The Fast and the Curious

Fossett Didn't Stop Challenging the Limits of Human Endeavor Until the Day He Disappeared

SPARKS, Nevada

Steve Fossett wanted to experiment with endurance, so he ran 100 miles through the Rocky Mountains and swam across the English Channel. He wanted to explore dangerous extremes, so he circumnavigated the globe in a sailboat, a jet-engine plane and a giant balloon. For the better part of 63 years, he sought out adventures that nobody ever had accomplished and then checked them off, building a legacy that included 115 world records and yet still left him wanting.

Until he came here.

In the months before his plane disappeared on a routine pleasure flight over western Nevada, Fossett often traveled to a corporate warehouse on the outskirts of Reno to prepare for an assault on a record more prominent than any he owned. He wanted to move faster than anyone ever had across land, but that was only the beginning of it. While visiting this gigantic garage, Fossett imagined setting a land speed record so extraordinary that it would become a benchmark in human innovation. A sign leaning against a wall in the front office of the warehouse betrayed his aspirations. Speed Limit: 1,000 mph.

Every few weeks, Fossett flew here from his home in Beaver Creek, Colo., to visit the jet-engine car he purchased and the team he assembled to refine it. The machine's white-paneled body extended 48 feet and weighed almost 10,000 pounds. To first-time visitors, it looked like a missile lying flat on its stomach -- a comparison that only hinted at its power.

When Fossett came to Sparks, he often changed into a one-piece black racing suit and put on a helmet. He contorted his body and sucked in his stomach so he could fit into a cockpit no bigger than a coffin, elevated only 10 inches off the ground. Two crew members strapped Fossett into a nine-point harness, and he stared out through the car's half-inch-thick windshield. Fossett sometimes sat there for hours and imagined sparking a 30-foot flame by firing the ignition, covering a mile in four seconds and then slowing down by releasing parachutes manufactured for nuclear weapons.

He believed it would be the most dangerous adventure of his life, because history held no precedent for what such speed entailed. Would the driver experience tunnel vision akin to temporary blindness? Could a quarter-size rock on the race course knock the car off-balance? Would the human body withstand the G-forces of accelerating at 40 mph each second?

As he prepared to confront the unknown, Fossett agreed to be featured in a series of Washington Post articles about the nature of competition. During a succession of e-mail and telephone conversations for the piece, he discussed goals and fears that were fatefully intertwined. Fossett's crew already had identified seven mechanical flaws that would have killed him. They delayed three speed trials last summer because the car remained too hazardous to drive.

In August, Fossett made a final visit to the warehouse to talk with the crew and check the car's condition. He had tired of scheduling test sessions only to cancel them a few weeks later, so Fossett implored his crew chief to finish the car before winter weather made driving impossible and delayed the project for another six months. Fossett left Sparks intent on taking the car outside in late September or early October.

"There's nothing I can do but be patient," Fossett said in one interview last summer. "But the longer I wait, the more excited and eager I am to really experience this and drive. Imagination can only take you so far."

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