As the almost equally determined Wayne Johnson’s documentary details (surely his own labour of love), Hart dedicated any spare moment he had to creating something John Britten or Burt Munro would be proud of. Taking an engineers eye to his monumental task of building a dragster jet car, the self-styled, would-be “world’s fastest ginger” initially threw himself into 18 months of intense study/Google research, before scouring the world for ways to be able to make his fantasy vehicle on a budget. Thanks to Kiwi ingenuity (which included a soda stream bottle as a shut off, Holden Kingswood wheel hubs and a Warehouse Dora the Explorer ball as a mould for the bullet nose), this potential $250,000 project was able to be crafted for around ⅕ of the price. Not that he skimped on safety. “Everything else can be nasty arse crap,” he tells Johnson, but the parts that allow him to stop and steer it, “those have to be top-notch”.
Whanganui Year in Review, March 2020: Speed record, lockdown, and our first Covid cases
30 Dec, 2020 03:30 PM
4 minutes to read
March 7 Records were broken on March 7 this year, when air force technician Sergeant Dean Hart smashed the New Zealand land speed record, clocking up an average speed of 363 kilometres an hour over the space of a mile at Ohakea Air Base. The speed beat the previous record of 355km/h.
During the ride, Hart reached a top speed of 458.2km/h - so fast that his helmet began to lift from the top of his head.
The record was broken in a car that took 10 years to build, with a 60-year-old Rolls Royce Viper 535 engine powering the 30-year-old chassis.