It was in 1898 that someone first went out and did something about the “need for speed.”
On a suburban Paris boulevard, Count Chasseloup-Laubat earned the title “fastest on earth,” after he drove his 36-horsepower chain-driven electric Jeantaud car a whopping 39.25 miles per hour and established the first land-speed record.
Last year, in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, Britain’s Andy Green drove the Thrust Super Sonic Car into the history books at the speed of sound, nudging past Mach 1 on land (about 761 m.p.h.) at 763 m.p.h.
You might think that snagging “bragging rights” as the world’s fastest would fulfill anyone. For Green, holding the World Land Speed Record wasn’t enough because the deed had not been done on “the salt”–the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. It’s a place so flat, so empty that you can see the curvature of the earth. A place so big you can spin out at 200 m.p.h. and finally come to a stop without having hit a thing. A place where courageous drivers have battled physics while flogging their speed machines for more than 60 years to win the velocity crown.
“You can do great things with a race car anywhere in the world,” said Green. “But what you do at Bonneville makes it that much more; it makes it special because of the tradition. I don’t want to be known as the only World Land Speed Record holder who hasn’t driven at Bonneville.”
Green will have to wait because the factory fellas never got the MG he was to drive last August into running condition.
The call of the salt goes back to 1925, when Utah auto racer Ab Jenkins, driving a Studebaker, won a bet by beating a train on the 120-mile run from Salt Lake City to Wendover, Utah. The contest was part of a celebration to the Victory Highway (now Interstate 80) at the Utah-Nevada border, that completed a highway for coast-to-coast automobile travel.
Located one mile northeast of Wendover, the salt flats, 150 square miles of the flattest, hardest racing surface around, were the next destination for Jenkins.
Considered God’s gift to straight-line acceleration, the flats gave Jenkins what land-speed racers call “salt fever,” an incurable urge to return again and again to see how fast and how long he could drive a car, motorcycle, even a tractor. An area once shunned by Conestoga wagon trains was embraced by the horseless carriage crowd.
Bonneville’s “golden age” began in 1935, when Sir Malcolm Campbell abandoned popular Daytona Beach, Fla., in favor of the flats. Driving his monster-size car, Bluebird, to a world land speed record–300 m.p.h.–Campbell was followed by countrymen John Cobb and Capt. George Eyston, who traded records until they had pushed the mark to 394 m.p.h.
At the time, hot rodders in southern California were organizing car clubs with such names as Gear Grinders, Sidewinders and Eliminators. The clubs banded together to form the Southern California Timing Authority (SCTA) in 1938. A volunteer group, the timing authority became responsible for setting up speed trials as well as conducting community service activities to improve the rodders’ image.
After World War II, land-speed racing really got moving. Running on dry lake beds, the enthusiasts’ “rods” were regularly exceeding 100 m.p.h. Stopping distances were a chief concern to the timing authority. The lake beds’ alkali dirt surface crumbled easily. If a car suffered a blowout, the wheel could dig in the earth, causing the vehicle to roll, usually with tragic results. There were no roll cages, no parachutes. Safety gear was little more than a pair of goggles over a leather aviator’s skull cap.
Bonneville meant salvation. The granite-like salt surface reduced the dangers associated with a blowout, and the great expanse meant that if the driver did lose control, the car was more likely to spin than tumble.
The SCTA held its first event there in August 1949. Dubbed “SpeedWeek” it was seven days of going as fast as one dared, or as quick as your machine could.
The 50th anniversary of SpeedWeek was celebrated in August with more than 200 cars, motorcycles, semis and even a motor home vying for honors in 350 classes. In six days the racers clicked off 1,520 runs down a seven-mile straight-line course to ink 77 new auto and 33 motorcycle certified speed records.
The golden anniversary was celebrated with an array of hand-crafted racing machines, the best that backyard engineering has to offer, competing in several categories. The Roadster, most often a 1932 Ford stripped of its fenders and described as a “flying brick” because it lacks aerodynamic styling, is the oldest, most revered Bonneville class. Lakesters, vehicles with slippery-styled bodies but naked wheels, are as popular as curvaceous streamliners hiding all their running gear under a voluptuous pencil-shaped skins.
The racing architects who created these machines fabricated lacy steel chassis into which horsepower conductors fit with finely tuned engines assembled with high-performance parts.
The 240-m.p.h. diesel big rig shocked the senses every time it ran. The mini-motorhome generated guffaws from several thousand spectators as it tried to spit out a triple-digit speed. It made it only to 99 m.p.h.
The racers do it for nothing more than a timing slip and, maybe, a trophy.
Plenty of youngsters, grandparents and other relatives populate Bonneville’s Pit City. Some come just to watch, arriving in customized street rods, but it’s hard not to pitch in. It is not uncommon to have two or three generations driving the same car in different classes with different motors.
Classes are divided by engine size, body style and fuel type. With one vehicle you could set records in two classes by merely switching from gasoline to nitromethane, a blend of racing fuel nicknamed “liquid dynamite.”
Participants come from all over the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, Canada, England and Japan to streak across their mecca. They reserve more than 1,000 hotel rooms a year. The local market stays open around the clock.
“We’ve come to understand the needs of the land-speed racer and we work hard to accommodate them,” said timing authority President Mike Cook. “All the credit goes to the all-volunteer staff of workers and officials who all pulled in the same direction to make this meet spectacular.”
It takes more than 100 people to stage a Bonneville SpeedWeek. Everything from dragging smooth the course, to setting up toilets, pit and parking areas, food concessions, security, ambulances, vehicle safety inspections and registrations and installing and calibrating timing lights gets done in 72 hours before the vehicles show up at the starting line.
The land-speed racing capital of the world rises and falls in 10 intense, blistering days every year. (As long as the Flats are dry, however, anyone can take a spin on them at any time.)
Mike Waters, chairman of Bonneville Nationals Inc., the organizing arm for the event, said: “Our little `backyard’ event took on a life of its own (by Saturday). We hoped it would be special, but it came out the other end magnified beyond anything we could hope for.”
Waters also noted that the weather was perfect, and the salt racing surface was the best it had been in years.
Adding a special patina to this year’s proceedings was the attendance of 42 of the 49 racers from the first event. Salt racing is an elixir. The years have not dimmed their determination to go fast, then faster and faster, though each is eligible for Social Security. A few of the “Speed Wrinkles” brought race cars, making high-speed passes alongside dozens of rookie “Salt Virgins.”
In 1949, Alex Xydias and Dean Batchelor set top speed at the meet: 189 m.p.h.–38 m.p.h. faster than any hot rod had ever gone. Called the So-Cal Speed Shop Special, it was built on Model T frame rails and the fully enclosed, aluminum body made it the first streamliner of its kind.
This year, white-haired Don Vesco of Temecula, Calif., who is blind in one eye, was the fastest of the meet overall, registering 405 m.p.h. with “Turbinator,” a turbine-powered streamliner he hopes will topple the World Land Speed Record for wheel-driven cars. (Green holds the unlimited record; the thrust of his car powered the wheels. In wheel-driven cars, the power has to go through a transmission. Vesco is seeking the wheel-driven record regardless of class, which is now held by Al Teague, of Orange, Calif., at 409.496 m.p.h.)
“It was neat to see the ’49ers come back,” said Radio Salt disc jockey Ron Christensen. “Some of them are still racing competitively. How many sports can boast that?”
KSALT is SCTA’s private radio station, broadcasting over 1610 AM at speed trial events. It provides up to the moment information on the cars running.
Many people wanted a picture with Bob Higbee, “Mr. Salt” to chief timer Glenn Barrett.
Higbee has attended every Bonneville meet since 1949. Listed as chief starter in the program, he is also a SCTA board member and part of the team that prepares the course. “The racers are my family,” he said. “I do what I can to see that they are safe.”
On race days, Higbee will be the last to snug down the safety harness, check the helmet chin strap and make a final inspection before letting the car go onto the course. Racers have lost count how many lives he has saved by catching something they forget.
All the racers strive to earn a membership in the 200 Mile Per Hour Club for those who set a class record at more than 200 m.p.h. Almost 400 racers belong to the club, begun in 1952.
“I believe character is built by overcoming challenges and anxiety, by pushing yourself to your limit,” said Sue Christophersen, of Detroit.
Driving a 1982 Camaro knocking out 650 plus horsepower–six times the horsepower of the average grocery getter–she recorded a two-way average of 214 m.p.h., good enough to join five other “2 Club” women in the male-dominated rolls. (In international racing, a two-way average is achieved by going back over a record-breaking route twice in one hour. In the SCTA, the driver has to duplicate speeds within 10 percent twice in a meet.)
Christophersen came to the salt for the first time in 1994 while on her honeymoon and got put to work changing spark plugs for her husband. A couple of years later after lots of hard work and determination, she landed in the driver’s seat.
“The experience is exhilarating,” she said. “When you are done, you have a higher sense of self, of who you are, because of the accomplishment.”
Driving alone on the glistening saline surface, drivers renew that faith that lets common people accomplish extraordinary feats.
Consider Al Teague. A maintenance man with little money but loads of perseverance, Teague pumped the wheel-driven record to 409.496 m.p.h. in 1991. He orchestrated a rolling metamorphosis of the modest lakester he built in his mother’s garage into a magnificent streamliner. Powered by one supercharged engine, he squeaked by the three-decade record of the Goldenrod, a car with four normally aspirated engines.
When Teague fires up The Spirit of ’76, everyone watches and listens. The throaty, snarling exhaust crescendo pours out from the perfectly tuned engine. The controlled explosions trail the car for five miles, remaining audible at the starting line long after Teague has shut down the engine, popped the parachutes and disappeared over the horizon. He is the hero of the salt.
Few Bonneville racers get sponsorships, leaving most to dig deep into their own pockets. But veterans acknowledge that the lack of “big money” is a major reason the sport has endured in its “pure” amateur form and ensures that the average person can still be competitive.
Just ask John Wright, Dave Brant and Randy Speranza of BWS Racing, a middle-age trio who turned a boyhood dream of racing on Bonneville into a successful reality. Dreamliner, a diminutive streamliner that began as model, using a Dustbuster with four peanut-can lids for wheels, now holds four class records, including being the world’s fastest single-cylinder car at 128 m.p.h.
“We studied all kinds of cars, talked to everyone who would talk to us and then Dave went to work fabricating the best of what we learned,” said Wright who drives the car. “If we can earn a place in the 200-m.p.h. Club we’ll be ecstatic.”
As the speeds at Bonneville mushroomed, the salt shrank. Many point to nearby potash mining as the villain, but scientific studies suggest that changing climate conditions also contribute to the destruction of one of the world’s most awe-inspiring natural wonders.
Save the Salt, a consortium of concerned salt supporters, comprising many land-speed racers, lobbied long and hard until the salt’s caretakers, the Bureau of Land Management acted.
Last winter, after years of arguing, the racers, government and private industry implemented a plan to resalinate the racers’ playground and nature’s jewel–one that can be seen by astronauts in orbit. The outlook is guarded, but hopeful, as this year’s surface translated into higher speeds, fewer spinouts or accidents and less serious injuries.
