Sep

Rain Clips Greenbird’s Wings

Posted by admin Published in Air Travel

Rain was the final thing Richard Jenkins needed as he tried to set a land speed record for a wind-powered vehicle, and it was all he got. After a rainy month in western Australia awaiting his shot at the record, the British engineer is packing up the land yacht he calls Greenbird and heading domestic.

September was supposed to be the perfect day to manufacture his run across the salt flats of Lake Lefroy and topple the current record of 116.7 mph, but Mother Nature wouldn’t cooperate.

“After many years of uncooperative weather, I am used to it by now,” Jenkins, who has spent a decade been chasing his dream of setting the record, told the Birmingham Post. “But it does not manufacture it any less frustrating. When we can’t set a new record due to the affect of the weather, it’s not like losing a race but it’s more like an athlete not even being allowed to enter the arena.”

Lake Lefroy is generally dry in September, but it got about an inch more rain in July and August than it did during the same period final year. That may not sound like much, but it was adequate to keep the salt beds that ring the lake from drying. July saw the region get twice its average monthly amount in two days, while a individual storm dumped as much rain on the area in 12 hours as it receives in all of August. Jenkins and his team made no bones about attributing the unseasonable rain to global warming.

“We’re pretty

disappointed not to have been able to get the
Greenbird out of the starting blocks,” says Dale Vince, managing
director of Ecotricity, the firm that sponsored Greenbird. “And it’s an irony not lost on us that while Greenbird is intended to
show how the world might be getting around when fossil fuels run out,
the changes that fossil fuels are causing to our climate right now
seem to be the very thing that has stopped us.”

Greenbird is the fifth iteration of the land yacht Jenkins originally called Windjet but renamed in a nod to Bluebird, the record-setting racers Britain’s Donald Campbell
drove in the 1950s and ’60s. Jenkins’ craft is every bit as graceful as
Campbell’s were brutish, and it shares more in common with jets than
sailboats. He calls it “a highly-evolved vehicle” that draws heavily
from aerospace and Formula 1 racing technology. Jenkins claims to have hit 120 mph in tryout runs on an airstrip in Britain but they didn’t count considering the record must be set on a natural surface.

And so the record American Bob Schumacher set nine years ago stands. For now. Jenkins says he’ll be back next year to try again.

Photos by Greenbird. Here’s a photo of Jenkins and his land yacht during better days. See our original post for more pics and info.