Wind-powered World Record!
By: Luke McKinney
When most people think of green vehicles, they think of well-meaning but underpowered cuboids with lots of k's and q's in the name and a top speed comparable to the average continent. That's because most people aren't English engineer Richard Jenkins, which is a pity, because the world would be significantly more awesome and way, way faster if they were. Jenkins recently broke the land-speed record for a wind-powered vehicle, with his "Greenbird" hitting one hundred and twenty six miles per hour, breaking the wind-powered land speed record. In other words, your gas guzzler couldn't catch this thing if you filled the tank with napalm and rocketed it off a cliff.
This is no balsawood construction held together by hemp and hope, either - the Greenbird has in impressive mass of six hundred kilograms. Even carrying the weight of five sumo wrestlers, the wind-powered warp drive still generates so much lift there's a serious risk of the entire half-ton contraption taking off altogether. Which would be fun for about a second, then massively destructive and un-fun from then on - a great YouTube clip, but no land speed record. This is why some of the wings are designed to generate downward force, like a Formula One car, shoving the vehicle onto the ground and increasing it's effective weight to a ton.
Understand: not only does wind power work, but it works so well they have to use some of it to stop themselves from just flying away.
The carbon-fibre frame can best be described as a high-tech sailboat - just one that runs on desert flats instead of sailing the ocean. And way more awesome. A full ten years of design gives it aerodynamics which can literally slice air in half, and a top speed which enables it to not only outperform any car, but beat Thunderbird One in a drag race - all while scoring an infinite fuel-efficiency rating. There are absolutely no drive components in the vehicle apart from the solid sail which catches the wind - and in case you're thinking they cheat by throwing the thing into a hurricane and claiming "wind-power", the airspeeds which push the craft are no more than thirty miles per hour.
No, we don't know how they end up four times faster than the wind. That's why they're in the Guinness Book of Records and we're here talking about it.
Obviously this isn't a system that can be extended to regular roads, if only because the world simply isn't cool enough. Instead it acts as incredible public relations for the renewable energy movement, demolishing the image of eco-power meaning you have to give things like "speed" or "waooahahahahhahahaaaa!*" up. This car is way faster than anything you own, and much cooler looking to boot.
*Note: while not a real word, anyone who's driven something fast knows exactly what this quantity is.
And as for Mr Jenkins? In continuing proof that he's not a real person but rather a character escaped from an action movie, he's going after the world wind speed record on ice. You read that right: his life plan for the next few years is to build something entirely out of blades and edges, climb inside, and accelerate it to over a hundred miles an hour.
