Look to the east and you can see the curvature of the Earth with distant mountains poking above like the mast of a ship. It crunches under your feet and tastes like table-salt-flavored rock candy.Īs the sun sets, the mirage shimmer of the afternoon heat settles away and reveals the crisp line of the horizon. The salt is crusty in some places – briny wet in others. Here at the Salt Flats, the ground is, well, flat. Others are families who’ve been returning for decades on a quest to fulfill a speed gauntlet laid down by their fathers and grandfathers. There are coupes, sedans, sports cars and diesel trucks that leave a wake of black smoke lingering over the sea of white salt. The vehicles are powered by factory motors, engines built in garages, and by jet turbines designed to lift military transport helicopters. There are factory-built motorcycles and cars, and cars that look like airplanes without wings. They compete in a dizzying number of classes and vehicle specifications. In the world of land speed racing, the epicenter is 125 miles west of Salt Lake City on an ancient lakebed covered with a thin crust of salt. They’ve come to the desert at Wendover to pursue speed – pure speed. Gearheads, speed addicts and their families from across Utah, North America – even New Zealand – fine-tune, tweak and, in some cases, completely rebuild engines that had exploded earlier in the day. THE AIR IS cool on a September Friday night as the sun begins to settle below the Silver Island Mountains on the north edge of the Bonneville Salt Flats.
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