After Campbell's achievement of the 300 mph land speed record with Blue Bird in 1935 he retired from the land speed record. Shortly afterwards he switched his attentions to the water speed record, at that time dominated by the AmericanGar Wood. Blue bird was designed by Fred Cooper and built by Fred Goatley of Saunders-Roe. The design was intended to be the smallest possible hull capable of carrying the Rolls-Royce R racing engine. Campbell had already used this engine in his Blue Bird car, and they had also been used in pairs in Segrave and Kaye Don's Miss England boats. Of the three individual R engines used by K3, one had previously run in Blue Bird and one in Miss England II. The most compact layout placed the engine behind the driver and relied on a front-mounted v-drive gearbox to reverse the direction of the drive shaft and increase the shaft revolutions 1:3 to 9,000 rpm. This gearbox, along with much of the mechanical design, was designed by Reid Railton who had previously designed cars for Campbell. Unlike Gar Wood's multi-engined monsters, Blue Bird was designed for a single engine, and the smallest possible craft to carry it. She was long with a beam of, compared to 38 feet for Miss America X. Her estimated top speed on paper was to be 130 mph. It was usual at this time for English hydroplanes to have their engines mounted as far astern as possible. In Cooper's usual style, the hull was wide and low, with a narrow, rounded, central superstructure. The engine was placed right back to the transom and the superstructure was extended rearwards in a fabric-covered overhanging conical nacelle. This rearward weight distribution encouraged planing, but could lead to some peculiar attitudes when setting off at slow speeds, as the whole boat appeared to be sinking by the stern. The displacement was only and the engine alone weighed. Construction was of plywood, although the attention paid to weight-saving was such that this was laminated to order from varying numbers of veneers, rather than sawn from factory-made standard sheets. The frames are formed of single-piece unjointed sheets of 7-ply, the hull skins of 5-ply and the deck of 6-ply. Even the engine bearers were made of a central plywood box girder. Reserve buoyancy in the event of an accident was provided by 36,000 ping pong balls, sewn into pillow cases.
Records
On 1 September 1937, at Lake Maggiore on the border between Switzerland and Italy, K3 set a record of 126.32 mph, breaking Gar Wood's previous 5-year-old record. The next day she improved this to 129.5 mph. Breaking the design speed of 130 would require another year, when on 17 August 1938 at Lake Hallwyl in Switzerland at 130.91 mph.
Ventnor "three pointer"
Despite these records, Campbell was dissatisfied with their small margin over the previous record. K3's hull was a single-step hydroplane, as already used for Miss England. This lifted half of the hull clear of the water, reducing drag upon it. A new idea from America was the "three point" hydroplane, where the forward hull is divided into two sponsons and the boat rides at speed on just these and the transom. This reduces the wetted area still further, while increasing stability at speed. It was not possible to convert K3 to this hull form, so Campbell began work on a whole new boat, K4, re-using the same engine.
Restoration
The original boat was restored at Filching Manor in East Sussex and is now in working order. The boat was stripped down and fully rebuilt using parts to the original standard, though the engine is a Rolls-Royce Meteor rather than the larger, supercharged Rolls-Royce R originally used. She ran on the regatta course at Henley-on-Thames during the Traditional Boat Festival on 18-19 July 2015.
