Category: Bonneville Speed Trials

Bonneville Salt Flats sign stolen – Jordan Miller @TheSaltLakeTribune

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The Bureau of Land Management’s Salt Lake Field office reported that the Bonneville Salt Flats welcome sign has been stolen.

According to a Twitter post from the BLM, the sign was discovered stolen on June 11. The Bonneville Salt Flats, located in Tooele County, are listed as “one of Utah’s most iconic landscapes,” with 30,000 acres of hard salt crust on the western edge of the Great Salt Lake Basin.

On June 11, BLM Salt Lake Field Office discovered the Bonneville Salt Flats sign had been stolen. If you have info to help locate it, contact (801)977-4387| utslmail@blm.gov. Theft of federal property: Class A misdemeanor punishable by up to 12 months in prison/fines up to $1,000 pic.twitter.com/AHCp07cnCK— Bureau of Land Management Utah (@BLMUtah) June 16, 2021

Individuals can report any information they may have on the theft to 801-977-4387. The crime is classified as a Class A misdemeanor, punishable by up to 12 months in prison with fines up to $1,000.

Rescued from rust, this Torino Talladega hits the salt with NASCAR power – Brandan Gillogly @Hagerty

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A former road and oval-track racer, Larry Wilson decided to move to a racing discipline with less wheel-to-wheel contact. Land speed racing seemed appealing and, as a fan of ’60s muscle, he decided to search for a classic car that could scratch his racing itch and get his family involved as well. Having grown up owning Falcons, Mustangs, and Corvettes, Wilson was quite familiar with compact performance cars. Although he admired Ford’s larger performance and muscle cars, he’d never owned one. For this venture, though, they seemed like the perfect cars.

Wilson is old enough to remember Ford’s NASCAR homologation cars and Mopar’s winged response. The pointed noses and tall wings of the Superbird and Charger Daytona may have brought superspeedway success, but they didn’t win over the hearts and minds of new car buyers. That’s where Wilson thinks Ford got it right.

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“You’re racing against something that isn’t human:” a short virtual film festival focused on all things Bonneville – Daniel Strohl @Hemmings

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Bonneville’s one of those places where, once you see it, you can’t get it out of your head. You could travel the world and not feel that you’ve ever really left home until you set foot there. You come away from the place transformed, with your perspective on horizons and scale and time absolutely demolished. You begin to reconsider what your limitations truly are.
And, it’s been said, nobody can take a bad photo at Bonneville. So it’s little surprise that documentary makers have flocked to Bonneville over the years in search of good stories and have come away with not only the stories they’re looking for, the lingering perfect-light shots they’d hoped to get, but also contemplative pieces full of prose and humanity.
There’s probably an entire film festival worth of documentaries that we could highlight in the wake of this year’s Bonneville Speed Week. So let’s do it.

Save the Salt presses Utah legislature for key funding for Bonneville restoration program – Daniel Strohl @Hemmings

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In federal and even state budgets, $1 million isn’t really that much — maybe enough to pave a couple miles of road — but when a state needs to cut as much as $2 billion from its budget, every dollar becomes imperiled, which is why representatives from the Save the Salt Coalition have started to urge Utah lawmakers to keep in the state’s budget the $1 million they previously set aside for a program designed to restore the Bonneville Salt Flats with more than 1 million tons of reclaimed salt per year.
“We’re optimistic (the funds) will stay there,” said Stu Gosswein, the senior director of federal government affairs for the Specialty Equipment Market Association. “We just wanted to take the opportunity to reinforce that we have this Restore Bonneville program.”
The program, estimated to cost $50 million over 10 years, will essentially pick up where a previous five-year pilot salt replenishment program left off when it ended in 2002. According to a fact sheet about the Restore Bonneville program that Gosswein shared, the pilot program transferred an average of 1.2 million tons of salt to the racing surface of the Bonneville Salt Flats per year via a brine solution, leading to a thicker salt crust and “improved” brine aquifer beneath the crust.
Intrepid Potash, the nearby mining company with a Bureau of Land Management lease to mine the salt flats, continued that pilot program voluntarily from 2005 to 2012, returning about 380,000 tons of salt per year. The BLM then mandated Intrepid to continue replenishment in 2012, after which the company started to return almost 600,000 tons of salt per year

Check Out This Flathead-Swapped Mustang Land Speed Record Holder – TORSTEIN SALVESEN @HotCars

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The Flathead ‘Stang went on to Bonneville and set a world record for the XF/BFALT class by reaching 142.822 miles per hour!

The current crop of Mustangs from Ford has definitely set a new standard for power and performance within the model’s many years of production. And with companies like Roush and Shelby American unveiling pumped-up versions, the potential for serious domination on the track and on the streets seems almost limitless.

But the Mustang has also been a favorite for backyard builders and home mechanics to live out their dreams of wrenching on epic builds. Case in point is a Fox Body Mustang land speed record holder that’s featured on Engine Swap Depot with a turbocharged flathead V8 under the hood.

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Where Cars Try to Hit Mach 1, the Salt of the Earth Is Crumbling – Paul Stenquist @NewYorkTimes

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Where Cars Try to Hit Mach 1, the Salt of the Earth Is Crumbling

The Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah have hosted speed chasers for decades, but the course is distressed. An advocacy group has a plan, but not the money.

Credit…Pete Farnsworth Collection

Not even 30 years after Karl Benz built what is said to be the first automobile, Teddy Tetzlaff climbed into a Blitzen Benz racecar and blasted across the snow-white surface of the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, clocking in at 142.8 miles per hour and setting an unofficial land-speed record.

This 1914 effort certainly generated publicity for Tetzlaff, a California-born racer, and the German automaker, Benz & Cie, that built his car, but the locale was most likely a mere footnote at the time.

The automotive legacy of the salt flats wasn’t cemented until 1935, when Malcolm Campbell rode his Blue Bird past 300 m.p.h. and into the record books: Bonneville was extremely well suited to high-speed driving

Where Cars Try to Hit Mach 1, the Salt of the Earth Is Crumbling

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Related –  Debate over future of Bonneville Salt Flats

Debate over future of Bonneville Salt Flats – CBS News

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Debate over future of Bonneville Salt Flats

For more than 100 years, the Bonneville Salt Flats have been one of America’s most famous speedways. The salt that stretches for miles and miles in northwest Utah makes the place look like a different planet — one that is uniquely suited to making vehicles go very fast. But today, the salt that is essential to racing is going away, and a bitter debate is raging over how that should be handled. Jeff Glor reports.

Debate over future of Bonneville Salt Flats

Read the report here

Related – Salt 101 – Bonneville Racing Guide – David Freiburger

Thirty years later, and little has changed at the Bonneville Salt Flats – Daniel Strohl @Hemmings

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Thirty years later, and little has changed at the Bonneville Salt Flats

Back in 1989, ESPN sent Peter Graves out to cover the racing at Bonneville, almost on a play-by-play basis with color commentator Rick Vesco. Speeds were high, records were set, and the salt stretched out as far as the eye could see. More interestingly, little seems to have changed out at Bonneville in the last 30 years.

Sure, fashion has moved on from bright pink team t-shirts and pushbroom moustaches and modern pickups have replaced the assorted support vehicles seen in the background, but take those away (and update the speeds and the vehicles’ power outputs) and much remains the same. Many of the same racers mentioned and interviewed still compete at Bonneville today, and the quotes about Bonneville being the last bastion of true DIY amateur racing could have come from any story written about racing at Bonneville this year.

Thirty years later, and little has changed at the Bonneville Salt Flats

Read the rest of the article here

Related – Bonneville racers push for $50 million to restore salt flats

S.C.T.A. Bonneville National Speed Trials – 1949-1968 Collector’s Set

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As a hot rodder, Bonneville is the ultimate destination. For the past seven decades, it’s been known to push man and machine to their limit. Legends are born out on the salt, and now the golden years of Bonneville racing have been compiled into an unbelievable two-book set.

Order from The Rodder’s Journal library here

 

 

 

Bonneville racers push for $50 million to restore salt flats – Daniel Strohl @Hemmings

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Convinced that a salt restoration program conducted in conjunction with the mining company that has removed millions of tons of salt from the Bonneville salt flats will return the unique landscape to its former glory, leaders from the Bonneville land-speed racing community have asked the state of Utah to chip in $5 million toward a $50 million fund for the program.

Read the rest of the article here