Blue Bird returns to Welsh beach 100 years on from record run

Find out what’s new on ST website and app.

LONDON - Pendine Sands, stretching for miles along the coast of south-west Wales, marks a motoring milestone on Monday with the return of a Blue Bird car that captured the worlds attention a century ago.

On July 21, 1925, Briton Malcolm Campbell became the first person to travel at more than 150 miles per hour on land when he accelerated the mighty 350 hp Sunbeam along the beach to 150.76 mph.

The car, with its 18 litre V12 Manitou aero engine, is now owned by the National Motor Museum at Beaulieu and will be fired up at Pendine in a static display without any run being scheduled.

Campbells grandson Don Wales told Reuters the 1925 record triggered a mania for speed.

Everybody wanted to hear about whos got the land speed record and it was sparked, I think, by this record that my grandfather achieved, he said at a commemorative event in London, with the car on display outside.

He was surprised himself by the amount of media attention he was getting from effectively increasing his own record by four miles an hour, but it was that magic mark of 150.

While modern sportscars can easily exceed 150mph, and do so on race tracks and Germanys autobahns, the speed was sensational at the time.

Campbell had hit 146.16 mph in September 1924 at the same location and in the same car. In 1935, by then knighted for his achievements, he became the first to exceed 300 mph on land at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.

The record now stands at 763.035mph, set in 1997 by retired British Royal Air Force pilot Andy Green who thundered across Nevadas