Bonneville Speed Week

Bonneville Speed Week

Four days in late September

Bonneville Speed Week is a competition to set speed records on the Bonneville Salt Flats near Wendover, Utah (now called the World of Speed ). The salt flats were once under Lake Bonneville, which was formed about two million years ago and covered 19,000 square miles in what are now Utah, Nevada, and Idaho. The Great Salt Lake to the east of the flats is all that remains of that prehistoric lake. Bonneville is so flat that it is the only place in the United States where the curvature of the earth can be seen. Its salt surface is as hard as concrete by summer's end, and the many miles of unobstructed space create an anomaly of nature found nowhere else in the world. These conditions are ideal for land speed racing.
Speed Week has been held since 1949. About 300 cars and motorcycles come here from all over the world to try to break land speed records. The one-mile automobile speed record was set in 1983 by Britain's Richard Noble who zipped over the flats in the Thrust 2 at 633.468 mph. The first person to set a speed record on the Bonneville Salt Flats was Teddy Tetzlaff who drove a Blitzen Benz 141 mph in 1914.

CONTACTS:
Utah Salt Flats Racing Association
P.O. Box 27365
Salt Lake City, UT 84127
801-485-2662; fax: 801-583-3765
www.saltflats.com

Holidays, Festivals, and Celebrations of the World Dictionary, Fourth Edition. © 2010 by Omnigraphics, Inc.