People have been coming to the Bonneville Salt Flats to see how fast their ride is since 1914, when Teddy Tetzlaff set a speed record at 141.7mph in his ‘Blitzen-Benz’. Expect disorientation, the unexpected, the inexplicable. Dismount into brightness so sharp you squint. Drive your road car as fast as it goes, remembering to lift for the glinting huddle of men, women, and machines as it emerges through the shimmer. The paddock is out of sight, five miles away in the middle of a great big empty, the route out there marked with sparsely dropped cones. Drive to the edge of the lake, where your credentials are checked and you’re waved onto the salt. And there is simply nothing on earth to match the petrol-head nirvana of Sp ee d Week, the single most celebrated seven days of the Salt’s year. A place to run-what-you-brung, where the engine ante starts at 50cc and does not quit until way beyond 25-litres. Simply viewed, it is a colossal dried salt-lake bed in a truly obscure corner of western Utah, near the town of Wendover.
Or, as it happens, madness quite so acutely beyond imagining. If you feel the need for speed then Bonneville should be on your bucket list, says Gavin Conway.
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