![]() These days, the main Bonneville event is called Speed Week and the volume of SCTA car classes is staggering, and quite confounding to the ever-growing volume of first-time racers and spectators. (Oddly, we've found that vintage issues of HOT ROD rarely, if ever, provide details about the various classes within any of the race coverage, be it Bonneville, the drags, Pikes Peak, or even NASCAR). At that first Bonneville Nationals hosted by the Southern California Timing Association (SCTA), the racing classes were very simple: there was Streamliner, Lakester, Roadster, Modified Roadster, Coupe, and Modified Coupe. It was built in part to promote the new line of Autolite lead-acid car batteries, 20 of which were used to propel it across the Bonneville salt flats. ![]() Every kid needs a hero, and when I heard what he'd done he became mine. ![]() The location was famous worldwide, thanks to the land-speed-racing battles of Brits Sir Malcomb Campbell (the first to 300 mph at Bonneville in 1935), George Eyston, and John Cobb, and American racer (and one-time mayor of Salt Lake City) Ab Jenkins. I've been interested in racing on the Bonneville Salt Flats since the early Sixties when Mickey Thompson amazed us all with a 406-mph run in his four-engined Challenger One at the Bonneville Salt Flats back in 1961. In 1949, HOT ROD helped create the Bonneville National Speed Trials for hot rodders. It is the remnant of an Ice Age saltwater lake that covered much of the state and left a 30- to 40-square-mile (depending on who's measuring) area of dead-flat surface covered in salt with a. ![]()
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