I first heard about the Bonneville Salt Flats well before the hot rod world considered it the Place Of Places. Back about a million years or so, when I was a tadpole, I read about some pioneers people heading to California, and they had to make sure they went north of the Great Salt Lake to avoid a place like until hell on earth. They were walking or on horseback or riding in wagons.
I first connected the salt flats with cars when Ab Jenkins started using the flats for land speed racing, and that was before there was much of a road between Salt Lake City and what would become Wendover, a train service place on the Nevada border. For more on the Jenkins era, check out a really good documentary called The Boys Of Bonneville. Buy that DVD!
Then I moved from the insular confines of windblown Santa Cruz, California to eastern Idaho. The salt was just a hop-skip to the south. And there were still pioneer wagon wheel ruts on the flats north edge. I got word from the car guys on the left coast that Wally Parks and some other SCTA wigs were going to look at the salt as a better place to run than the dry mud flats around southern California. So was born the best damn land speed racing in the world. Not the best surface, that is in Australia, just the best racing. Which was born out this past August at the annual Speedweek.
Simply put, if you consider yourself a sure-nuff hot rodder, you gotta put the annual salt Mecca on your bucket list. In years recent an adjacent potash mining company has been (illegally) relocating much of the salt flats surface as they flushed the potash from the underlying mud. Those of us around from the first of salt racing raised concerns about the salt going away every year, and finally an organization came about called Save The Salt (look 'em up on the net, and join their struggle). When I went to the first rod event in l949, the salt was so thick, and so hard, that you had to drill a hole it it to set a tent spike. Now yo can just scuff the thin salt surface to expose mud. Year after year, the hot rods ran east of Wendover. Following in the footsdteps of Jenkins and Malcom Campbell, et al. Some years the salt condition was great, other years it was atrocious, but it became the yearly trek of preference for a hardy bunch. Not enough accommodations, hot, a long way from much of anything...absolutely perfect for high speed automobile and motorcycle timed racing. But only racing against one's self. This year may have been the very best ever.
Last I heard there were over 500 entries, many of them introduced to the salt flats legends by car magazines. A growing percentage of this growing entry list is motorcycles. And all this has put pressure on the SCTA/Bonneville Nationals Incorporated to continually upgrade the operation. The pits are now huge, sometimes the trackside lineup of parked spectator vehicles stretches the full two miles from pits to starting line(s), and two more straightaway tracks were added this year (four total). This last has markedly increased the number of runs a racer can make, while dramatically reducing the clog of spectators at the starting line(s). And this year, the weather was much cooler, the speeds were therefore higher, the records were falling helter-skelter, and the course downtimes were minimal. In short, you shudda been there! You cudda had you got off your duff and started plans a year ago.
There are a number of big bombers over 400 mph now, and the efforts in the under 200 classes are getting intense, as more and more performance is coming from the imported four banger engines. For me, watching the tater-bug of Ron Main and George Poteet seem to effortlessly lay down a 440mph pass was the highlight. For a decade, Al Teague ran a single hemi engine to Herculean feats over 400 during the Eighties and Nineties, now comes Poteet to good-ol'-boy the mystical four bill as if it is just another run to the market. And serious talk of 500 is commonplace.
At the same time the racer crews are scrabbling for just one more mph, the street rod crowd is growing exponentially and their convergence on the (Stateline) Nugget casino parking lot has expanded from a half-dozen back a handful of years to now include Friday through Monday evenings. There are early arrivals for Thursday banter, and many streeters are beginning to arrive as late as Wednesday. This evening bash event has become an activity unto itself, and the badge of honor coating of salt is worn by the streeters all the way back to east overshoe by zealous hot rodders eager to proclaim their participation to the greatest racing event in the world.
This is a very magical time for hot rods in the land of speed, so start setting aside some plunder now for the 2012 activity. Just remember that accommodations can still be scarce during Speedweek and you may want to look at motorhomes or travel trailers, or the trusty old tipi. Or just hop a jet to Salt Lake City and get a tarp and sleeping bag. If you miss out in this era, you (and your posterity) will never forgive your oversight. Be forewarned!
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