By GUY GUGLIOTTA


SPANAWAY, Washington - When Ed Shadle was growing up, you could buy a beat-up car for a couple hundred dollars, pound out the dents, drop a big engine in it, paint it candy apple red, take it to the outskirts of town and race from stoplight to stoplight until the cops told you to go home.

Mr. Shadle, a retired IBM field engineer, is 67 now, and he is still racing. So a bit over 10 years ago, he and his good friend Keith Zanghi bought an old vehicle in Maine, pounded out the dents, customized the exterior, dropped a big engine in it and painted it red.

Except this was a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter. The real thing. The singleengine Mach 2.2 interceptor that ruled the skies in the 1950s and 1960s.“In a post-9/11 world we probably wouldn’t have been able to get one,”Mr.Shadle acknowledged. But in 1999 they drove this one away for $25,000.

And next year - on July 4, perhaps - they intend to take the North American Eagle to the hardpan desert at Black Rock, Nevada, and run it through a measured mile to set a new land speed record of about 1,300 kilometers per hour, 70 kilometers per hour faster than the speed of sound. Mr.Shadle is the driver.

The Eagle has stiff competition. Late last year, Richard Noble and Andy Green of Britain, who broke the sound barrier on their way to setting the current record of 1,228 kilometers per hour in 1997, announced the beginning of Bloodhound, a new three-year project to build a jet-and-rocket car capable of 1,610 kilometers per hour.

Bloodhound enjoys private-sector sponsorship, university technical support and the endorsement and some education financing from the British government. The Eagle, on the other hand, has about 44 volunteers helping to build the ultimate hot rod.

Mr.Zanghi said he and Mr.Shadle had bankrolled Eagle for about $250,000 over the last decade with one thought in mind:“What we want,”Mr.Shadle said, with a slow drawl,“is to go fast.”

From nose to tail, the Eagle is 17 meters long, weighs 5,900 kilograms and is powered by a single General Electric LM1500 gas turbine, better known as a J79 when it flew in F-104s. The engine is a loaner from S Turbine Services, a Canadian firm that rebuilds J79s for repressurizing natural gas wells.

The rules are simple. Clock the racer through a measured mile, turn around and do it again, then average the two speeds. The vehicle must have at least four wheels - two of them steerable - and be back at the original start line within 60 minutes. And that’s it.“You race Formula One or Nascar, the rule books are as thick as the Bible,”Mr.Shadle said.“For this, the rule book is a half-page long.
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But consider the challenges. Rubber tires turn to molten licorice at anything above 560 kilometers per hour, so the Eagle uses custom-built, single-billet aluminum alloy wheels. The brakes are special alloy magnets that generate 4,700 brake horsepower.

The Eagle team clipped the F-104’s wings and ailerons, welded new plates, stitched the fuselage together with thousands of new rivets and hustled sponsors at air and auto shows. Mr.Shadle and Mr.Zanghi did not have the money to buy a J79 outright, but S Turbines leased one to them for almost nothing.

The big imponderable is the sound barrier. In the sky, the shock wave simply dissipates. But on land, it bounces off the ground and can flip a racer into the air. Since each car is unique, the problem has to be solved differently every time.

Mr.Zanghi, 54, started crewing for race cars after high school. He met Mr.Shadle in the mid-1990s when he volunteered to work on a land-speed racer team. Mr.Shadle was a part owner.

The partners thought an F-104 might do for the land speed record. It took Mr.Shadle more than a year to find the one in Maine. The Air Force sold it to a Los Angeles company to use as a template for spare parts, and it was later junked. The engine had been removed, half the plates were ripped off and the rest were decorated with graffiti and bird droppings.“It was about two months from being turned into beer cans,”Mr.Zanghi recalled.



BUILT FOR SPEEDThe North American Eagle, a converted jet fighter, on a 2007 test run in the Nevada desert, where next year the car’s crew will try to set a land speed record. Below, a computer graphic showing the flow of air around the vehicle, which its owners hope will reach about 1,300 kilometers per hour.