High Speed Land Sailer

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The goal of the Land Yacht Speed Record Project is to design and fabricate a vehicle capable of traveling as fast as possible using only wind power. With wind speeds of just 20 to 30mph, some land yachts are able to travel over 100mph. The present record was set at 126.1mph in 2009 by Richard Jenkins.

In 2008 I co-founded the club with a colleague, Edward Stilson. For about a year we concentrated our efforts on building a tire testing trailer which was used to select a set of tires and tune their settings for use on a land yacht. More on that project here. In these early stages of the project, Dr. Joachim Grenestedt came up with a radical design based on a sail plane airframe. This design, shown to the left, will allow us to have three axis aerodynamic control to increase stability at high speeds. In late 2009 we purchased a Diamont glider which we used as a base for our land sailer.

Unfortunately, this project ended as a miserable failure. Although it was heartbreaking and confusing at the time, in the years since it has become clear why we failed to deliver a working vehicle. We failed because as young engineers we tried to make everything perfect the first time. Instead of building a rough proof of concept to test our radical new design we tried to make every component in every subassembly flawless in form and in function. At graduation all we had to show for our work was half of a vehicle. The lesson for me is this: until you’ve fielded a proof of concept, forget about building the final product.

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Click here to see fabrication pictures

Click here for an article written about the project

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