Wingfoot Express

Wingfoot Express cockpit was located centrally, just behind the front axle, covered with a plexiglass canopy from in front of the driver's feet to behind his head. The front wheels were mounted within the bodywork barely further apart than the width of the engine, while the rear wheels were on outriggers and exposed to the air. Green estimated that the aerodynamic drag of the exposed rear wheels cost the car 20 miles per hour (30 km/h), but since his calculations indicated that they already had much greater speed available than they needed, this was not viewed as a problem. A small fin rose vertically at the tip of the car's nose.

Green figured 80% of the problem in creating a land speed record challenger was down to aerodynamics and the rest to pure power so his design featured the narrowest track practical and smaller wheels than most contemporaries were going for, in order to reduce frontal area to a minimum. Jet power was still new territory at this point in time but the benefits were already very apparent . Westinghouse J46 engines could be bought "on the surplus market for $400-$1000 each" and provided considerably more than the power Green calculated would be needed to push beyond 400mph. So Arfons acquired one.

With the design in place and the facilities to build the car, money, as always, was the stumbling block. A presentation was made to Good Year ,who were already backing Craig Breedlove's new SPIRIT OF AMERICA. Arfons and Green, armed with just a blackboard and chalk,offered their theories to a board of 13 executives and among other things they used aerodynamic calculations to predict that Bluebird CN7 was good for a maximum of around 400mph, Doc. Ostich's FLYING CADUSEUS for about 360 and their own project for exactly what Craig Breedlove was claiming, 480mph. "I pointed out that Breedlove's car was a fine example of aerodynamic design,in fact slightly superior to ours, but WINGFOOT had fewer square feet of frontal area and Breedlove's car weighed almost twice as much". Aside from the weight difference was the small matter of available power.The J46 engine put out some 7000lbs of thrust with afterburner compared to Craig's 4400lbs.