IN THE land of the record-breaking adrenaline junkie, one man is king.

John Ackroyd may not personally have crashed through the sound barrier on land, sailed the jet-stream, strapped himself to a rocket motorcycle or careered across a lake at ridiculous speed. But he made it happen and at the age of 70, the grandfather figure of British rock-and-roll design engineering continues to do so.

And he does it with some vigour and not a little verve. If John Ackroyd was a battery, he would be a super-duper gold-top Duracel that flattened only under extreme load.  Arms flapping Magnus Pike-style to illustrate a point or two and words tumbling out at breakneck speed, one wonders how the man unwinds.

Here’s one answer. He sits up until the very wee hours, not lap-top but pencil and paper in hand, scribbling a magnum opus autobiographical 288-big-paged book of some of the more interesting bits of his life’s work. Then, as so often in his life, fate intervenes and finds him a publisher in a world where hard work is not always the successful seeker of great reward.

Then what does he do? In between working on balloonist Per Lindstrand’s latest flying creations, he puts some of his boundless energy into marketing a book — Jet Blast — that is certain to interest anyone who wants tales of derring-do and most certainly those who know anything about his extraordinary work. And there are plenty of those on the Island.

A particular reason for that is, of course, the Thrust 2 record car produced on a shoestring, built at Fishbourne, and which carried my name pencilled by me (in secret) on an internal panel at an average speed of 633.468mph across the Black Rock desert to a new land-speed record. It was an unusual-looking beast but built by Island craftsmen to John’s grand design, it did the job.

After the Lord Mayor’s show, which was the culmination of a six-year obsession, came the pain of no job, the loss of team mates — that were just that — the death of his mother, divorce and storing all he had in a garden shed.

How to pick yourself up by the bootstraps and start again, that’s the question.
The answer was writing his first book, which detailed the project’s downs and ups, how it succeeded in that peculiarly British against-the-odds schoolboy hero sort of way.

Then two infectious enthusiasms came together again — Ackroyd’s and Thrust project mover, shaker and driver Richard Noble. The result, the budget-flying ARV Super2 produced at Sandown and which could soon be re-born in the USA.

The Super2’s lack of success illustrated John’s design expertise has not always been harnessed to world-beaters. Witness too, if you will, the Enfield Electric saloon car, produced on the Island decades before its time from Ackroyd’s drawings but which wilted on the peculiarly English vine of under-investment.

Size 280mm high x 220mm wide, hardback bound
288 pages full colour throughout

ISBN: 978 0 9544357 8 3

Oh yes, then there was Ackroyd crossing to the dark side, working on Craig Breedlove’s beaut of a car that was beaten by Noble’s British brute-force SSC, that John also had a small hand in.

Being able to bat for both sides, without acrimony, was a measure of ‘Ackers’ value and popularity and the friendly rivalry of record challengers. When driver Andy Green shattered the world record with a two-way average of 714.144mph, Breedlove was the first to offer his congratulations.

Bigger pictures are littered with diversionary postcards like involvement with a rocket car on skis and work with much-loved Frogeye sports cars in Ryde. And all from a chap probably best recognised in his home town habitually riding his Hercules bicycle — older even than himself — along Ryde seafront; from a character born in India in the days of the Raj who progressed in life along a haphazard path through an ability to put a line on paper while forming 3D images of the wonderful and weird, the prosaic and functional, in his head.

• Jet Blast is published by Red Line Books (www.redlinebooks.co.uk) at £29.95, plus postage.

By Richard Wright