Burkland's family-built racecar. Jeffrey Conger photo. How fast can you go? Alum sets world record by Brenda McDonald Tom Burkland, '82 ME, travels at speeds that would make "Speed Racer" jealous. Unlike the cartoon character who travels around the world in his ultimate driving machine, Burkland took just a minute and a half in the Utah desert to set a land speed record of more than 400 miles per hour in his family-built car. On October 16, Burkland drove his bullet-shaped, ground-hugging streamliner to a world-record 417 miles per hour to win the wheel-driven, piston engine category at the Bonneville Salt Flats Raceway in the World Finals 2004. But don't think this is a logo'd up, thousands cheering kind of event. Burkland competes in an anonymity of sorts, racing some 100 miles west of Salt Lake City. He describes land speed racing as a kind of last bastion for amateur racing. "There's no high-dollar sponsorship. It's just getting your name in a record book," said Burkland, who lives in Ogden, Utah, about two hours from the race site. "It's a grass roots, backyard thing that doesn't require huge dollars to participate." Land speed racing has been a passion of Burkland's since 1971 when he and his parents ran a modified Studebaker. He caught the racing bug from his father, working side by side in Gene's high-performance auto shop in Great Falls. Originally it was his father who was the driver. When Gene decided his driving days were over, Tom stepped up and has been driving ever since. The car that Burkland drove to set the land speed record was one the family, including his mom Betty, had been working on for two decades. It had been rebuilt over the last three years after Burkland pencil-rolled it more than 12 times in 2001 at Bonneville. "It happened so quickly. There wasn't anything you could do. All of a sudden the horizon is rotating in front of you," he said. Burkland was slowing and turning out after a successful run when part of the car's tail flap hit the edge of a buried 55-gallon drum. But Burkland sustained only a broken arm. "The cars have the most stringent roll cage structure," he said. "We've also done extra things that made it a lot safer, and it's built just for me to fit in," he said. In fact, it was the car's arm restraints that actually broke his arm. Land speed racing on the salt flats has a very short season, late August to mid-October. Burkland says racing on the salt flats is like trying to accelerate on an icy Montana road, and car speed is almost entirely at the mercy of track conditions. "When we go back next summer we've hoping for better race track conditions," said Burkland. "The car is capable of running a whole lot faster."