Bonneville SpeedWeek 2010

The SCTA's Bonneville SpeedWeek 2010 was the centrepiece of our trip, with plans in place for us to meet up with almost 20 other Australian travellers out on the salt, most of them also making their first visit to the hallowed Bonneville Salt Flats.



We were looking forward to seeing Norm Hardinge and the Aussie Desert Coolers / Big Knob Racing team taking a shot at the 200 mph mark and personally, I'd been hoping to get to see the Speed by Spectre "Infidel", a Cadillac big block powered streamliner who's owner has set a long term goal of 400 miles an hour on gasoline. Last year, they set a record at 330mph, and this year, they went over 20mph faster, with average speeds of 356mph from the 'slow' A class motor. As of Tuesday afternoon, they're now stepping up to their AA combo and pushing for another record over the rest of the week.



The Big Knob Racing team also managed to hit their marks this year, with a best speed of 200.1mph as of Tuesday afternoon, however they've hurt the clutch in the car in the progress and will have to wait for for next year to improve their Bonneville scorecard any further.



Another car that caught my eye on the salt was the turbocharged Suzuki Kizashi being built by Road & Track Magazine. These guys ran 197mph in licensing this morning in order to get approval to run the long track of the combo course, and when they ran the long track this afternoon they ran 203mph on a 202mph record. They're in impound now and will be trying to back up the record first thing tomorrow morning.



One of the crowd favourite cars on the salt today was the Jeff Brock / Brooks and Dunn Bonneville Bombshell Buick, built by Jeff Brock and run this year by Jeff and Ronnie "Cowboy" Dunn of Brooks and Dunn.

Time To Head For The Salt

After our overnight stop in Beaver, Utah, we headed on north towards the cities of Wendover (Utah) and West Wendover (Nevada) and the Bonneville salt flats. The state border is in the middle of the town, resulting in a very small town with 2 post offices, a handful of casino's on the Nevada side, and not much more to offer to the casual tourist. There are actually more things to do in Wendover than just gamble and race on the salt, but I suspect 99% of visitors to the town would never discover that.



The flight crews that flew the Enola Gay and Bockscar B29 Bombers to Hiroshima and Nagasaki trained at Wendover, and there's a small museum at the former air force base explaining some of the history of the area. There's also a local drag strip, but neither of these were the primary reason for our visit to the Wendover area.



Racers have been chasing land speed records at Bonneville since 1914, and the Southern California Timing Association have been running 2 events a year for many years now, one of those being August's SpeedWeek event. This year, over 500 teams entered for SpeedWeek, including 200 rookie teams. This was also the first time for me at SpeedWeek, and I had been looking forward to it since making the decision to come here almost a year ago.

The Grand Canyon

After leaving Las Vegas, we spent the night at the Grand Canyon, in a cosy little cabin in the North Rim Lodge complex. The Lodge itself is right on the edge of the canyon and is surrounded by a couple of hundred little cabins that can be rented out for the night. It's billed as a much quieter place to visit the Grand Canyon than the South Rim, which has the highest numbers of visitors of any Canyon viewing areas and the West Rim, which is the closest to Las Vegas and is also the most recently developed.

The North Rim Lodge is also approximately a quarter mile walk from Bright Angel Point, which overlooks one of the major fault lines that makes up the Grand Canyon, the Bright Angel Fault. I got up nice and early to walk down there just after sunrise to check out the view, and then went back again a couple of hours later once the others had woken up.

This was also the point at which David and Nicole had to head for home, as they had to get back to work, so we took the opportunity to have lunch at the Grand Canyon Lodge, overlooking the canyon, before we said goodbye and headed on north to our next overnight stop at Beaver, on the way to the Bonneville salt.

The Auto Collections at The Imperial Palace

This collection was a bit of a surprise for me, as I didn't expect there to be quite so many unique cars hidden away here. I knew the billing claimed a 300 car collection, I didn't realise just how little filler was involved in this collection.

The Auto Collections are an auto museum located on what used to be the 5th floor of the parking garage at the Imperial Palace in Las Vegas. They are home to cars spanning from a replica 1887 Benz 3 wheeler to late model supercars including a Jaguar XJ220 and 3 Ford RS200's. There are also almost 40 custom built Rolls Royce's, many billed as "1 of 2 in existence" and also a number of rare Cadillacs, including one of 200 'bicentennial' El Dorado's ever built.

Group B Rally fans would find plenty to drool over here too, in addition to the 3 RS200's I've already mentioned, there's a Lancia 037 road car and 2 MG Metro 6R4's, including one driven by the late Henri Toivonen.

In short, if you have a couple of days in Vegas, and you're a car nut, this is definitely somewhere you must visit. It's only a short walk if you're staying on the centre strip and if you're not, then all roads lead to the centre strip anyway and you could very easily and cheaply catch a monorail or bus ride here.

The Fremont Street Experience

The Fremont Street Experience is the name given to the part of Fremont Street, in Las Vegas, which used to be "the strip", before the current crop of mega dollar casino's sprung up down on Las Vegas Boulevarde. The area has also become home to a number of refurbished neon signs from now-defunct Las Vegas casinos and has acquired what is billed as the largest big screen in existence, with a length of over 1500 feet.

The casino's here have a definite feeling of being in "Old Vegas", while there's still plenty of glitz and plenty of tacky to be found, the whole street has a much calmer feel to it than the regular Vegas strip.

We called it a night relatively early after Fremont Street, as our next day in Las Vegas was also our last, and we still had a fair bit of site seeing to be done, including a visit to the Auto Collections at the Imperial Palace.

The Las Vegas Strip

One of the things I was really looking forward to on this trip, was walking around, camera in hand, taking photos of the neon lights of the Las Vegas Strip. The lights of Vegas are known world wide, and many of the sights are recognisable from movie appearances. We spent a fair bit of time walking around various parts of Las Vegas, but mainly the "new" strip, with our hotel, the Bellagio, being located at the centre of the new strip. We also drove out to the "old" Las Vegas Strip, now known as the Fremont Street Experience, and home to many retired (and now restored) neon signs from Vegas' history, but we'll get to those in a later post.



While I have no problem sitting down with a tripod and a timer to take photos, that was not something I wanted to do in Las Vegas, not only do I hate wielding a tripod in a crowd, but it's also not that vital when you have as much light as Vegas does. I ended up running higher, but not high, ISO's of around 640 to 800 ISO for most of these shots, with speeds around the 1/6 to 1/30 of a second being the most common, although some lights required that I shorten the exposure to 1/80th of a second or so. The Canon 1D Mk III's high ISO performance helped out a bit, as I was more comfortable running higher ISO's without being too concerned about graining, while Canon's Image Stabilisation on the 24-105 f/4.0L seemed to help out a lot by allowing me to run much slower speeds than I would normally be comfortable with.



The other reason I didn't want to be lugging a tripod around in Las Vegas was because I came to Vegas with every intention of sampling some of the various drinks that are available on the strip, while walking up and down it and taking photos. This is something you could never do at home, and while street drinking is technically illegal the whole length of the strip, it's something that is never enforced in Las Vegas, unless you're doing something else wrong and the cops need something to charge you with. As a side note, the law in Nevada specifically permits public drunkenness and forbids local counties from changing that. As a result, you'll notice as you walk along the strip, that almost half the people you see are carrying drinks. You can even buy a drink, or have your souvenir half yard glass refilled right on the strip.

Beatty to Vegas, via Scotty's Castle

On our first day in Nevada, we visited Scotty's Castle, in the Death Valley National Park. Scotty's Castle is actually the "Death Valley Ranch", and it wasn't actually Scotty's either. Scotty's Castle was built by a wealthy couple as their vacation home, and Scotty was a close friend who entertained the couple and their guests, while pretending to live there.



The Death Valley Ranch was an amazing building, with it's own hydro-electric power station and rather advanced cooling systems for the era in which it was built. Over the years many Californian celebrities came to stay at the Ranch when they visited Death Valley.



We had lunch at a little bar in Beatty known as the Sourdough Saloon. This Saloon's claim to fame lies in the car parts covering it's walls. Over the years, many automotive manufacturers have used Death Valley to test their cooling systems and many of those test teams have retired to the Sourdough Saloon for dinner and a drink or two at the end of a long day. They've also been known to donate signed car parts to the Saloon, to be hung on the walls.



By now it was about time we hit the road, as we had rooms booked at the Bellagio Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, so we pointed the Cadillac in the general direction of Las Vegas and stood on the gas. A couple of hours later and we were pulling in to the parking at the Bellagio. I knew to expect Vegas to be big, but it still surprised me with just how big everything is. Our room was up on the 24th floor of the Bellagio, with a perfect view of the famous Fountain Show and also a great view of the strip.