John Rhodes Cobb

After his education at Eton and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, John looked all set for a charmed life in the family fur-trading business. A taste for thrills, however, led him into flying aircraft at Brooklands in 1924, and a year later to take to the track there, where he won his very first race driving a fearsome, chain-driven 10-litre Fiat S61. He developed a specialism for setting speed records in 1929 when John’s Delage V12 set a new Brooklands lap time of 132.11mph. This was nowhere near fast enough for him so in 1933 he commissioned the Napier Railton with a 24-litre aero engine, and this beast upped his lap record there to 143.4mph in October 1934. A machine with two Napier Lion engines brought John Cobb his first world land speed record in 1938 at Bonneville, USA and this ‘car’, now known as the Railton Model Special, was the one to clinch the 1947 achievement celebrated by the Segrave Trophy. It also made John the first person ever recorded travelling on land at (momentarily) over 400mph. He then switched his fearless attention to the water speed record in the specially built Crusader boat, with fatal consequences: John was killed on Loch Ness in September 1952 when the jet-powered craft fell apart at over 200mph after hitting an unexpected wave. He was 53. The Cobb Green in Esher, his hometown, was named in his honour.