We noticed a lot of people in town and as we were unloading I asked a guy with a racing type jacket on what the deal was. Every summer there is "Speed Week" where people come to set land speed records in every type of vehicle you can imagine. Well, in September they have finals week and we happened to hit it just right. They had cancelled the day's races due to wind, but tomorrow was predicted to be calm. So we landed on our feet again! By the way, that old guy (older than me by a decade at least) races "drop tank pods".
They are replicas of drop tanks from WW2 P-38 fighters that have been converted into speed machines. No kidding! He showed me some pictures. They are similar to the photo at left that I found on a Motortrend website article. Anyways, we got all our stuff stowed in the room and walked down the the Salt Flats Café for a mexican dinner. Not as good as Las Camellinas in Salida, but filling. We got showers and did more laundry so we'd be all set for the morning. We were pretty excited about what the morning would bring.
Wednesday, September 29, 2021
The day dawned a beautiful blue sky day and one with no wind at all. We got our selves packed up and decided to have breakfast at the Salt Flats Café again around 8am. When we were leaving the restaurant Tim discovered his GoPro was missing. He thinks he didn't get the case closed and it just fell out. He was pretty upset at himself for that. We looked all over the place for it, but I think he's right: it probably fell out on the main street we turned off from and someone saw it and picked it up. Fortunately he had already removed his micro SD card with all his footage. He had put a new on in it the night before. So it was 8:30am before we headed out of town for the flats. We stopped at the Speedway Gas Station so I could pick up a souvenir t-shirt (image at right). We chatted for a bit with a rider that had just retired from the Army as a jumpmaster. We bet he has some funny stories. Dave and Tim chatted with him for a bit while I got my shirt. Then it was on to the raceway!
We knew that with the racing going on our access would be limited, but we didn't know by how much. The other thing is that an entrance fee of $20 was required. For me this turned out to be well worth it. We rode out into the flats following a couple of cars on a very dirty looking path, but very smooth. Suddenly a truck came past us and waved the car ahead of us to stop – probably for not paying the entrance fee. There are speed limit signs on the way, which I found a little ironic, but of course necessary. As we went we could see the staging area where the racers start from and then a spectator area further on. We had no idea how this all worked so as we got to the end of the latter area I rode over to ask some people. The spectator area was really wide so there was plenty of room for people to set up a nice viewing "camp". We couldn't go beyond where they had things marked off, but there was a nice area further away from the track that we could play in.
Tom Clark
I'm a Senior Software Engineer at Intellitect, living in Spokane, Washington. I also do a little development work on the side. And I love riding motorcycles all over the country with my friends.
