Bonnville 2011

I took my annual trip to the Bonneville Salt Flats last week, it was an excellent event this year. The weather was perfect, the salt was in great shape and the cars were running hard. It's great to see old friends and talk to the old guys as well.

I saw a number of 300 mph plus passes, with the highlight being the Poteet & Main streamliner that ran 380 and later went 436! It's powered by a small black Chrysler with two big turbos. The motor is under 300 cubic inches.

The other highlight for me was the Beck & Davidson A/Fuel Roadster. This thing is just violent, it ran 281 by the first mile and a quarter! It has gone 309 and holds the record in class by about 100 miles an hour over the next closest car in class.The car is powered by a detuned funny car motor, a blown Hemi running on nitromethane and making somewhere between 3500 and 5000 horsepower.

I took a whole mess of pictures and videos, here's some of my favorites.

This is a totally handbuilt body (aluminum) and loaded with rare, high dollar speed parts from the golden era. Check out the magnesium Halibrands.

It's powered by a small block chevy with Hilborn injection and a front mounted Potvin supercharger. Take a minute to look at all the details, there's a lot of them here.

A view from the other side of the engine.

Here's a perfect example of Bonneville ingenuity. A mid 80's Firebird is a slippery shape.

But wait a minute, it's powered by a GMC Jimmy straight six with a Horning head, homemade fuel injection and a Procharger! It ran in the low 200's.

This started life as a 1939 Ford Deluxe Coupe. It was channelled, sectioned and chopped to make it more streamlined. It was originally built in the late 1940's and run at Bonneville in 1952 and 1953. The car was restored to within an inch of it's life and the new owner brought it out to the salt.

The restoration workmanship is extraordinary. This car was never this nice when it was first built. It pretty amazing that it wasn't scrappped.

The interior features a bevy of old Stewart Warner gauges in a custom dash and a bitchin' 1953 Crestliner steering wheel. There's also timing tags on the pasenger side of the dash showing what in ran back in the day, I think it went 130-ish. Not bad for a leaded coupe with a flathead and spotlights!

This is the Poteet & Main steamliner. Powered by a 290-something inch small block Mopar and two giant turbos, it went 376 on this run. It later ran over 430 miles an hour. At those speeds he was covering a mile in under 12 seconds.

How about a 223 mile an hour Audi S4!

This streamliner was built after World War 2 by a man in Colorado in is garage. It went through a whole mess of engines before he settled on an Allison V12. He went over 350 miles an hour in this thing in 1954!

The body is all handformed. I tired to get a shot of the interior, it is crude as hell. It uses a cut down Impala steering wheel and a whole bunch of surplus Air Force parts. It must have taken giant balls to keep the loud pedal mashed in this thing.

This '32 is one of the many hot rods built by the Rolling Bones shop out of upstate New York. They build new cars with patina, I think they had every one they ever built at Bonneville this year.

Tom Branch's '32 roadster, in paint after god knows how many years of running around in bare steel. Tom's father passed away a few weeks earlier, his ashed were packed into the parachute of his race car and scattered on the salt at over 200 miles an hour. Godspeed.

This heavily hammered '33-'34 three window coupe is another of the Rolling Bones cars. I really like the chop and the proportions of this car. It was built for George Poteet and it has a bitchin' hand formed track nose as well. I think it was driven to Bonneville from Texas for this event.

This car was a bit too rat rod for my tastes but the motor was interesting. How about a Packard flathead 8 with six two barrels and an old Paxton supercharger! Some nice work here on the micro side, but the overall look missed the mark for me.