At the west end of the salt flats was an exit off of I-80 that lead to one of the fastest places on earth.
A few miles from the interstate the paved road just sort of ended and you drove out on to the 30,000 acre Bonneville lake bed.
Each year in August Speed Week is put on by the Southern California Timing Association and Bonneville Nationals, Inc. Several hundred drivers from all over the world in a whole range of categories from motorcycles to eighteen-wheelers (minus a bunch of wheels) show up to "shoot the salt" and go as fast as they can. How cool is that!?
I wondered how long a car that lived here would last in this kind of an environment?
There were two raceways. One, above, was seven miles long, and the other, a hundred feet or so off the right side of this picture, was five miles long. The long one was for autos and the other for motorcycles.
This was near the middle of the seven mile track near the pits and looking back at the starting line above. Like as if you could see it.
Cool. I didn't see it in the top 10 fastest, but it looked like it should have been. The fastest car in 2005 was from the Thomason & Tradup Racing crew. They reached a speed of 296.095 mph. That was a little bit quicker than my Toyota pickup would do -- even going downhill.
Apparently the guy driving the truck above showed up every year going just a little bit faster each year. This year everyone was rooting for him to break 100 mph. I don't know how fast he ended up going, but we stuck around long enough to see him take off. The results and other news were transmitted on regular car radio frequencies so everyone could listen in. Good idea.
The picture above was at the beginning of the five mile track. The fastest motorcycle was Joe Amo/Team Amo at 221.947 mph. That too was quicker that my pickup could do. The engine of that motorcycle was only 1000cc.
How did that guy get in there?? In 2005 there were 296 cars and 80 motorcycles entered. 40 speed records were set and a total of 892 starts were made. The first few days went well, with the exception of one fatal crash, but the last couple of days were rained out.
I've seen the movie Chicken Run, but WOW! I suspect these chickens had the ride of their lives.
Actually, they were fake rubber chickens that wiggled around such that they
did keep us guessing for a while. 
2018-01-27