Yahoo Autos Finishing Old Business on a 10,000-Year-Old Racetrack
From the November 2016 issue
Tom Hurley from Dallas has a 171-mph 1957 Chevy nicknamed “Old Stewball” that has a 632 big-block making 1150 horsepower. The week before the annual Bonneville Speed Week this past August, his crew evaporated.
One got in a motorcycle wreck; another bailed to stay home with an ailing wife. Well, thought Hurley, what the hell, and he loaded the car anyway, driving solo and nonstop the 1300 miles to the salt flats near Wendover, Utah. I, too, was at home thinking, well, what the hell, so I hitched a ride with friends from Hot Rod magazine to that ancient salt playa where so many greats have trod. Upon arriving, we found tacked to a board Hurley’s handwritten sign asking for volunteers. I called the number and learned that if you want to work at Bonneville, you have to act fast. Hurley already had a guy from Fort Worth, a guy from the Yukon Territory, and folks from England, France, and New Zealand pitching in. Because that’s Bonneville.
Speed Week is 68 years old, but the past two years have been washouts due to monsoonal summer rains that turned the five-foot-thick salt pan into unusable oatmeal. Every year, the salt rats wait out spring and summer with fingers crossed, hoping that the salt will be dry enough to race on by mid-August. Cancellation can happen at any moment, even the day before the event if Mother Nature is feeling particularly cruel. At the drivers’ meeting this year, I met Brenda Bowen, a University of Utah geology professor who has been studying the sodium-chloride playa and the altering effects of climate change and mining.
The 10,000-year-old salt flats are all about water, she said. In winter, they want lots of it in the form of briny groundwater below and smoothing rainwater above, then several months of hot, dry weather to bake the surface into a hard crust resembling white asphalt.
In recent years, the rains have come at the wrong time, and the groundwater has gone elsewhere, harvested by a commercial mining operation to the south. But the Southern California Timing Association has been working with the miners and various government agencies to hammer out a plan for the future. I expected to find an American racing institution on the verge of extinction but departed optimistic that the efforts to save it are real, if still entirely at the mercy of the changing weather.
Traffic cones on a race course at Bonneville Salt Flats during Speed Week
Meanwhile, the salt rats were overjoyed to be racing again, even if the crust was only a few millimeters thick in places. Danny Thompson, son of the late Indy 500 and drag-racing impresario Mickey Thompson, was trying to tie up a loose end dating to 1968. Back then, the elder Thompson was foiled by weather in setting a record with the twin-engine Challenger 2. The 400-mph car went into storage for the past four decades, during which Mickey Thompson was murdered in a case that went unsolved for 19 years. Danny eventually decided to drain all his worldly assets to rebuild Challenger 2, dumping in $2 million plus a smattering of private contributions, including a donated tow rig. And Danny did it on day two, setting a class record at 406.769 mph and writing the Thompson name permanently into the 400-mph club, which now swells to just 15 members.
Troy Trepanier, of Rad Rides by Troy, walked us through his new coffee-colored streamliner for the Mariani brothers, two California almond farmers and avid salt-flatters. The artistic perfectionism that has raised the cost of winning national hot-rod shows into the mid-six figures is now influencing Bonneville, the 900-hp Mariani streamliner being an exquisitely clean machine packed within a skeleton of beautifully fish-mouthed tubing.
We bumped into drag-racing royalty, Don “the Snake” Prudhomme, walking the starting line. He told me, “It used to be a big deal to get into Car and Driver,” and I hope it still is. As the Snake examined a black lakester with jutting pipes, the crew chief leaned into the cockpit and whispered to the guy who was about to go more than 250 mph, “Don Prudhomme is checking you out!” The driver seemed pleased.
Down in the pits of Speed Demon, the fastest car this year at 436.959 mph, famed engine magician Kenny Duttweiler showed us the computer traces from the last run, including a perfectly square tabletop created by 68-year-old owner George Poteet mashing the accelerator at the line and not lifting until the chutes. “We just have to build the traction control around George’s driving style,” Duttweiler said.
Later, I rode with Duttweiler in the push truck. At around 40 mph, two loud bangs from the pipes of Speed Demon’s twin-turbo 368-cube small-block indicated that Poteet was on it. The golden, finned syringe simply jetted off and disappeared. Still accelerating at over 400 mph, however, the engine let go. Blown head gasket. Duttweiler was philosophical. “It’s got five runs on it,” he said, meaning the circa-$50,000 V-8 had lived a long, useful life of roughly eight minutes. Because that’s Bonneville.
