This room was dark and lit by artificial light giving odd colour rendition. The red car is the Sunbeam LSR Mystery of 1926, often called The Slug. Designed by Jack Irving of Sunbeam, this had two V12 sunbeam boat engines giving a combined output of 870 bhp. One engine sat in front of the driver, the other behind (and behind the rear axle!) This made the car quite unstable, but Henry Segrave drove it to a new record of 203.97 mph on Daytona Beach in Florida (Jan. 1927). Malcolm Campbell in his Bluebird then raised the record by a few mph, and American Ray Keech took it to 207 mph in his White Triplex, powered by three V-12 Liberty aero engines. Irving left Sunbeam, and Segrave persuaded him to design another car to take the record to 250 mph. Using just one engine, a W-12 Napier Lion used for the Schneider Trophy seaplanes and tuned for 925 bhp, the Irving-Napier Special, or Golden Arrow, this car was amazingly docile - Segrave drove it to and from its garage onto the beach at Daytona - and on its first run it easily raised the record to 231 mph. The next day, driver Lee Bible crashed the White Triplex, killing himself and a photographer. The beach was closed and Segrave was unable to attempt other runs. Golden Arrow covered a distance of 36 miles in its active life. Donald Campbell's Bluebird in the NMM was powered by a gas turbine engine connected to all four wheels. Weighing about the same as the Golden Arrow, it had nearly five times the horsepower and was aiming for 500 mph. After a high-speed crash at Bonneville Salt Flats in 1960 and rain problems with the salt lake Lake Eyre in Australia, Campbell finally raised the speed record to 403.1 mph in 1964. This record, unbeaten until 2001, was the highest for a wheel-driven car.
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