I came across Bob Norwood's page today about setting speed records at Bonneville. Amazing!
Here is an excerpt and the full article is linked below:
Bonneville can be one mean, unforgiving bitch.
There are legions of good racers who have tilted at the Windmills of a Land Speed Record many times and never come out on top. There are competent racers who have gone to the Utah Salt Flats every year for decades and never set a Land Speed Record.
Going fast requires a TON of power. Air resistance goes nuts with speed, increasing exponentially as the cube of the increase in speed. Air resistance over 120 mph becomes extreme, which is the speed at which a human body free-falling through the air (prior to pulling the ripcord!) reaches terminal velocity and will not fall any faster. If you could go 100 mph on, say, 80 horsepower, to double speed to 200 mph requires 640 horsepower! If you could go 150 mph on, say, 210 horsepower, doubling speed to 300 mph requires 1680 horsepower!
Once you’re making a ton of power, you typically need to run hard for a relatively long time--minutes rather than seconds like a drag car. And then you need to run again within four hours, with the car in the meantime locked in impound where certain repairs are impossible. Mechanical parts flogged to the limit over the required 4-7 miles of super high speed running take a terrible pounding, and thermal loading can increase to fatal levels as the minutes tick by. Melt-downs are endemic to salt-flat racing.
And then there is the question of tuning. Truly fast cars have virtually no good way to test at design speed at full power until they actually arrive on the desolate dead-level salt flats 100 miles west of Salt Lake City. Where can you run a car flat-out at 200-300 mph for 4-7 miles without lifting the throttle except at Bonneville? For many competitors, Salt Flat racing is more akin to an R&D and tuning nightmare than a race.
The fastest little sports car in Utah
