Pendine's Speed Century: Records, a Death, and a Buried Car
Pendine Sands has been a proving ground for going fast since 1924, and the century since has left a stranger record than the mph figures alone suggest: a car buried on official instruction, later dug out of the same sand that hid it.
Three Cars, Three Years, One Beach
On 25 September 1924, Malcolm Campbell drove the Sunbeam 350HP car Blue Bird across Pendine Sands at 146.16 mph, setting the first land speed record run here. It stood for a year and a half. In April 1926, the Welsh engineer J.G. Parry-Thomas took it back at 171.02 mph, driving a car he had built himself: Babs, a rebuilt Higham Special originally constructed for the racer Louis Zborowski. Parry-Thomas had bought the wreck from Zborowski's estate for £125 after Zborowski's death and rebuilt it around a 27-litre Liberty V12 aero engine — a war-surplus unit that Wikipedia's infobox rates at 450 hp, though other published sources on the same specification give a considerably higher number; the sheet behind this page cannot settle which is correct. Whatever its true output, Babs was, by Wikipedia's account, the largest-capacity racing car ever to run at Brooklands, and it was fast enough to take the record on a beach, not a banked circuit.
Campbell answered in February 1927, reaching 174.22 mph in his second Blue Bird. Parry-Thomas went back out almost immediately to reclaim it. On 3 March 1927, running at around 170 mph, Babs crashed. Parry-Thomas was killed — the first driver ever to die chasing the land speed record. Three record changes, two men, one beach, in under three years. That is the entire founding myth of Pendine's speed era, and it ends in a fatality rather than a trophy.
One further attempt was planned for later that year. On 26 November 1927, the Italian driver Giulio Foresti crashed his car Djelmo during a test run at Pendine, destroying it completely and ending, for good, the run of headline record attempts on this stretch of sand.
What Happened to Babs
The response to Parry-Thomas's death was not to memorialize the car. After the inquest, Babs's seats were slashed, the glass in its instrument dials was smashed, and the wreck was buried in the dunes at Pendine following the inquest. This was closer to punishment than preservation — an attempt to close the book on the beach's one fatality by putting the physical evidence in the ground and not marking the spot.
It stayed there for decades. Owen Wyn Owen, an engineering lecturer, eventually excavated and restored it, in what became his best-known project and one that drew worldwide attention. Wikipedia's page on Owen states the car had lain buried for 40 years before he began the work; other sources describing the same excavation give a slightly higher figure, and this page cannot resolve the discrepancy from the research behind it. Either reading puts the recovery decades after the crash — long enough that the sand, not any deliberate act of preservation, is what kept the wreck intact.
The reversal is the point. Pendine's own authorities tried to erase Babs: gut its interior, bury the evidence, end the story. What a tidal beach did instead, without anyone planning it, was preserve the wreck until someone was curious enough to dig it up. Once restored, Babs did not stay a buried secret — it became the single artifact most people associate with Pendine, ahead of any of the three men who actually set records here. The tourist-facing version of this history tends to read as a clean story of restoration and rediscovery. The uncomfortable part is what came first: a dead man's car was mutilated and hidden after the inquest into his death, and it took forty-odd years and one engineer's initiative to reverse that decision.
The Record Didn't End in 1927 — It Moved On
Pendine's use as a speed-record venue did not stop with Parry-Thomas's death, even if the great 1924-1927 duel did. In June 2000, Don Wales — Malcolm Campbell's grandson — set the UK electric land speed record at Pendine, reaching 137 mph in Bluebird Electric 2, a direct family echo of the original Blue Bird runs. On 21 July 2015, the 90th anniversary of Campbell's first Pendine record, Wales returned to drive the fully restored original Blue Bird at the beach.
More recent records have come from outside the traditional motorsport world entirely. On 12 May 2018, a home-built car nicknamed the "wooden shed" — an Audi RS4 twin-turbo engine installed in a wood-clad metal frame — reached 101 mph. The very next day, 13 May 2018, Guernsey businessman Zef Eisenberg set a new sand speed record of 201.5 mph on a supercharged Suzuki Hayabusa motorcycle, the first time any wheeled vehicle had exceeded 200 mph at Pendine. In 2019, Eisenberg went further still, reaching 210.332 mph in a modified Porsche 911 and breaking both the flying mile and flying quarter records on the same day — the fastest confirmed speed recorded on this sand. Pendine has also drawn celebrity record attempts: on 7 May 2015, actor Idris Elba broke the historic "Flying Mile" UK land speed record originally set by Campbell, recording 180.361 mph in a Bentley Continental GT Speed.
A Beach That Stopped Being Anyone's to Use Freely
The record-breaking era took place on a beach that, at the time, was open. That changed permanently during the Second World War, when the Ministry of Defence acquired the Pendine range land in 1940 to develop wartime weapons and train troops for the Normandy landings. The MOD, through its contractor QinetiQ, still owns and controls the majority of Pendine Sands today, and the range has since been used to trial aircraft ejector seats, for drone testing, and at one stage for Hercules transport aircraft "touch and go" landings. All vehicle access to the beach was banned outright between 9 July 2004 and May 2010 on safety grounds before cars were allowed back. Driving here today, once free to any visitor, costs £2,000 a day and requires prior permission arranged through Carmarthenshire's local authorities.
The speed-record history and the access history are the same story told twice. A beach famous for the freedom to go as fast as anyone could manage is now a place where going anywhere by vehicle at all takes paperwork, a fee, and — for most of the working week — permission from a landlord that isn't the public.