Yes, you read correctly; I did a doubletake too when I first came upon this story. The North American Eagle team aims to break the British land speed record with a craft based on the chassis of an F-104 Starfighter:
A group of speed-crazed men from Pierce County wants to break the world land-speed record with a jet plane-turned-three-wheeled-vehicle they are building in a hangar in Spanaway… The vehicle has elements of a potential world record-holder: It’s a former Air Force plane re-engineered for subsonic speed, with a jet engine that generates 39,000 horsepower and solid aluminum wheels machined for desert surface.
This should prove to be quite interesting…
It brings to mind the decidedly less ambitious effort that Shaft and I came up with oh, about 15 years ago: to explode an F-104 Starfighter plastic model by strapping model rocket engines onto it and lighting different types of fuses to ignite it. It’s probably a good thing that you can’t ignite those engines with a flame, and as such Shaft and I have all 10 of our fingers. And to think that we didn’t even drink back then… 
