Bonneville Speed Week 2023 Blew Me Away!
Literally, a lightning storm with 60 MPH winds and a deluge of rain destroyed my camp.
It took a dozen retellings of the story, but I can now laugh with my audience when I recount my most-disastrous camping trip, ever. I saw the storm coming about an hour before it hit me, but my only thought was that Bonneville Speed Week 2023 was going to be officially canceled due to poor track conditions, and I had only just arrived. Thankfully, I had the foresight to put all my camera gear, laptop, and best friend’s Jackery Explorer 1500 portable power station into Bill the pony, my 500,000-mile 2008 Ford Ranger, before things got bad.
I did not, however, think the winds would pick up so viciously they would collapse my tent (flooding immediately in the rains accompanying the winds) and attempt take my EZ-up to heavens had it not been strapped to the truck and 50 pounds of weight. Goodbye Amazon privacy tent (for #2), though. Had the privacy tent blown down the racecourse, it might have set a land speed record.
When the winds blew in, I was worried about Bill getting damaged by the EZ-up coming loose, so I grabbed onto one of the scissor mechanisms to hold it steady—that’s when Mother Nature slapped, no, punched me in the face. In a matter of seconds, the porcelain-like clay went from the dull gray of a cloudy sky and setting sun to nearly pitch black, only being lit by the lightning strikes. To quote comedian Bill Engvall, “IT WAS PANDALERIUM!”
The tent collapsed behind me while the EZ-up frame bent in my hands with the force of the wind. Kudos to Ozark Trail, the canopy on the EZ-up didn’t break free anywhere (unlike my tent guywires)…but it did take me windsurfing for a few feet when I finally undid the last Velcro strap. I was already completely drenched with my bare feet caked in thick, flip-flop-destroying mud (yes, those got ruined, too), but I managed to wrap the canopy around my arms before I lost hold of it…or it could drag me face-first through the white, salty goop.
I should have listened to Chick! I mean I did (read my post about LA Roadster Show 2023), to the first bit of advice she gave me, anyway. But after packing and driving all night and through the afternoon the next day to get to Bonneville Speed Week 2023, I decided to camp at the Bend in the Road and not up Bonneville Speedway Road aways on the hillside, as Chick Huntimer—SCTA and BNI media relations, land speed racer, and pinstriper—suggested when I picked up my media kit.
I’ve always been enamored with land speed racing and making my first trip to the Bonneville Salt Flats for Speed Week 2023 was supposed to be a fun and exciting new experience. Obviously, it wasn’t. Because of the looming threat of cancelation due to weather—tech inspection and racing were supposed to start August 4-5, 2023—I had procrastinated in my preparations and ended up leaving for the Flats the day I had originally planned on arriving.
When I made the decision to go to Bonneville Speed Week 2023, I planned on being there the last half of the week, from August 8-11. I didn’t want to stay in a hotel (nor could I really afford to), the last time I truly enjoyed a camping trip was before I had a driver’s license, and I simply didn't want to be away from home that long for a personal trip as I had not managed to secure any sort of assignment prior to Speed Week. After hearing back from Heather Black confirming the speed trials would not be extended (I don’t know what gave me the impression they would be), I made a mad dash to complete my preparations.
Best laid plans, yada yada, too many words already—by the time I came out of the mountains west of the Bonneville Salt Flats, I had been awake 36 hours and was in hour 11 of my 12-hour drive. If you follow my adventures, Bill did great. With the AAMCO-rebuilt transmission, the 20.5 MPG I ran the whole way were the best tanks I’ve seen since buying the truck in January 2023, but he’s a little worse for wear after all that salt exposure.
As I began to catch glimpses of the vast expanse of white flatness that is the Bonneville Salt Flats, my fatigue and aches from the long drive faded more and more, and my anxiety about the trip transformed into an almost-religious excitement and wonder. When I exited Interstate 80 and turned onto Bonneville Speedway Road, rounded The Bend in the Road, and made my way toward Land’s End, I couldn’t believe I was finally at Bonneville. Totally forgot to take a picture of the sign, though. Oops, maybe next time.
I spoke to the SCTA officials managing entry and gazed in wonder at the standing inches of salt brine rippling as vehicles made their way out to the pits and racecourse. The sheer expanse of the Bonneville Salt Flats didn’t hit me until slowly rolling down the transition from asphalt to salt bed, and I realized I couldn’t make out where the pits and racecourse were. It was a full 20-minute drive that first time, moving at what I thought was a respectful and safe speed. Who knows what could be lurking in those deeper brine puddles that shine like mirrors. I spotted the SCTA/BNI media truck, parked, and stepped foot on The Bonneville Salt Flats for the first time in my life.
It was electric...and it tasted sweeter than I was expecting, but that could have just been my sheer joy of being there, making those first few hours some of the most memorable in my life.
Growing up riding motocross with my dad in the high deserts of Southern California has made me very accustomed to heat, and—unless both temperatures and humidity levels are above and or approaching triple digits—when it gets hot, that’s when I want to go outside and play the most. The heat on the salt at Bonneville was different. The humidity wasn’t inconsiderable, but 95 degrees doesn’t usually register with me as excessively hot. When that heat, and all the sunlight a wide-open desert sky has to offer are being reflected up at you, that’s a different story.
About all that sunlight—I was practically blind. Light-colored irises and staring at screens indoors most days mean I could barely keep my eyes open. Add the sunscreen melting into my eyes and I’m surprised I managed any pictures at all. But I digress. I explored, I ogled the race vehicles, had the pleasure of running into my former co-worker (of sorts) Alex Taylor as legendary land speed racer Kieth Turk was prepping her for a licensing pass. Kieth Turk has more 200 MPH records from different land speed racing clubs than anyone on Earth, he and his wife Tonya are David Freiburger’s land speed racing partners (she’s got almost as many records as her husband), and they also run tech and record keeping at HOT ROD Drag Week and Roadkill Nights. I’m always in awe of them when I have the pleasure of sharing their company.
Tarantino back to the exciting part of the story—the EZ-up and my tent are destroyed, all my bedding and thankfully only the clothes I had changed out of were soaked, the poop…I mean privacy tent (I prepped for a true pack-it-in-pack-it-out camping experience) was long gone—and then it all just stopped.
What the f@#$!ng F#^k JUST HAPPENED?!
I went from being sleepy with a belly full of chili, to soaked, shell-shocked, and looking like I had been mudding drywall all day in less than 20 minutes. When the wind and rain broke enough, I frantically ripped my ground tarp off the stakes, collected the last bits of stuff light enough to blow away and shoved it all anywhere I thought it would be safe, then dove into my sorta-freshly-detailed pickup. I’ve wiped down my passenger door card with water and cleansers 10 times since, but there is still white Bonneville clay stuck in the textured plastic of my door cards.
I let my nerves settle for a few minutes, told my friends and family what had happened, then hightailed it off the clay. It was more like slithered and jiggled, really. And it’s a good thing I did. Only the top inch or two had absorbed water because the storm came on and ended so abruptly. Third-gen Ford Rangers aren’t that heavy, and the new clutch that went in with the transmission has a good amount of modulation range, not something third-gen Rangers are known for.
I grabbed what might have been the last room at the Wendover, Utah, Motel 6, spent the next two hours organizing the muddy mess that was my home-away-from-home not but an hour ago, then washed my sorrows away with a shower, an acceptable amount of Corona, and a second dinner of gummy worms and peanut butter M&Ms. Despite being awake over 42 hours at that point and recovering from an adrenaline dump just as intense as my car accident in January (it’s always the rain!), sleep did not come easily.
At 5:30 AM the morning of August 10, 2023, I had a decision to make: Spend the money I was trying to save and stay at the Motel 6 for the rest of Bonneville Speed Week 2023 or turn tail and run home to mommy (I really did need a hug). So, I did both!
I wanted to check the salt, see if Speed Week was going to be cancelled because of the previous night’s weather. As I drove past my campsite I saw where other vehicles had had more difficulty than I in escaping the cornstarch-and-water-like mud. Bill’s one-legger differential probably would have dug us a nice trench and gotten stuck had I waited for the rain to soak in longer.
I’m glad I came back, but I did leave just before noon, thinking only of my 12-hour drive home and the comfort of my own bed. In the few hours I spent on the salt, I did manage to lift some of my bedraggled spirits. It’s not easy trying to ask racers to share their story when you’re in a salty mood (ha!).
But meeting SCTA officials like head starter Julie Iversen, fellow worshipper of Burt Monro Kiwi Steve (sorry, didn’t catch the surname), and technical director Lee Kennedy (he gave me his personal Bonneville Speed Week 2023 pin because they ran out before I got there!)—all of whom are unpaid volunteers, mind you—helped bolster my resolve to stay.
Talking with the racers and feeling the dedication they all brought to the salt was uplifting, as well. A team from France came all the way to Bonneville to run a 50cc supercharged sidecar, hoping to achieve a top speed of—wait for it—40 MPH! They crossed an ocean and a continent to break a 36 MPH record! I hope to find the ability to dedicate myself like that to any pursuit, one day.
No racing vehicle was like any other. The motorcycles were all very motorcycle-y, naturally, but the cars were completely different. Line up any two rear-engine modified roadsters, and the similarities stop at the class designation. A much different experience than what I’m used to at the dragstrip, where the ethos is LS-swap the world and if you’re not in an F-body, you’re probably in a Fox body. I over-generalize, of course.
I’m determined to go back to Bonneville Speed Week and enjoy the experience the whole time, more so than I am to earn my own red hat (a lifelong dream). Maybe I didn’t have my shit together enough to go this year, maybe it was just coincidence that I was worried about disaster and then disaster manifested. Oh well, I was unharmed except for one finger getting only slightly crushed in the melee and the memories of the storm I will tell my future grandchildren (by then it might get escalated to a tornado, though). In the meantime, Bill and I will search out more adventures in automobilia and share them here. Stay Motived!