About Us

The Speed Record Club is a member’s club which published the member’s magazine ‘Fast FACTS’ and now produces the Fast FACTS ‘insights’ digital newsletters. Established in 1991 by like minded speed enthusiasts with support from Land Speed Record Breaker Richard Noble the Club seeks to promote an informed and educated enthusiast identity, reporting accurately and impartially to the best of its ability on record-breaking engineering, events, attempts and history. The Club earns it’s revenue from subscriptions, sale of merchandise, member’s events and trading related to the production of it’s publications.

Whatever type of speed record breaking appeals to you, and at whatever level you are interested, the Speed Record Club is the only club that is not associated with any one project or organisation and is intended to provide a forum for all with a common interest.

The Club holds informal meetings incorporating exhibitions, tours, team presentations, film and slide shows and sales of collectables at places of interest such as Coniston, Pendine and has previously visited museums with speed related displays including The National Motor Museum, Beaulieu, The National Motorboat Museum at Pitsea and The Coventry Transport Museum. These are terrific opportunities to meet with other enthusiasts and well-known personalities from the world of speed record breaking.

With numerous SRC members having active projects, the Club also provides a source of volunteers for their trials and record attempts.

“I’ll bet that like me there are a number of people reading this issue thinking “blimey, is that the time already and where did all those years of my life go?” The bad news is that you really are as old as you feel. The good news is that the Speed Record Club is alive and kicking after all these years. Like all good ideas I guess it was something whose time had come and if I hadn’t done then somebody else would have. As is often the case, it was chance that made me do something with an idea that had been kicking around in my head for a while.

A picture of John Cobb’s car in a schoolbook when I was 5 years old was the spark that lit my infantile interest, which in turn led me to collect things from newspapers, magazines and anything else about record breaking. I was the prototype nerdy anorak. This being the 1950’s and 60’s, back then it was all about Donald Campbell until by chance I found an early Hot Rod magazine. Put the two together and a whole new world of interest opened up. Only lack of money, talent, age and opportunity stopped me getting involved somehow. Then came work and girls (not necessarily in that order) and before I knew it I was on the way home from a company Xmas Ball in Eastbourne when I happened to see a sign for the museum at Polegate. A brake test and a U-turn led to the discovery of the Bluebird exhibit and a long chat with it’s then curator Steve Holter. As matching anoraks we clearly got along, so that in turn led to an invite for a small event for Ken Norris at which Fred Harris and others were among the selected guests. It’s well known that Ken’s encouragement to start some sort of club to field all the many requests for information and help he was always receiving was the thing that shamed me into actually doing something for once rather than just reading about it. As the godfather of British record breaking (a title bestowed on him by David Tremayne) he provided some names to contact, as did Steve Holter.

As a well known writer about the record breaking scene David Tremayne was one of those we contacted and he in turn came up with more names. A couple of letters published in Motoring News, Autosport and Motor Sport brought forth even more names – one of which was a long lost friend (Tim Mudd) while another turned out to be a brand new friend (Andrew Smith) who became part of the quarterly Richardson household “envelope stuffing team” when things got underway. A certain Malcolm Pittwood was very keen to help, not for the last time, so with names and an overall concept, we were ready to go. Apart from having any content that is! Steve, DJT, Malcolm, Fred Harris, Fred Kasmann, Martyn Flower and others provided a small stock of articles while I trawled any source I could find for related information that could be worked into the various sections.

The Sunbeam Tiger had just come up for auction and at a private event at Elvington an attempt was made to beat the record it set with Segrave at the wheel. I blagged my way to the side of the runway (sorry sir, private invites only due to insurance) by putting on a coat, hopping over the fence and attaching myself to the St John Ambulance people as they got themselves ready. That ploy provided enough information and photographs for an article so that was added to the mix as well. We take cheap, sophisticated PC and Smartphone software for granted these days, but back then, unless you worked at it for a living, cut and paste meant just that when creating the master document for the first newsletter. The headings and the underlines were done using Letraset and a ruler, while the pictures were either originals stuck to each page or carefully photocopied so they could be resized and stuck on. Every typed page had to include all the laboriously entered spaces to create a white box in which to stick the picture. Even though the original contact list numbered but 40 people to relieve of subscriptions, it quickly became clear that buying envelopes and paying for photocopying was out of the question. My travels around the various offices of the company I worked for meant that I could liberate a handful from each stationery supply area while the photocopying meant staying late for 2 or 3 evenings every quarter and making surreptitious use of a shared copier – along with the paper of course.

If you want to know where Fast FACTS was born, it was the 7th Floor at 190 High Holborn, London. Each issue was collated by hand and either stapled or fixed using a slide on plastic grip on the spine – the newsletter, not me. The envelope stuffing team were bribed with cheap beer and we even used any unfranked stamps we’d carefully removed from envelopes. The point of this “cheapskatery” was to build up enough cash to buy the club its first PC – something that was needed 3 years later when Richard Noble came knocking at the start of the Thrust SSC project.

When the first subscriptions came in after the first issue went out, that money got added to the pot and for the first 2 years I personally picked up any costs for things that I couldn’t nick, borrow, con people out of or avoid paying. No wonder Richard saw the potential! I’m a great believer in constant evolutionary change to keep things fresh rather than forced change when things get stale so it was time to go anyway. As paid member number one Malcolm Pittwood was persuaded to be the first Chairman. His contacts and his own projects made him the ideal person. Damien Halliwell was tempted with a shiny new PC into becoming Editor and very successful at it he was too. A devoted petrolhead, he’d built his own small block Chevy powered street car for drag racing and had been a member of Jim Head’s top fuel race team when he lived in the States for a while. Jim Head’s cars often wore the legend “Why Be Normal” and you couldn’t have a better motto for all of us for whom record breaking is normal. I once asked Richard if record breaking attracted dysfunctional people or if it simply made them dysfunctional. “The former without a doubt” was his reply. I’m proud to have kicked started an organisation that still thrives and has allowed us to share our abnormality.”

Robin Richardson

About Us

In 2011, twenty years after founding the Speed Record Club, Robin Richardson recalled how the Club came into being-