Land speed, drag racer Walt Arfons dies at 96

Crain News Service report

DETROIT (June 11, 2013) — No one seemed to know why the two brothers stopped talking, but their resulting rivalry led to some of the fastest cars ever built — two of which went more than 600 mph.

Over the years, Walt Arfons battled his half-brother Art on the Bonneville Salt Flats and at dragstrips across the country, but the pair rarely spoke over the course of one of the longest and most intense motorsport rivalries ever.

Land-speed pioneer Walt Arfons died June 4 at the age of 96. His brother Art died in 2007.

Walt was born in Muncie Ind., and moved to Akron at an early age, according to an article in the Akron Beacon Journal, which noted that after four years service in the U.S. Navy, Walt joined the family business at Arfons Mill and Hardware, an Akron Historic Landmark.

Walt and Art started out working together, building a three-wheeled dragster in their native rural Ohio in 1952. There was no fancy paint scheme on the car and it looked like they'd used leftover green paint of the John Deere hue. When Art drove it up to the line at the local drags, the starter said, "Bring that green monster up here."

After that, they called their cars "Green Monsters"—with a numerical suffix to each new model. Allison V12 engines powered the first round of Arfons Brothers creations, hurtling the cars down the quarter-mile at 150 mph in the early '50s.

Then, sometime in the late 1950s—after they'd built Green Monster 11—they split up.

Brian Lohnes, writing at Bangshift.com, said of the split: "There was no public spat, no screaming match, no threats made, and no real public reason as to why the two brilliant men from Akron decided to move in separate directions, but they did.

"From that point on, the men were not only working apart and not on speaking terms, they were actually engaged in a sort of speed-obsessed cold war. Both Art and Walt moved on from drag racing and became fixated on setting land speed records. Their intense personal struggles against one another led to some of the most incredible racing moments of the early 1960s."

Jet (and then rocket) cars came next. Walt's Wingfoot Express hit 420 mph at Bonneville in 1964 with Tom Green at the wheel. Art would then battle Craig Breedlove for land speed dominance on the salt—a rivalry that saw the land speed record pushed to 600 mph. Walt came back with a rocket car that hit 605 with Mr. Green at the controls. Art later hit 610 mph before crashing.

That crash led to something of a reconciliation between the two, as Samuel Hawley wrote in his book, The Inside Story of Land Speed Racing in the Sixties, quoted by Hemmings: "When it mattered, they really did care about each other. They would never again be buddies, not like in the old days with their motorcycles and home-built airplanes. But much of the animosity between them would remain behind in that hospital room, left in the past."

According to the Beacon Journal report, Walt Arfons was preceded in death by his son Jon Craig. He is survived by Gertrude, his wife of 76 years; daughter Patricia (Richard) Stiff; son Terry (Kathleen) Arfons; sister Lou Wolfe, as well as eight grandchildren and 19 great-grandchildren.

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This report appeared on the website of Autoweek magazine, a Detroit-based sister publication of Tire Business.