A 64-year-old retired Royal Air Force pilot slid into a 32-foot yellow needle on a dry Utah lake bed and pushed it to 406 miles per hour. No jet. No rocket sled. The power came from two engines lifted almost straight out of a construction digger.
His name is Andy Green, and on August 11, 2026, he drove the JCB Hydromax to an average of 406.320 mph across the Bonneville Salt Flats near Wendover, Utah. The first pass clocked 400.623 mph. Then he turned the car around, ran it the other way, and hit a genuinely ridiculous 412.135 mph. Average the two runs and you get a brand-new world land speed record for a hydrogen-powered vehicle, confirmed by the sport’s international governing body.
That is fast enough to cross seven football fields every single second. In a car. Powered by the same kind of engine that digs holes in the ground.
The Guy Behind the Wheel Already Broke the Sound Barrier
JCB didn’t grab a random hotshot for this. Andy Green is the only human being who has ever traveled faster than the speed of sound on land. Back in October 1997, he drove the twin-jet ThrustSSC to 763.035 mph across Nevada’s Black Rock Desert and punched clean through the sound barrier. Nobody has beaten it since. That record still stands today, almost 30 years later.
He is also the man who set the diesel land speed record in 2006, driving the JCB Dieselmax to 350.092 mph at this very same salt flat. So when he strapped into the Hydromax, this was record number three for him, and the second one he has set for JCB at Bonneville. The guy shows up, he goes fast, he goes home. There is a reason people call him the fastest man on Earth.
That Car Is Basically Two Diggers in a Costume
The best part of this whole story is what is bolted inside the Hydromax. It runs on two four-cylinder hydrogen combustion engines, each one about 4.8 liters, each making roughly 800 horsepower. Together that is around 1,600 horsepower feeding all four wheels.
These are not exotic hand-built racing motors that have nothing to do with real life. They are upgraded versions of the exact engines JCB already builds for its diggers at the Foston plant in Derbyshire, England. The engineering firm Ricardo helped rework them with special radiators, intercoolers, and racing-spec turbochargers so they could survive the punishment. Strip the fancy bodywork off and you basically have a digger engine doing 406 mph. JCB’s engineering director put it bluntly, saying the team took a hydrogen digger engine and made it the fastest of its kind on the planet.
Why He Had to Drive It Twice
One blistering run down the salt does not count for an official record, and there is a good reason for that. Wind at your back or a slight downhill slope can flatter a single pass. So the rules force you to prove it in both directions.
Under the governing body’s rules, a driver has to make two timed runs in opposite directions on the course, and both have to happen within a single hour. The official speed is the average of the two, measured over a marked mile in each direction. Green had a 10-mile straightaway to build speed, ran it down one way, and then the crew had to spin the car around and send him back before the clock ran out. His two timed passes landed at 400.623 and 412.135, which is where that 406.320 average comes from. The record is still waiting on final ratification, but the numbers are in the book.
The Salt Flats Have Been Calling Drivers Since 1914
Bonneville is not just some empty parking lot in the desert. It is the leftover floor of a prehistoric lake, sitting about 100 miles west of Salt Lake City. The crust is dead flat, bright white, and hard enough to drive on at insane speeds.
There is a clever bonus underneath it too. The flats sit on top of a shallow aquifer, and that water actually helps cool the tires as the car screams across the surface. Add in the low friction of the salt and the bone-dry desert air, and you have a place tailor-made for going fast. Drivers have been chasing records there since the first race in 1914. Green has called it the spiritual home of the land speed record, and honestly, he has earned the right to say so.
The Records It Stomped On
The margin here is what makes people in the racing world sit up. The old hydrogen combustion record was 185.5 mph, set by the BMW H2R way back in 2004. The Hydromax beat it by more than 220 mph. That is not nudging a record forward. That is more than doubling it.
It went further than that. The 406.320 mph average also blew past the 303 mph mark held by hydrogen fuel-cell cars, which means the Hydromax is now the fastest hydrogen-powered vehicle of any type, period. And it topped JCB’s own diesel record of 350.092 mph from 2006. So this one car beat the hydrogen combustion record, the hydrogen fuel-cell record, and the diesel record all at once. That kind of clean sweep is rare in this world, where records usually move by a few miles per hour at a time.
Burning Hydrogen Is Not the Same as a Toyota Mirai
People hear “hydrogen car” and picture something quiet and futuristic gliding along on electricity. That is not what this is. A fuel-cell car like the Toyota Mirai takes hydrogen, runs it through a chemical reaction to make electricity, and uses that electricity to spin an electric motor. It is basically an EV that makes its own power.
The Hydromax does something totally different. It burns hydrogen directly inside a piston engine, the same way a gasoline engine burns fuel. Pressurized hydrogen gets mixed with air, then ignited to create bursts of power. There are pistons pumping and turbos spinning, but the fuel itself does not throw out carbon dioxide the way gasoline or diesel would. That distinction is the entire point of the project. JCB spent a reported $130 million on its hydrogen program, and the chairman, Lord Bamford, said the record proves hydrogen combustion works right now, at the highest level, using engines already rolling off the line.
From Blank Page to Record Car in 18 Months
Here is a detail that should not be possible. The whole Hydromax went from an idea to a record-breaking machine in just 18 months. The engines started life as 74-horsepower production units and got developed up to around 800 horsepower each. By June 2026 the finished car was sitting on a runway at RAF Wittering for testing, with the crew focused less on top speed and more on making every system, the engines, the hydrogen supply, the transmissions, the parachutes, the brakes, all behave the same way every single time.
Then the team took it apart, shipped it across the Atlantic, and rebuilt it in America. A week before the record, they ran it at Bonneville Speed Week with the engines dialed way down, to about 600 horsepower each instead of 800, and still went 368.347 mph. That run set a class record with the local timing association but did not count as an official world mark because of how the two events are regulated. When someone asked Green what kept him up at night, he did not mention the speed. He said it was the sheer extraordinary ambition of the engineering.
Twenty years after the diesel record, the same driver, the same salt, the same company, and a new fuel. Green called the car terrific, stable, strong, and fast. Coming from the only man who has ever gone supersonic in a car, that is about as high as praise gets.
