At a lot of the air shows I go to there is an act where someone attaches a jet engine on a ground hugging chassis with four wheels. The goal being to go as fast as you can and stop, controlled, before you run out of pavement. With show runways being anywhere from one to three miles long – and no curves – and people who don’t mind a little noise, this is a perfect environment for these vehicles and the folks who voluntarily strap themselves into said vehicles.
As I have a little background in Jet Engines, I’m always interested in what the power plant is on these vehicles. In the case of the Smoke-N-Thunder car, it is powered by a Westinghouse J34-48. The money stats, roughly 10,000 HP and 6,000 pounds of thrust when the flame comes out the back (afterburner). The Westinghouse J34-48 engine was designed/built in the mid-40s. This was a period of jet aircraft development where the by the time an aircraft was built, the design was improved. As such, this engine was not in too many production aircraft of the time but was in a lot of experimental X aircraft. One of the interesting tidbits of information was this engine was designed to run on normal aviation gas, instead of the normal JP-4. And in the case of Smoke-N-Thunder, it is fitted to run on Diesel fuel.





And that pretty much ends my interest in these vehicles. Until. Part of the show usually includes the vehicle making a lot of smoke then driving through the smoke and lighting the afterburner for a very nice eerie effect. And that is when I caught this one. For some reason, this one caught my eye. When I saw this one in the camera screen for review, I knew I had my next screen background/saver.