JCB Hydromax Land Speed Record - The fastest story we’ve ever told

On 11 August 2026, on the white expanse of the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, a hydrogen-powered streamliner called JCB Hydromax crossed the measured mile and set a new 406.320mph FIA world land speed record for a hydrogen-powered vehicle. Days earlier, during Speed Week, the same car had already set an SCTA record at 368mph.

We Are Nameless has been part of this project from the very beginning — supporting JCB as its automotive PR agency with the press office, influencer partnerships and content, from the first planning meetings through to the moment the timing beams confirmed the number. Now that the salt has settled, we wanted to put a few things on record ourselves.

First, the engineering

Let’s be clear about whose achievement this is. JCB’s engineers took a hydrogen combustion engine — technology built for diggers and loaders, designed to work hard in muddy fields and dusty quarries — and asked it to do something nobody had done before. Then they built a car around it, refined it, tested it, shipped it across the Atlantic, and ran it flat out across a dry lake bed at over 400mph.

That’s a proper, old-fashioned feat of British engineering, delivered by a team who talked about it the way engineers do: quietly, precisely, and only once the numbers were in. With Andy Green — the fastest man on earth — at the wheel, the whole project carried a kind of understated seriousness that made our job both easier and more humbling. When the substance is this good, you don’t need to inflate anything. You just need to make sure the world is watching when it happens.

Congratulations to every single person at JCB who designed, built, tested and ran that car. What you’ve achieved — for hydrogen, and for British engineering — will be talked about for decades.

Our part in it

Our role was to help tell the story, and to make sure it travelled. That meant a PR campaign built around the project’s real milestones rather than manufactured ones: the launch in May, when Hydromax was revealed to the world; the first dynamic tests at RAF Wittering in June, where the car found its legs on a runway in Cambridgeshire; the journey to Utah; and then the two record weeks at Bonneville — Speed Week and the SCTA record first, the FIA World Land Speed Record after it.

Across all of it, we ran the press office, built the influencer and creator partnerships, and produced and placed the supporting content — the films, the stills, the briefings, the early-morning updates from the salt. Bonneville is a beautiful place to work and an unforgiving one: the days start before dawn, the heat builds fast, and the story can change with a single run. Being trusted to manage that story, in real time, on a project of this scale, is not something we take lightly.

The results went further than we dared plan for. Coverage has now reached audiences in more than 75 countries, across national broadcast news, international wires, the specialist motoring and engineering press, and a creator community who brought the project to audiences no press release could reach. Hundreds of broadcast airings around the world carried the moment itself [AMBER: add one or two more hard numbers here if cleared — total reach, pieces of coverage, creator views]. For a story about a digger company and a gas, that’s remarkable — and it says everything about the strength of what JCB built. We’ve written up the full campaign in our JCB Hydromax case study.

The thank-yous

Projects like this don’t come along often. Most people who work in communications go a whole career without one. So we want to say some thank-yous properly.

To everyone at JCB: thank you for the opportunity, and for the trust. You let us into a project you’d been quietly building for years and treated us as part of the team from day one. It has been a privilege in the truest sense of the word.

To the journalists, broadcasters and content creators who covered Hydromax at every stage — from launch, through testing, to the records themselves: thank you. You asked good questions, you told the story with energy and care, and you turned a series of runs on a salt flat into a moment shared by millions. None of the numbers above happen without you.

To the team at Marketiers — Julian Fisher, David Oakley and Melissa Cruz — it has been a pleasure from start to finish. Collaboration between agencies can be complicated; this never was.

And to our own people: the We Are Nameless team who worked the timelines, the embargoes, the 5am starts and the shifting schedules with unfailing good humour. Particularly to Jules Tipler, whose effort, judgement and sheer graft ran through every stage of this campaign. Records get set by drivers and engineers; campaigns get delivered by people like Jules.

What it means

There’s a bigger story here than a number on a timing sheet, and it’s the one we suspect will matter most in the years ahead. Hydromax wasn’t built to sell speed. It was built to prove a point: that hydrogen combustion works, at the extreme edge of what any engine can be asked to do. If it can hold together at 406mph on the salt, it can power the machines that build our roads, our homes and our farms.

That’s the story we’ve spent the past months helping to tell, and it’s why the coverage travelled the way it did. Not because it was loud, but because it was true.

We’ll remember the number, of course. But mostly we’ll remember the people — on the salt at sunrise, in the workshops in Staffordshire, on the phones and in the edit suites — who made it happen. Thank you for letting us be part of something historic.

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We Are Nameless is the automotive PR agency behind JCB’s Hydromax land speed record programme — press office, influencer partnerships and content, from planning through to delivery.