This man went 700mph+ on a rocket-powered speed machine...

What did this guy do, then?

He didn’t officially break the speed of sound.

Seems a low bar. Nor have most of us.

Yeah, but Stan Barrett – Hollywood stuntman, fearless speed pioneer, all round humanitarian good dude – didn’t officially break the speed of sound while doing 700-plus miles per hour across a dry lakebed in a 48,000bhp rocket-powered car with a Sidewinder attached to its roof.

A Sidewinder. As in, the air-to-air missile?

The very same. Borrowed from the US Navy and strapped atop Barrett’s ‘Bud Rocket’ to give it an extra kick through the transonic region.

Sounds totally safe. So what’s the story?

On 17 December 1979, our steel-cahoned stuntman squeezed himself into the Bud Rocket’s 20in wide cockpit, lit the fuse and clung on for the ride. “I could hardly focus,” he recalled after. “All I could yell was, ‘Wow!’” At 600mph, Barrett hit the Sidewinder booster, subjecting his body to five g of force as he aimed to become the first driver to smash beyond Mach 1.

Which he... failed to do?

A topic of debate. Some onlookers stated they heard a sonic boom. Some didn’t. Issue was, there was no independent authority on hand to sanction the run. The Rocket team took data from Air Force radar and onboard accelerometers, and came up with the figure of 739.666mph, or Mach 1.0106. Many disputed this number. In any case, an official land speed record requires a second run to be made in the opposite direction within an hour. Barrett’s attempt was one and done.

So... no record?

Not according to the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile, at least: it would take Andy Green, Richard Noble and Thrust SSC nearly two decades to officially raise the land speed record beyond the sound barrier. For Barrett, that was mere paperwork. He’d done his thing, gone faster than any driver in history.

“There are no rules for breaking the sound barrier,” he recalled sanguinely. “I was as prepared to die as I was to live.”