by Ross Finlay (18 Jun 00)

Don Wales's new British Electric Vehicle Speed Record, set on Saturday at Pendine Sands in Carmarthenshire, brings a family story full circle. Wales is the grandson of Sir Malcolm Campbell and nephew of Donald Campbell, and he's carrying on a tradition which goes back more than three-quarters of a century.

His new national EV record speed of 128mph in Bluebird Electric, beating his own previous figure by 12mph, isn't all that far short of his grandfather's outright World Land Speed Record set at Pendine in 1924.

In the 18.3-litre 350bhp V12 Sunbeam which was the first record car to bear the Bluebird name, Sir Malcolm's two-way runs over the sands averaged out at just over 146mph. Don Wales has got within 18mph of that in a lightweight vehicle with 135bhp available from its array of 48 Hawker Genesis lead-acid aircraft batteries.

Parry Thomas's 26.9-litre "Babs" managed 171mph on Pendine two years after Sir Malcolm, but the last of the Welsh course's LSRs was set by Campbell again, in the 1927 Napier-Campbell Bluebird, just three miles per hour faster.

After that, Pendine didn't have the length to accommodate the run-up and braking distances needed by the monster pre-war record cars, which moved to Daytona Beach in Florida and, later, the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.

But Donald Campbell's 1964 record of 403mph, in another Bluebird with a 4100bhp Bristol-Siddeley Proteus engine, was set at Lake Eyre in Australia. The most recent British successes - Richard Noble's in Thrust 2 and Andy Green's current record with Thrust SSC - were set on the Black Rock desert in Nevada.

Electric car records, of course, are nothing new. The very first World Land Speed Record was set in 1898 at Acheres, on a road which is still there just west of Paris, not far from the Peugeot factory at Poissy. Gaston de Chasseloup-Laubat was timed at a little over 34mph, driving a battery-powered chain-driven Jeantaud.

That record was broken soon afterwards by Camille Jenatzy in another electric car, the remarkable artillery-shell-shaped "La Jamais Contente", which is now in fine restored condition in a Brussels motor museum.

Electricity gave way to steam when Leon Serpollet beat Jenatzy's record in one of his own cars, and it took until 1902 before the first petrol-engined car, the American millionaire Vanderbilt's Mors, driven by Fournier, raised the record to 76mph.

The Bluebird Electric team, with Paul Sparrow as designer, now hope to begin work on a car to try for the World EV Record. That's quite a tall order, because the present figure is 245.5mph, set at Bonneville.

It's amazing that three generations of the same family, all driving cars with the same name, figure in the record books over a span of so many years. And how did the record cars come to be called Bluebird? It wasn't a lucky charm, or anything like that. Sir Malcolm was a keen theatre-goer, and he liked Maeterlinck's play "The Bluebird".

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