It was the summer of 1998, and a young Andrew Brilliant was about to embark on the single galvanizing three-digit large ride of his life. With a friend, the two put together a Suzuki GSX-R 750 sport bike in the garage, complete with fully-built engine, big carburetors, nearly 900cc of displacement, and "a lot of nitrous," as Brilliant puts it.

The bike went 208.8mph with Brilliant aboard. He remembers realizing afterward how the differences in air pressures around his head had sucked the snot out of his nose and spread it across his face.

"That thing was a hell of a ride," he recalls. "Some things were a little crude, like the lack of a throttle lockout for the nitrous. You pretty much had to punch it in high gear and stay in it no matter what."

Most importantly, Brilliant's 200-plus adventure instilled in him an insatiable desire to go that fast again, to experience what he describes as the peace that comes only from hurtling across terra firma at ludicrous speeds.

A bona-fide gear head from his early years, Brilliant began work on the Eclipse in 2003, with the aim of taking the soft top out to Bonneville to set a land speed record, while still keeping it streetable. Around the same time, he began hanging out with the guys in Douro Oni, a group of purists based out of the Bay-area in California devoted to performance tuning and auto sport. With their help, and his personal initiative, Brilliant transformed his Spyder into an impressive feat of engineering.

The collection of modifications is staggering (see below). Much of it centers around a stroker turbo 4G64 power plant assembled by Magnus Motorsports, the same guys that do sport compact drag racer Brent Rau's 4G63 mills. The 2.4L Magnus motor initially created more than 640 wheel horsepower from 5,000 to the 8,000rpm red line, 500 lb.-ft. of torque by 4,500, and 660 lb.-ft. by 5,000.

The bullet is housed in a specially prepped chassis that has been set up like Dennis Grant's five-time championship winning SCCA autocross Eagle Talon. Grant is the first Canadian ever to win an SCCA ProSolo Class Championship and a ProSolo Challenge Championship.

It would be exceedingly tidy to say the project came together smoothly and Brilliant has earned his record, but life seldom works out that way. There have been admitted setbacks in putting together the Eclipse.

For example, it took seven engines to get to the working combo he has now. Brilliant had a mega-high-dollar cylinder head that turned out to actually make less power. Almost every single component that isn't stock on that car had to be redone because of poor quality in aftermarket parts or bad design. A lot of things that were done to the car are pioneering, things that nobody else had done at the time.

In one specific instance, Brilliant discovered that the extreme heat generated by long-distance acceleration, in combination with the higher silica content of certain aftermarket pistons, causes the pistons to expand so much they would impact the cylinder bores. To deal with this, he had to either run the motor way more loose than Wiseco recommended, or use a different piston.

"Imagine the kind of learning curve with $10,000 motors getting burned up like that, seven times," Brilliant laments. "I wanted to give up so many times. Losing a motor is the worst disaster."

He persisted, though, and in 2007 found himself on the hallowed salt flats of Bonneville, the home of the fastest vehicles on the planet, getting ready to fulfill a dream and contest the Production Supercharged F/PS mark of 221.4mph in his convertible, daily-driven Eclipse. Although there is no class to certify this, many of the old timers at Bonneville told Brilliant his may have been the fastest open-top car to traverse the flats.

Brilliant unfortunately missed the record that year by a miniscule 0.6mph, but the close call just made him want it more. The Spyder has spent most of 2008 in development, Brilliant working on traction control and a bit of aerodynamics (the car had all stock aero in '07). The power ante has also been upped, to 687whp and 660 lb.-ft. of torque, and a bevy of further mods waits in the wings.

We've got a strong suspicion Brilliant is on the threshold of making that record his. With four-and-a-half years building the car, and mild testing already revealing the vehicle has achieved well in excess of the record, it's pretty much just a question of when, not if. Hopefully this time it won't be as mucusy as his first trip over 200mph.

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