With safety standards as they are, it’s a record no one ever believed they’d see an attempt at again in this lifetime. But they say good things come to those who wait, and for legendary entertainer and octogenarian Captain Jack McClure, that wait was more than 40 years. And now, at the ripe age of 88, McClure is going take a legitimate crack at a mark he set way back in the golden years of drag racing when safety, insurance, and everything else took a backseat to men and women willing to put their lives on the line to fill the grandstands at drag strips around the country.

McClure, who brought himself and his original and infamous rocket-powered kart out of retirement just last fall for its first official runs down a drag strip in more than four decades, has struck a deal with the Aruba International Raceway Park Palomarga in Sint Nicolaas, Aruba to make full quarter-mile runs over the weekend of February 28th. That weekend also just happens to be McClure’s birthday weekend, so you could call it an 89th birthday celebration of sorts for the rocket racing legend who’s trying to speed up with age rather than slow down.

According to documented records, McClure set the record for rocket-powered karts back in 1973 at the famed and now-defunct Beeline Dragway in Arizona with a pass of 5.98-seconds at 213.27 miles per hour — that, after reportedly running out of fuel around the 1,000-foot mark and coasting across the finish line. Other runs, however, netted trap speeds in the 220 mile per hour vicinity.

Whether McClure can approach those kinds of performance remain to be seen. In shakedown runs at the South Georgia Motorsports Park in November, he clicked off a best of 4.73-seconds in the eighth-mile, shutting it down early to the tune of a 136 mile per hour speed.

We’ve reached out to McClure for comment on this big announcement, but it goes without saying that if you have any thoughts of vacationing in Aruba, February 28th might be a heck of a time to do it to perhaps witness something that hasn’t been done since Richard Nixon was in office.