.
Yeah, and that's just one element of this, right?
I mean, I mean, there's so many things that we mentioned, you know, the aerodynamics,
and we mentioned that the shape of the body of the Bugatti changed, you know, as it went
faster and faster, it was on a track.
Here's the other thing.
Okay.
So, gosh, I feel like I'm going crazy or something.
I got so much to get out of it.
You're out of it.
Yeah.
You're out of it.
I am.
I really am.
I feel like, you know what?
Here's what's going to happen.
Here's what's going to happen.
As soon as we're done and I say, you know, thanks for listening and all that to our
listeners.
And, you know, I send them on their way and they're out, you know, doing their own
research and digging up all this stuff and looking at the Texas mile and buying tickets
and all that.
I'm going to remember about 10 things I didn't say in this podcast, even though I've been
going a mile a minute, just, ah, a mile a minute, it's fine.
That would be really slow at this, at this competition.
That'd be 60 miles an hour.
That's not a good at all.
All right.
Anyway, I was thinking back and I was thinking, okay, so is this a response to the Texas
mile record?
I don't, I don't think it is.
I think the timing is a little strange.
I think it's a little suspicious that, you know, they decided, all right, now is the time
we're just going to go do it.
I just feel like the 300 mile per hour mark for car is that number.
Yeah.
Nowadays.
Well, nowadays it's like a 200 mile an hour number was, I don't know when it's like these
two.
I was going to say like 25, 30 years ago, I mean, or more.
Yeah.
It's just, it's just the nice round number that takes a lot of fine tuning to get there.
You know, we should talk about someday soon is 400 coming, but I don't know.
I'm not sure.
I mean, well, technology, the whole talk about tires, that's a limiting factor.
Yeah.
And, um, and all of this and as technology gets better, I'm sure that we'll be looking
at 400 miles an hour.
Just why not?
Well, I mean, right now we've mentioned the electric car, the Mustang.
It's interesting they chose a Mustang from the 60s to do it because the, the combustion
Mustang in the 60s, it would be interesting to know how fast they could run the Texas
mile.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's almost like now electric cars are where combustion engines were in the 60s,
where are they going to be 60, 70 years or now, where the combustion engine is going
to be, where, where rubber compounds going to be.
And I'll tell you this, you know, again, I'm skipping all over the place, but going back
to the Mustang that you just mentioned, you know, the, the 68 Mustang, the, the electric
version that did this Texas mile run, the record run, they give it an equivalent horsepower
rating.
You know, how they can, you know, can I kind of extrapolate what it would be in horsepower?
800 horsepower.
Yeah.
So that's far, far above what the, uh, the 68 Mustang fast back had, of course.
So it would be interesting to see what the, you know, internal combustion engine version
of the 68 Mustang could, could muster in the one mile run.
And maybe, maybe it's been run there, right?
I mean, you know, out of all the cars out of 250, probably twice a year for 16 years, I
would guess that somebody has run a 68 Ford Mustang, you know, fast back at some point,
maybe, maybe, maybe.
All right.
So back, finally, maybe, maybe we're going to wrap this up and go on to the road here
exactly.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I was thinking about this, this Bugatti thing and how they, they ran,
they did a 304 mile per hour run in August of 2019.
So not long after the Texas mile, you know, was achieved at 300.4, I was watching these
and trying to draw comparisons and, you know, contrast and, you know, figure out what's
happened in here.
But now, remember, I said the GT had 2500 horsepower and that's an estimate.
It might be more, it might be a little less.
The Bugatti, of course, had a, the, Sharon had so many modified, had lots of modifications
to it.
And of course, I'm sure that the, the GT does as well.
But the big difference here is that this is a road going production car technically.
I mean, it can be sold to the public.
It can be driven on the roads.
And that's one thing that Bugatti has to deal with the builders at M2K Motorsport don't
have to deal with.
They don't have to worry about mass production of this, not mass, but limited production
of this one vehicle.
It's a one of a kind.
It always will be, but they're dealing with just that one event, that one record.
And it's kind of like we run it, we're done with it, and then maybe improve it for next
time.
But that's it.
The other thing about this is that Bugatti had a quad turbo W16 that was tuned up to
like 1600 horsepower.
So it had almost a thousand, it had like 900 less horsepower to get up to the speed.
But one thing that is most, the most striking about this to me and the most, maybe the most
impressive about the Texas mile and the 4GT's attempt or the 4GT's record run is that it
did it from a standing start.
And it only went, you know, those, what it's a mile, 5,280 feet, I think.
It went that distance and achieved 300.4 miles per hour, and that's short amount of time.
I mean, just imagine the force on the human body and the vehicle at that time.
When you look at the Bugatti run and again, all the specifics, the altered body and the
tires and the engineers and the teams and everybody involved, fine, maybe, maybe there's
some of that going on with the GT.
But here's the other thing.
They did it to the special track, you know, under very controlled, very controlled conditions
that they were able to enter the track at 180 miles per hour.
That's where they start at when they enter the straight.
Then it takes them the entire 5 mile straight to get to 304 miles per hour.
When you watch the way that the speed grows and I'll be specific here because you remember
the half mile speed for the Ford GT, it was 240 miles an hour and then it got up to 300.
If you watch the speed grow on the dials, the readings or whatever they give you on the
YouTube videos for the Bugatti run, once they get to, you know, if they, let's say you
could even start at 240.
The way that the miles per hour count up is like this, it's like 241, 242, 243, 244.
The Ford GT didn't have that luxury.
It was like going leaps and bounds up to 300 miles per hour.
It was accelerating so fast after the 240 mark that it's just unreal to think about.
I mean, considering when you look at the Bugatti and what it's intended purposes, you know,
it's intended to go fast, that's what it was built for.
Go fast and to break this 300 mile per hour run, this particular model, the Sharan, was
built for this test and it will be sold, of course.
But the way that it grows from 240 to 304 is much, much slower, still impressive.
These are all impressive, still impressive, but much, much slower than the Ford GT.
Yeah.
This is a completely different race or test.
The text of smile seems like a strict power test.
It's a brutal test.
It's a brutal, brutal test, isn't it?
I mean, and the footage from it is incredible to be able to see it.
Now, you don't get a lot of shots of like the car at the finish line going by at 300
miles an hour.
You don't see that because it's already in the distance it's gone and the spectator area
where all the filming and everything's happening.
I wish they had more cameras on the track, watching the cars go by at that speed, but you
kind of rely on, you know, the GoPro cameras that are in the vehicle, you know, by the drivers
themselves.
And of course, that gets into weight and aerodynamics and all that.
Then you're also dealing with the spectator views, people that are there with them on
the team to film the event.
You don't get a whole lot of like sensation of the cars passing you at the top speed.
I don't know why that is.
Maybe it's because they don't want anything on the track that could damage or harm the driver
or, you know, if there's something went terribly wrong, which sometimes does, you know,
anytime you're talking about these speeds, you don't want any obstructions in the way you
want to be able to have plenty of room.
They've got a half mile slow down area that they run off area with sand at the end and everything.
But I just I find this whole thing fascinating, but there are other mile events, the Arkansas
mile.
The Arkansas mile.
I didn't know that.
That's another one.
You know what?
I'm going to immediately look up the Arkansas mile as soon as we get out of here.
I really am.
Colorado mile is another one because the Arkansas mile, the Colorado mile.
All right.
I'm finding out new things every moment here.
But if you don't know anything about the Texas mile or, you know, a little bit about
it now, you don't know everything, of course, because we're just kind of scraping the surface
on this thing and it's fascinating to watch really if you're into that type of racing.
It's really, really cool.
If you're just like speed.
There's a lot of little nuances that you can kind of dig into and find out about and,
you know, specific drivers and types of vehicles that are run there and, you know, current
records and all that.
And like I said, I probably neglected to, you know, give you all of the information.
So if you want to dig into the Texas mile and find out what it's all about again, please
do so.
But I do want to tell you that we are on all forms of social media that you can think
of.
Everything under the sun.
Really?
Okay.
Well, there's maybe three.
All right.
So we're on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
You can find us there.
You can always, you know, kind of give us a little bit of feedback there if you want.
We are car stuff HSW at all three of those.
And we do have, of course, a big archive of material that you can find on iHeart.com.
If you get your podcast there or you can go to Apple Podcasts and leave some feedback
at either one of those places, you can find our extensive archive on iHeart.com.
If you want to go to Apple Podcasts, I think you're limited to the most recent 300.
And of course, tell your friends because we're always trying to grow the audience and get
more people involved.
So we really do appreciate it and we will catch you next time.
That's right.
See you later.
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About this episode
The Texas Mile is a unique speed event that challenges participants to achieve their top speed over a one-mile stretch, rather than competing head-to-head like traditional drag races. Hosts Scott and Kurt discuss the event's history, its evolution since 2003, and the impressive growth in both participants and spectators. They highlight the recent record-breaking run of a modified 2006 Ford GT, which reached 300.4 mph, and compare it to other high-speed events. The episode delves into the technical aspects of the vehicles, the strategies employed by racers, and the excitement surrounding this one-of-a-kind automotive competition.
Original notes
Imagine a mile of open pavement in front of you, and no fear of a speeding ticket or jail time. Seems like a dream, but it’s a reality for drivers at The Texas Mile. Listen in as Scott and Kurt describe why the Texas Mile is such a unique test of speed.
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