This is the Most Dangerous World Record to Beat

In the long history of insane people trying to one-up another in stupidly dangerous world records, one of these records stands above all the others as being the most dangerous. That record is the water speed world record. How fast you can make yourself move while on the water. The current world record was set in 1978, and every official attempt to beat it since has resulted in the person attempting it getting themselves killed. But what makes the attempt so dangerous? It should be pretty obvious if you watch a video of one of these attempts. Traveling at insanely fast speeds of several hundred miles per hour, on flimsy boats on a lake is a recipe for disaster waiting to happen. But before the current world record in 1978 was set, the record was already an elusive and deadly prize. Going fast on the water for most of history wasn't really an exciting feat, until we figured out how to put gasoline engines on boats. In the 1930s, the competition for the water speed record was in a tight race that kept going back and forth between an American and British team of idiot geniuses. The first casualty in pursuit of the record was perhaps the ironically named Englishman Sir Henry Seagrave, who in 1930 set the world record at 99 mph (159 kph). Apparently unsatisfied with not breaking past 100 mph (160 kph), he set out immediately afterwards on the same day to try again, but this time his boat struck an object in the water, which caused it to capsize and killed both him and his co-pilot. The record continued to go back and forth between the Americans and the British, until a guy named Malcolm Campbell (bet you'll never guess which of the countries he belonged to), locked the record in place in 1939, before that big global war kind of stopped people from trying for a while. Once the 1950s came around though, and people started figuring out how to put jet engines on their boats. The fatalities of people trying REALLY began to skyrocket. An Englishman named John Cobb wanted to be the first person to break the 200 mph (320 kph) speed barrier, and built a jet-powered boat called Crusader to do it. In 1952, out on Loch Ness, he managed to get up to 210 mph (337 kph), and achieved his goal and the record. But the boat's front plane unfortunately collapsed, which caused the boat to instantly disintegrate, causing Cobb to die from shock. Two years later, in 1954, the pursuit of the record would claim its next life. The Italian Motorboat Federation was offering a 5,000,000 lira price to any Italian that could beat the record. So, two Italian businessmen built a piston engine hydroplane named Laura 3. Traveling across a lake in Northern Italy, the boat was going fast at 190 mph (306 kph), but ultimately became unstable and the pilots lost control of it. The boat somersaulted through the water and threw one of the pilots out, which didn't result in him surviving. Following these disasters, a guy named Donald Campbell, son of the previously mentioned Malcolm Campbell, decide to break the record himself. Learning many lessons from Cobb and the Italian designers, he created a new craft called K7 that returned to the classic 3-pointer design that was built entirely out of metal to increase rigidity. Over the next 9 years, Campbell and K7 went on to break the world record 7 times! Finally getting up to a speed of 276 mph (445 kph) in 1967. He became the most prolific water speed record breaker of all time, and he could have retired then. But for whatever sad reason he didn't. He wanted to go even further and equipped K7 with even more powerful engines to try and beat his own record for an 8th time! He sped across the lake at an average speed of 295 mph (475 kph), and whether he got cocky or just reckless, he decided to go back across the lake immediately before the water had settled down. On this return run, K7 began to lose stability and Just 400 meters short of the finish line, K7's nose lifted beyond it's critical pitch, took off, somersaulted, and smashed into the water, nose first, breaking up as it cartwheeled across the surface. It took two weeks of searching just to discover the wreckage. But it wasn't until 33 YEARS later in 2001 that Campbell's body was actually discovered! The world record that I mentioned at the beginning of this video was finally set in 1978 by the Australian Ken Warby. He managed to get an average speed of 317.6 mph (511 kph) during his run. He survived to talk about it. But the next two attempts to beat his record did not. The first was by an American name Lee Taylor who had already gotten himself into a horrible crash that nearly killed him over a decade previously. Determined to take the record from Warby though, he scheduled his attempt for November 13, 1980 but when the day arrived he found the conditions on the lake unfavorable and cancelled. Not wanting to disappoint the spectators and media though, he went on a test run anyway and hit a swell which caused the boat to start violently shaking at the high speeds. The boat ended up collapsing into the water which claimed Taylor's life in front of everybody who had gathered to watch him. The final official attempt at breaking the record was in 1989, when Craig Arfons raced in his fiberglass Kevlar boat that's probably an Xbox Live gamer tag somewhere named Rain X Challenger. But like so many before him, his boat somersaulted at 300 mph (483 kph) and killed him. Ever since those two disasters, no official attempts have been made to break Ken Warby's record set back in 1978. But despite the high accident and fatality rate, the water speed record remains highly coveted, by both boat enthusiasts and racers.