Days earlier, after nearly a month in the high desert, Thrust — SSC stands for supersonic car — had set a new Land Speed Record of 1,149 kph. Now its British creators were aiming to become the first to break the sound barrier on land. But there were problems. The car's aluminum fuselage was cracking from being sandblasted at near the speed of sound. Its parachutes, essential for braking, were failing. The project was nearly bankrupt. And with winter rains just days away, time was running out.

Inside the cockpit, Green had a bigger problem: whenever the car broke 885 kph, the steering would veer wildly to the left, throwing the twin-engined machine's 16.5 meter black frame 15 meters off its prepared track, which had been painted in thick white lines across the desert. (The problem, its creators would discover, was that the car's asymmetrically aligned rear wheels were creating powerful aerodynamic shockwaves that forced it sideways.)

On cue, as Thrust reached 950 kph, it lurched wildly to the left. Green instinctively threw the wheel right 90° — a full lock. Still the car veered off line, drifting towards the track laid out for his return run. Green, an RAF wing commander and Oxford-educated mathematician, had set a strict safety edict: if the car crossed that line, he would abort. He knew that, just a year previously, a land-speed attempt by the American Craig Breedlove on the same desert had ended in a crash at 1,086 kph.