To this day, Art Arfons holds one rather inglorious record: After crashing his Green Monster land-speed-record car in November 1966, he became the only person to survive a 600-mph-plus car wreck. That car only exists in memories and scraps now, but the replica of it that Arfons built remains and will anchor a display dedicated to land-speed-record holders at the San Diego Air and Space Museum.

Arfons’ land-speed-record ambitions date to the Fall of 1962, when he hit upon the idea of building a jet-powered car in the vein of the Cyclops and Green Monster jet drag cars he’d been campaigning across the country. Except Arfons believed he could take the record with a far more powerful engine, the afterburner-equipped J-79 from the F-104 Starfighter, good for about 17,000 pounds of thrust, or about 10,000 more than other jet-powered land-speed racers were harnessing at the time from their J-46s and J-47s.

Rather than worry about streamlining, Arfons built a basic fairing around the engine and attached two narrow cockpits to either side of it and a tailfin to the back of it. According to Samuel Hawley‘s Speed Duel, Arfons reasoned that because the intake of a jet engine doesn’t technically contribute to frontal drag, it made little sense to cover it with a nosecone and then try to duct sufficient air to the engine. The chassis consisted of whatever Arfons could find around his yard: an axle from a Dodge truck, a steering assembly from a Packard, the instrument panel from one of his old airplanes.

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