It is the earliest and most primitive of all of motor racing; even simpler than point A to point B; all that is recorded is the speed averaged over a kilometer or a mile. And yet, it is also the most difficult to master and arguably the most complex and uncharted of all of the different types of motor racing there is.
It is also the fastest.
It seems so simple. Just hold the steering wheel straight, foot to the floor, and see what she’ll do, right?
No, not by a long shot. The first problem is space. Unlike drag racing, which evolved from land speed racing and only needs about 1/2 a mile of pavement to run and stop in, land speed racing requires miles, at least 9 or 10 miles of flat surface in order to be able to build up speed, and then hold it for a mile, and then have enough room to slow down and not run into anything. Not too many places like that.
The first land speed races were held out at the dry lake surfaces in Southern California. Places like Muroc and El Mirage, the absolute beginnings of hot rodding, and where land speed racing continues to this very day. These were fine venues in the beginning, but they were small, and as speeds increased, a bigger place was sought out and found in Utah; The Bonneville Salt Flats – the fastest place on earth. It’s a lake bed made of salt. When the lake fills up, the water creates a perfectly flat surface and after draining through and evaporating, it leaves 240 square miles of billiard table flatness. Well, almost. On a clear day, if you squint just so, you can see the curvature of the earth. And it’s not quite like a billiard table, hey, it’s salt!
The surface quality is more like a partially hardened slurpee that never melts. Sometimes it’s harder, sometimes it’s slushier, most of the time it’s both. There are other venues, like Black Rock Desert in Nevada, that are bigger, but they just aren’t the same. They are dusty and not so flat with cracks in the ground, but most of all they are missing an intangible indescribable element that is purely The Bonneville Salt Flats.
What can I say? The place gets into your blood, it kicks your ass time and time again, and you come back because the challenge is one that throws all the weirdness of Mother Nature and meta physics that exist in the universe and you can’t resist it because you’re hooked and you know it and there’s nothing you can do about it. I have yet to meet anyone who went to the salt once and never went back. It gets under your skin and lives with you until the day you die. Did I mention all the highly toxic chemicals in the salt? I highly recommend it.
But back to the difficulties. Consider all other forms of motor sports, anything really, IRL cars, Formula 1, NASCAR, drag racing, they have each evolved into a collection of vehicles that look rather similar to each other. That’s because there exists a wide enough body of knowledge so that each competitor knows quite a bit about what it’s going to take to develop a winning car. Just look at them; after each winter, each team carefully unveils their car, usually to find that all the other teams reached an almost indistinguishable conclusion. This is because they have all had a chance to practice and try out different things. This happens after many laps or passes, such that by the end all the teams will be very close to the same result.
But not in land speed racing. Where are you gonna try out what you think might work? That abandoned stretch of highway? I don’t think so.
Land Speed Racing is the last form of racing where a guy with a dream can take on the big boys, and win, if he’s creative and thoughtful enough and comes up with better ideas. No two cars look the same. That’s just one of the many cool aspects of the LSR experience.
If the first difficulty in land speed racing is the lack of knowledge, the rest should all be familiar to anyone involved in any other form of motor sports; aerodynamics, traction, weight, more power, safety, braking, weather, and yet, they each have their own twist and lack of knowledge as no one really truly knows what will work on some other guys car, just what works on their own car, and more often than not it’s very different than what the other guy swears works for him.
Aerodynamics: The resistance to air increases exponentially with the increase in speed. And what you think is aerodynamic because it looks aerodynamic isn’t. Needle nose front tapering to a wider back. Big in front, small in back, like a rain drop. Or not.
Traction: Wide tires are out because they float, everyone who’s tried them has failed miserably, one of the few “knowns” at Bonneville. So with thin tires, one of the best way to get traction is (not always) to add weight. But not always. Many of the cars weigh well over 6,000 lbs. This is not a misprint. But some don’t, they find traction some other way, or they pedal the hell out of the car and pray it doesn’t come around.
Weight: As stated, some run a lot of weight, some don’t. If you do, be ready to bring extra horsepower to lug that weight up to speed.
Power: Is there ever such a thing as too much? At Bonneville, a typical base line is if it took you 800 hp to get to 200, it will take 1,600 or more to get to 300. And if you got to 300 with 1,000, figure on 2,500 to get you to 400. And so on. Bring a big stick and prepare to be humbled.
Safety: So, what happens when you go 200 or 300 or 400 MPH is…… nothing. For a long while. Help is coming at mortal speeds, say 90 or 100 mph, and it takes a while to get there, assuming they find you! It is 240 square miles of blinding white after all. If you have a parachute failure and go to the 9 or 10 mile mark, or beyond, it could take 10 minutes or more to get to you. At a typical race track, help arrives in seconds. At Bonneville, you need to figure out how to help yourself. Besides a lot of safety stuff you have to conform to in order to be able to run, you need to show that you can do the following in a “reasonable” amount of time, say less than 20 seconds. Ready? Go: kill ignition and fuel, activate one or both fire systems, deploy high chute, then low chute, steer the car to a stop, unbuckle all of your safety belts, hans device, etc. clear the window net or hatch, remove the steering wheel, climb out of the car.
Braking: What brakes? No ordinary brakes connected to a pair of skinny tires will work on a car weighing thousands of pounds and going hundreds of miles per hour, so you use parachutes, with pilot chutes to deploy them. Faster cars use two chutes, a high speed and low speed, some use flaps or doors. There are two basic techniques – lift and pull or drive through the chute. I drive through, some won’t even think about it but prefer to lift first. You couldn’t pay me to do that. To each his own [ hey, that's what Bonneville is all about ] but whatever you do make sure the chute comes out straight and not to the side, by even a little bit, like by inches, or it could all be over.
Weather: Ah, the weather. At Bonneville the weather can change in minutes. Or not. In August, during Speed Week, it can soar past 100º. In the car, in a 5 layer suit, you can lose 5 to 7 lbs. per run. This October, at the World Finals, the temperature in the morning was 39º with a high of 60º . But what really matters to racer is the DA, Density Altitude, and this can vary from 4,200 [ good ] to 7,000 [ bad ]. Then there’s the wind to contend with, squalls that come up every so often [ a squall is like a tornado laying down on its side. If it isn't super secure or bolted down it will be gone, as in, not on this planet any more ], and of course the rain. Sometimes it’s nice by the start line, raining at the 3 mile and windy at the 5 mile, but you wouldn’t know it.
So with all that, here’s what you need to do to set a record. You need to make a run with an average speed over a mile that is faster than the current record. If it is a FIA event, you need to turn your car around, prep it to run, pack the chutes and do it again, in the opposite direction, in less than 60 minutes, or you start all over again. If it is a SCTA event, you make your run, then you have 60 minutes to bring your car to impound [ not that easy since it is way the hell out there.... ] and then you get to go the next morning and run again. World records are the average of the two runs. What if it rains the next day or it’s too windy? Too bad. Start over. It isn’t all that easy to run fast to begin with, but the way I explained it to my kids is that in order to set a world record, it’s like hitting a Grand Slam at the bottom of the ninth, then doing it again the next day.
See you on the salt,
Amir Rosenbaum #86
