For a few years in the 1960s, the fastest man on wheels was a California hot-rodder named Craig Breedlove, a handsome former firefighter obsessed with speed and engineering. Working from his father’s garage in El Segundo, he built a jet-powered car, gave it a patriotic name – Spirit of America – and headed to Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats, where he broke the world land-speed record multiple times as he became the first person to officially cross the 400-, 500- and 600-mph marks.

His speed runs made him a national celebrity and inspired a Beach Boys song, “Spirit of America,” in which he was lionized by singer Brian Wilson as “a daring young man” playing “a dangerous game” – a reference to the risks faced by speed demons such as Mr. Breedlove, who once crashed into a lake, and his friend Donald Campbell, who died in 1967 while trying to break the world water-speed record.

Mr. Breedlove, who likened his record-breaking speed runs to “walking out on a limb to see how far you can go without breaking it and then retreating just in time,” was 86 when he died April 4 at his home in Rio Vista, Calif. He had cancer, said family spokeswoman Louise Ann Noeth, an author and public relations specialist.

As a 13-year-old in Los Angeles, Mr. Breedlove was so fascinated by cars that he persuaded his parents to help him buy a derelict 1934 Ford coupe for $75, on the condition that he not drive it until he got his license. The car needed plenty of work, but with help from his high school shop teacher, who donated a supercharger for the engine, he was soon competing at races in the Mojave Desert, where he set a course record when he was clocked at 148 mph.

The year he turned 21, in 1958, he traveled to Bonneville, where he got behind the wheel of a belly tank racer – a streamlined car made from a modified aircraft drop tank – and reached 236 mph.

Mr. Breedlove only wanted to go faster.

As he told it, he grew increasingly single-minded after hearing President John F. Kennedy declare in his 1961 inaugural address, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

“I knew I couldn’t go to the moon or cure cancer, but I did know how to go real fast,” he told the New York Times in 2012, “and the most patriotic thing I could think of was to take the unlimited land-speed record away from the British.”

An Englishman, John Cobb, had held the record since 1947, going 394 mph across the Bonneville Salt Flats. (The record is determined by taking the average speed of two runs in opposite directions, to eliminate the effects of wind.) Mr. Breedlove thought he could go faster with help from a jet engine and spent $500 to acquire a surplus J47 turbojet, the same engine used in fighter planes such as the F-86 Sabre.

With help from friends including Walt Sheehan, a Lockheed engineer, he effectively designed a fighter jet without wings. The car ran on three wheels rather than four (there was some debate over whether it was an automobile or a motorcycle or something else entirely) and was sponsored by the Shell oil and Goodyear tire companies, which helped cover the reported $250,000 cost.

“It was handmade,” Mr. Breedlove told Sports Illustrated, “but I mean made with hand tools, a little file and a screwdriver.”

On Aug. 5, 1963, Mr. Breedlove dethroned the British, setting a new land-speed record of 407 mph. “I think I can go faster,” he said, and he made good on the prediction, returning to the salt flats over the next few years while battling rival driver Tom Green and two half-brothers, Walt and Art Arfons, who traded places in the record books with help from their own jet-powered cars.

Mr. Breedlove broke the 500-mph mark in October 1964, when he averaged 526 mph at Bonneville. A year later, he reached 600.6 mph while driving a new four-wheel version of the Spirit of America, dubbed Sonic I. His hold on the record was permanently loosened in 1970, when American driver Gary Gabelich went 622 mph.

By then, sponsors were reluctant to back Mr. Breedlove’s quest to go faster, deciding that the risk of injury and death was too great.

Mr. Breedlove had already survived a near-catastrophic accident during his record-setting run in 1965, when his braking parachutes snapped and he burned through his brakes. To avoid crashing into a canal, he tried to make a U-turn, by his account, only to run into a line of wooden utility poles. “I thought they might slow me,” he told the Los Angeles Times decades later, “but I clipped them off like they were toothpicks.”

His car flew over a berm and into a lake. Just before he hit the water, he unlatched the top of the vehicle, enabling him to pull himself out and swim to shore. Video footage of the event showed him cracking jokes within minutes of his support team’s arrival. “What a ride!” he said. “For my next trick … I’ll set myself on fire.”

He also had a question for his colleagues: How fast had he gone?

“I kept thinking,” he later recalled, looking back on the moment he realized he was headed into the water and facing potential death, “if I have to go, I may as well have the record.”

Norman Craig Breedlove was born in Los Angeles on March 23, 1937, and grew up in the Mar Vista neighborhood. Both his parents worked in Hollywood, his father as a special effects technician and his mother as a seamstress turned dancer. They separated when Mr. Breedlove was young.

At age 17, he married Margaret Toombs, with whom he soon had three children. He worked as a welder and a firefighter in Costa Mesa to support the family before quitting to focus on the land-speed record, a pursuit that led to the collapse of his marriage.

His second wife, Lee Roberts, was more amenable to his racing, supporting him with money from her job as a carhop at a drive-in restaurant. Mr. Breedlove persuaded her to get behind the wheel of Spirit of America – by one account, it was a gambit designed to block a rival driver from speeding across the salt flats that day – and in 1965 she went more than 308 mph, gaining the title of fastest woman in the world.

Mr. Breedlove later worked in real estate while keeping an eye on the land-speed record, dreaming of someday becoming the first person to officially break the sound barrier in a car. That achievement went to British driver Andy Green, who set the current record, 763 mph, while racing across the alkali flats of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert in 1997.

By then, Mr. Breedlove had invested in building a new five-wheeled Spirit of America, a dart-shaped car that he believed was capable of going more than 800 mph. He reached 675 mph before skidding and tipping over in the Black Rock Desert, and later sold the damaged car to millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett, who died in a plane crash in 2007 before he could make a run at the speed record.

In 2003, Mr. Breedlove married his sixth wife, Yadi Figueroa. She survives him, as do two children, Norm and Dawn; a half sister; five grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren. Another daughter, Chris Breedlove, died in 2008.

Mr. Breedlove was inducted into the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America in 1993, the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in 2000 and the Automotive Hall of Fame in 2009. By then he was in his 70s, and while he was no longer in the driver’s seat, he was still looking to organize one last speed run with his friends, hoping to lead another team to the top of the record books.

“We do it for the same reason Columbus sailed off to explore an ocean that people told him dropped off at the edge,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1997, explaining what drove him and his colleagues. “It’s man’s nature to explore. We’re modern-day explorers.”