Although he was an accomplished race-car driver, Milliken's best-known feat behind the wheel of his Bugatti Type 35 was rolling the vehicle in a 1948 road race at Watkins Glen, New York.
The accident happened when he overtook a supercharged MG at 160 km/h approaching a turn known as ''thrill corner''. Millikin recalled in 2001: ''I managed to pass him, but it was so close to that corner and the brakes on the Bug are not the world's greatest. I lost it on the corner and spun out and hit the hay.''
He emerged from his flipped car unscathed. The turn has been known as ''Milliken's Corner'' ever since.
One of his successes associated with high-speed cars was his role helping to design a stunt for the 1974 James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun, starring Roger Moore.
For many years, Milliken worked as a senior engineer at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, a research facility in Buffalo, New York, associated with Cornell University. In the late 1960s, some of the scientists under Milliken's purview began running computer experiments on how to flip a car in midair using ramps. The researchers, using complex mathematical calculations, proved it was possible and invited a test driver to try it out.
The resulting barrel-roll move was employed by Moore's 007 secret agent persona during a car chase scene filmed in Thailand in a single take.
Milliken was born in Old Town, Maine, once known as the canoe-manufacturing capital of the world - hence his use of canoe wood in the early 1930s to build an aircraft. Today, the Milliken M-1 aircraft is in the collection of the Owls Head Transportation Museum in Maine.
In 1934, he graduated in mathematics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and after working at Boeing during World War II, he joined what became the Cornell Aeronautical Lab.
Milliken retired in 1976 as chief of the transportation research division and started a consulting business. He worked up until his death. In his spare time, he participated in more than 100 car races. He finished sixth in the 1947 Pikes Peak hill climb in Colorado, and in 2002 and 2007 drove his own radically designed MX-1 race car at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in England."
No more GPs at (the expanded) Watkins Glen.
Bill did the computer modeling for the Astro-Spiral jump for Jay Milligan’s thrill show in 1972. I met Jay Milligan (himself a NY native from Orchard Park) at the Fair in Danbury, CT in 1974. He was running the American Thrill Show. They had just completed filming of the “Man with the Golden Gun” where they did the stunt again.
I have the program in my hand right now with all the guys autographs and the story on the jump at the Houston Astrodome.
I wish I had seen the jump in person. Anyway, the show they put on in Danbury was quite a thrill for a 12 year old boy.