Earth, Wind, and Fire: Bonneville Speed Week Gets Elemental for 2021

The Bonneville Salt Flats is a place for the farsighted. Near Wendover, Utah, its intimidating landscape can only be crossed by those with enough vision to imagine founding a city on the other side of a seemingly endless expanse of white salt—and land speed racers who can see a record nine miles away.

Bonneville Speed Week 2021, which kicked off last Saturday and ends Friday, began with more of a stumble than a triumphant stride. Winds lifted clouds of the soft gray silt that lines the outer banks of the salt flats and turned the entire lake bed into a giant, hazy, stinging blasting cabinet. Port-a-potties tumbled. Tarps and awnings went airborne. Even the slim orange flags that mark the boundaries of racetrack and pits bent to the ground in supplication. Then came the fires. Not on the flats themselves—there's nothing there to burn—but nearby in the dry mountains. Smoke filled the valley, filtering the clean desert light into the greasy orange of a chili-dog wrapper and hiding not just the horizon but even the cones a few feet out from the starting line in a smudge of ash. These weren't record-setting conditions for the nearly 500 racers who made the trip this year, but Bonneville revels in unpredictability.

By Saturday afternoon the smoke had cleared, and by the end of the day there had been 220 passes down the track, and 29 vehicles went fast enough to set records. Come Sunday, they'd make a backup run and see if they'd make it official. Setting an official Southern California Timing Association record isn't as simple as just going fast once. After a run that qualifies as faster than an existing record, the car goes to an impound yard and must make a second run the next day. The two runs are averaged, and the result, if it's fast enough, is the new record. It sounds easy enough, but there were also crashes—three on Sunday serious enough to send drivers to the hospital. Chasing records remains a dangerous pursuit.

Spend some time watching the live feed, and you'll see everything from former stock cars and vintage roadsters to Mercedes Gullwings and elongated superbikes. Land speed racing encourages mutations and evolutions in both powerplant and chassis. This year, there are multiple teams running electric vehicles and hunting for a chance to put their names in the record books. There's also a snowmobile team running a long, tracked machine powered by a Yamaha R1 engine that's force-fed by two inline superchargers. Yeah, it's wild.

Bonneville racing is so strange. It seems to pop out of the salt fully formed, like some sort of fuel-hungry fungus. Of course, it doesn't. Bill Lattin, chairman of the SCTA Bonneville Nationals, told us the SCTA crew and volunteers had been out there for more than a week before the start of the competition, setting up tech inspection and the impound yard for the record-setters, as well as dragging and preparing the race courses. "After the wind flattened everything, even friends were here picking stuff up," he said. "So, that was unexpected, but mostly we're excited because the salt is so smooth. It hasn't been this way in a long time, and if Mother Nature cooperates with us, we're going to see some records fall."