ANNOUNCER: Bringing you the world for 20 years, this is CNN.</s>DON KNAPP, CNN CORRESPONDENT: The story takes place in the Blackrock Desert. It is an amazing place to look at. It's this perfectly flat, tabletop desert. Perfectly flat, that's how -- why they run the cars there, and surrounded by these beautiful mountains. There was Craig Breedlove, who was a long-time American hero with that beautiful high-speed car, and there were the Brits with their monster car with twin Rolls Royce engines just designed to do one thing: break the land speed record. Craig Breedlove just didn't have a chance against this powerful machine.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Oh, yeah my god. Oh, my god.</s>KNAPP: It was an incredible moment because -- and it took a couple of passes -- we were standing there with a live camera, and the camera had to pan 180 degrees from the far right, live, all the way to the far left. And the car went by us and it broke the sound barrier just about opposite us. I'd expected to hear a crack like you'd hear from an airplane, but you didn't hear it. It wasn't quite like that. And the car was so loud you could barely hear the sound barrier break. The record does hold today. And it will probably hold for a long time. It was just so incredibly difficult to break the sound barrier on land, because not only do you have to have the power and the machines, you have to have wheels that spin at these super high speeds without coming apart. It was a tremendous engineering feat.
CNN 20: World Land Speed Record Set, October 13, 1997