that sucks... she was cool :(

I have to think that Bonneville would have been safer - I've been on it a couple of times (never over 160) and at the right time of year is dead flat.

Unlike the Bonneville salt flats, the Alvord is a true mud playa - people go out there for land sailing usually. The bumps & cracks don't matter at low speeds.

Would imagine the brain pan routinely smacks the canopy with each run.

she was a talent

That's because it was an F-104 with a history....; was a chase plane... rescued from an aircraft junkyard by Ed Shadle to break the record... add wheels and a used J-79 with a burner. Voila'... sort of....

Ed died - cancer - last year. Other than him, think Jesse was the only other person to drive it at speed.

They were gunning for the sound barrier when Thrust SSC from England broke it on the desert in Australia (Bonneville is too short).

https://www.hemmings.com/blog/2018/09/12/north-american-eagle-team-vows-to-continue-land-speed-record-quest-despite-ed-shadles-death/

How awful but she had a full life! RIP Ms Combs.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1567067692.jpg

RIP.

Cool car girl who knew her way around a toolbox. Enjoyed watching her as she seemed to know a lot more about what she was doing than some of the other woman "mechanics".

Sad. Have a friend at Bonneville now doing 180+ on a bike. I've wanted to go down and spectate at some point ever since watching the worlds fastest indian. Can't imagine what speeds feel like that she was doing in that thing. RIP

Watch the youtube vid of the Thrust SSC breaking the sound barrier, from inside the cockpit...with Green narrating.

Thanks!


https://jalopnik.com/here-s-what-it-s-like-to-break-the-sound-barrier-in-a-d-1819515461

She was 36 yesterday, probably sourced from wikipedia, which is where I looked. It's been changed today, and now she's 39. I wonder if she was keeping her age reported lower as part of that double standard where older women in TV have a harder time keeping their careers going... or if it was just an honest mistake from crowd sourced information.

she started out enrolling at Wyotech to get trained working on cars.
She reportedly gradumacated at or near the top of her class, and wyotech saw an opportunity.
She was hired to work on a SEMA build that was filmed as advertising for wyotech, and that's when her career took off.
Lots O'women on car shows are make-believe mechanics, just window dressing. But not her. She was the real deal.

Warning, sidetrack ahead:
has anyone watched that horrible car show called goblin garage?
What a POS knock off, they make junk that i would be embarrassed to drive and sell it for huge piles of money.
Yeah sure they do.

[/sidetrack]

.........Goblin garage^^^^^^^^^^^^why yes.............such a gem.........where there are 3 supposedly talented people that don't actually do any of the 'custom' work themselves and no explanation of why they are together...............

Yep - you're both right, it's a converted F104. It's actually a local Pacific Northwest effort, out of the Tacoma, WA area, so we've seen a lot of news coverage over the years.

A friend of mine and fellow Pelican, who happened to work for the same little airplane company I worked for, helped out on this effort. He is an aerodynamicist, and worked with them in their early days in that regard.

And, yes, the Germans had a bunch of them in the '60's and '70's. I grew up spending summers in the little town of Warburg with my Oma and Opa. There was a cool castle ruins up on a hill just outside of town that my cousins and I would wander out to all the time. It was a prominent enough landmark that the local fighter squadron would use it as a turn-around point. We would be up on top of the tower, jumping up and down and waving our arms. We like to think one or two pilots actually waved back. These were all F104's and F4's. Good times for us kids.

She won the King of Hammers race a couple years ago as well. Used to be on Extreme 4x4 on the Saturday morning Power Block with Trucks, some hot rod show and so on.

now that's SERIOUS understeer. I wonder how Capt. Slowly would describe the buffeting?

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1567124207.jpg
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1567124248.jpg

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1567131021.jpg


http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1567131021.jpg

This is hard for me to write, as i’m still in shock at what may have been a worst case scenario for the North American Eagle.

I volunteered as an aerodynamicist for several years. I haven’t been working with the team for a while now, and I have no more information than what the press has released. I can’t imagine what the people that have devoted their lives to this project must be going through - not to mention the tragic loss of Jessi Combs.

It all started for me when Keith and Ed gave a presentation on the North American Eagle and their bid for the land speed record to a chapter of the local Model A Club. After all, no one is more interested in going fast than the Model A Club. One of the members worked at the transonic wind tunnel here in Seattle. He contacted several of us aerodynamicist that regularly tested there and got us involved. Some even bought computers to run CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) on the F-104 car, and several of us worked on the car on weekends.

The current land speed record is owned by Andy Green and the Thrust SSC at 763 MPH. Surprisingly the tail number of the F-104 that Ed and Keith dragged out of a junk yard is 60763.

The ability to go faster than 200 mph is very difficult - I made this chart to show the history of setting the record. Once you get to Mach 0.7, shocks start to dominate the aerodynamics and can be hard to predict - especially for mechanics that are used to building their own cars. I predict that future record holders will be professional teams with large budgets and engineers in addition to mechanics.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1567131015.jpg

It was a once in a life chance for me to help the team test near Gerlach Nevada at the Black Rock Desert many years ago. Several people on here have wondered why they were not at Bonneville. The salt cannot support a vehicle of this size, weight, and type of wheels. They had to find ground hard enough to support the vehicle. The hard playa of Black Rock and Alvord seemed to work well. They have been to Alvord several times, so they know the area well.

As more information is released, we will hopefully learn what happened.

The various news reports I have heard have been short on details obviously because it just happened . But they have been consistent in stating she died instantly so it must have been a catastrophic failure/crash . Obviously at 400 + a wreck is going to be very difficult to survive . She was a very special lady , smart , good looking , a great fabricator and a personality that was very positive . The world lost a good one . RIP Jessie