It was March 26, 2009 when Richard Jenkins kicked up a lot of dust.
In the Mojave Desert, the Brit smashed a fragile-looking thing called the Greenbird across dry Lake Ivanpah on the border between California and Nevada.
Jenkins reached a top speed of 202.9 km/h and then, when he had climbed out of his narrow capsule with a Plexiglas hood, he was celebrated by a group of fellow combatants with a triple shout of “Hip, hip, hooray”.
By his own account, the engineer had worked on the desert rocket for ten years, also to the glory of Britain.
Walter Will
“Technology and Engine” editorial team
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Jenkins has now held the land speed record for a wind-powered vehicle for almost exactly 13 years.
Maybe not for long: A group of highly qualified, highly decorated experts want to snatch the record from him.
They are designers, builders, boat builders from Team New Zealand.
This is the defending champion and dominant force in the America's Cup, the most storied and technically demanding sailing competition in the world.
For him, the development of the carbon fiber wind racer on wheels is a stimulating pastime after winning the 36th America's Cup in 2021 and an ambitious byproduct of preparation for the 37th America's Cup.
The vehicle, currently under construction in Auckland, is expected to be completed by the end of March.
According to its creators, they had "some pretty creative and innovative ideas".
In the end, however, they ended up with a design whose basic layout is surprisingly similar to that of Jenkins' Greenbird: elongated fuselage, side boom with ballast, straight rigid wing for propulsion.
So it's not a silver bullet, it's more about the subtleties.
And luck.
Even Jenkins had to learn painfully how tedious waiting for the right moment in the right place with the right weather conditions can be.
The New Zealanders and their Australian driver Glenn Ashby, the driving force behind the record attempt, hope to catch it on one of Australia's salt flats in July or August.