Salt

Well, we are here. Bonneville Speedway. Really, words don’t describe it. 600 square miles of salt. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Derrick, Grady and I flew in to Salt Lake City on Friday afternoon. We headed to the rental car counter and found some very angry people screaming at the budget agent. Apparently the system by which they deliver their keys to the front counter was broken. They use the old tube system like banks used to use (still do?) and the keys were jammed. People were waiting an hour and a half for their cars. People were screaming and finger jabbing. Well to accommodate everyone they gave away a bunch of their cars. All they had left was a H3. “What’s an H3?” I ask. “A Hummer,” Derrick responds. “No way!” I shout., “It will kill my soul to ride in a hummer. “ “Okay,” Derrick says, a little dejected. As I was chasing Grady down the terminal I thought about it. A Hummer may come in handy. “Okay, get the H3,” I shout as Grady runs under another stansion screaming with joy. Well, at least we did one thing right.
My parents got to the salt a few hours before we did, and were met by the first wave of our amazing crew—Louis, Andy and Jessica. Louis is the son of Paul Dalgaard, who used to work for my dad. Louis is a gear head, and drag racer and he and his two friends decided to spend their vacation out here on the salt helping out the Hemi Performance team. By the time Derrick and I got to the salt they had the entire pit set up and were on top of everything. They were incredibly helpful, and I don’t know how we would have made it without them.

How to describe the salt? It’s almost exactly like snow, but it’s dry and warm, and doesn’t melt, so once you have it, it stays with you. When you drive on it, it cakes around the wheel wells of your car just like snow and ice. It gets EVERYWHERE. The inside of the hummer is caked in salt. If you are picturing taking your salt shaker and spilling it on the floor mat of your car, like I was, you have got it all wrong. Picture instead white sugar frosting that has been left out for a week. It’s dry and hard and clumps together. It is ot small refined crystals. Needless to say we will be hitting a couple of car washes before we return it to Budget.

Driving on the salt is incredible. It grips like hard packed dirt, like asphalt. And it’s flat, for miles and miles. According to my dad, it is one of the only places in the world where you can see the curvature of the earth because it is flat for so far. Driving behind the pits, or on the entry roads is great, but when you get out to the track, out on the salt 5 or 6 miles, that’s when it’s truly amazing. You can see mountains in the distance, but that is it. It’s a plateau of white. When you walk on the salt it crunches under your feet like a frozen lake. Jessica said that when she was a kid she said how much she loved snow, but hated the cold. Wasn’t there a way to have warm snow? Well here it is.

The race entries this year are the highest in the history of Bonneville. Just over 500 crews registered their cars and bikes this year to run on the salt. Everything from vespa scooters to supercharged dragsters go down one of three groomed tracks. You complete in your own class trying to be just that record, so the speeds range from 40 mph to 900 mph. The event record so far is 417, but it’s just the third day.
However, before you can get to that, before you are allowed to run on the most famous raceway in the world, you have to pass inspection. It took us 2 days. Next up, inspection and rookie runs.