Bonneville Salt Flats
Bonneville Salt Flats
THIS IS THE HISTORY OF RACING ON THE BONNEVILLE Salt Flats, and a rich volume it is, full of the names that created hot-rodding, and full of the simple, powerful enthusiasm that drives such people.
Bonneville is an otherworldly place, the bed of an ancient salt lake, rimmed by faraway mountains that float between salt and sky. The flat surface stretches for miles-ideal for high-speed running. All the names that as a boy I read in newsprint speed magazines raced here: Ab Jenkins, Tom Spalding, John Cobb and hundreds of others. The salt is a university, educating those who race on it, making of them formidable engineers, engine-builders, aerodynamicists, survivors. Some of us humans feel a strong impulse to leave normal life behind and distill everything into one simple idea. There is no place like the salt for this. You pack all the horsepower you can build into a wheeled missile, then track down that long black line toward the imaginary mountains. They become real all too quickly. Your accomplishment then exists on two levels; you have the timing slip that says how fast you went, and, record or no, you have the pleasure of being part of this endless celebration.
The book is packed with photos, most in color, of the great machines and the people who built and ran them. Motorcycles have full citizenship here, so you’ll see Don Vesco, Bob Leppan, Jess Thomas, Warner Riley and many others who had to go fast on two wheels in strange, 20foot-long projectiles.
As you read, you may find yourself wondering if maybe you ought to go out there to Utah and have a look, talk to some people, maybe build something you’ve been thinking about for a long time. -Kevin Cameron
Bonneville Salt Flats, Louise Ann Noeth, 156 pages, $40, MBI Publishing, 729 Prospect Ave., Osceola, WI 54020; 800/826-6600; www.motorbooks.com
