Naturally, things didn’t go smoothly as the Watt, engine tuner Shane Tecklenberg and engine builder Ken Duttweiler found multiple mechanical issues prior to the record-breaking run.
“We’re in impound and we’ve got a half hour left (before the end of the day) and we run it through the gears and we don’t have seventh gear,” Watt said. “Shane looks at me, I look at him and I’m like, ‘Oh, this is not good.’ We got it out and physically did it by hand and sure enough, no seventh gear.
“We didn’t say anything to anybody. We had a couple of the crew guys take the shift fork stop and back it out three or four turns so that it would back seventh gear in further. We didn’t start the car and do it again, we just put it in seventh gear and felt it click.”
The crew put the car back together and waited anxiously for the next morning, when they would get their opportunity to set the piston-powered speed record. Still, there were more problems.
“We got up to the line to run our record run to get the 470-mph average and the first thing that happens is that someone had left the power on from impound to the (starting) line,” Watt said. “The guy who turns the bottle on heard this big old burst of air come out. We all heard it and I’m like, ‘Oh no, the CO2 has a leak or something.’
“We figured out the power was on, so I turned it off and turned it back on and I checked the CO2 pressure and it had enough pressure to run,” Watt added. “So we get the car ready, all the crew guys go down to the other end and George gets in the car and he goes to turn the car on and the dash flashes red. He has no dash. He doesn’t know what gear he is in, he doesn’t know when to shift.
“Ken (Duttweiler) told him just wait until you feel it on the rev limiter and shift it. George took off and had no idea what was happening.”
With no dashboard telemetry and no idea what gear he was in, Poteet rocketed down the Bonneville Salt Flats. When he reached the five-mile mark, he was going 481.576 mph. The two-way average speed of the runs was 470.015 mph.
The Speed Demon Streamliner was officially the fastest piston-powered, wheel-driven car on the planet. Since they were using the same engine they’d used earlier in the week, the run also reset the AA record.
“We went nuts because we knew there were three things that could have cost us the record,” Watts said. “It wasn’t like it seems, like everything is perfect. It was far from perfect.
“I teared up because I knew it was a goal that all of us had, to go over 450 mph, but we never had a clue we were going to go 470 mph.”
Watts believes that had things gone perfectly the car could have gone at least 10 mph faster than the 470.015 mph average.
“Had we done a normal run it would have been in the high 480s, maybe 490 mph because shifting on the rev limiter slowed us down quite a bit looking at the data,” Watts explained.
Watts credited the hard work of the entire Speed Demon crew for helping get the car ready for the record run, an effort that wouldn’t have been possible without Poteet bringing them all together.
“They all come to Bonneville because they want to. We all come there to work 10 days together and accomplish a goal that not a lot of people get a chance to do,” Watts said. “George gives us all the chance to be heroes, basically.”