Bonneville Day 8 NEW RECORD

For the second day in a row, on the last day of the event, Smitty and I left the motel in Wells, NV at 4:15 AM to drive for an hour to the Salt Flats. We also lost an hour changing timezones.

On the salt, we hitched the Pathfinder to the trailer in the impound area, fueled The Red Baron back up with the C123 gasoline, and checked the LiPo battery voltage.

An SCTA official truck led the group of qualifying vehicles from the impound down the the first two miles of the track toward the starting line. It was the perfect opportunity to evaluate the salt conditions and plan the route that looked cleanest — the sides.

When the line of qualifying vehicles from impound reached the starting line, we looped around 180-degrees into two lanes. The Red Baron was quite a few back in line, but most of the vehicles in front of us chose the right lane, while Smitty and I decided the left lane was a better choice. This made us second in the left lane, having the advantage of less vehicles tearing up the salt ahead of Smitty.

We off-loaded The Red Baron and Smitty finished suiting up with his race jacket, gloves, and helmet while I rolled the starting motor into place behind him. The motorcycle in front of us was having trouble getting started, so we were signaled to instead pull up directly to the starting line and get ready to go. Smitty walked The Red Baron forward and I realigned the starting motor behind him then the Pathfinder forward too. It took two attempts to get the motorcycle aligned well with the starting motor. The Moto Morini started easily when I pushed the starting motor to fully throttle. Smitty let the oil pressure rise to 55 psi, then he flipped the ignition switch and The Red Baron started. That’s always a great moment. I turned the starting motor off, and helped push Smitty off the rollers.

A few moments later, the bike ahead of us finally started up and was ready to go. Smitty idled The Red Baron for several minutes but turned it off when the intake manifold temperature reached 110-degrees F. Maintaining a low temperature intake air charge delays heat soaking the engine in the later stages of the run. At some point in all this, I brushed the salt off the bottom of his left boot and the shifter to limit slipping as he had noticed the day before as he shifted from 1st to 2nd gear.

I checked that the starting motor was ready to be used again — throttle down for starting, ignition switch on, choke off, and the rollers centered behind the back tire of motorcycle. The two vehicles ahead of us went on their runs — one of them setting a record. When we were next, we restarted The Red Baron. I helped Smitty with a push off the starting motor, then he shifted the motorcycle back and forth slightly as he shifted into 1st.

Smitty’s visor fogged quickly having being flipped down earlier, so I opened it for him again to clear. At the same time, I saw the starting official give the “all clear, your track” signal to us, so I held up two fingers to Smitty as a reminder to go two miles, and flipped his visor back down.

Note: Whatever can be mis-interpreted, will be.

We could not hear each other over the motor and wearing ear protection. Smitty hadn’t seen the starting official’s signal because he was pre-occupied by me opening his visor, so he thought my two-finger signal meant that he had two minutes. I shook my head — nope — and instead imitated the two-hand point down the track as the starting official had done.

Smitty got the message. He revved the bike to around 4000 RPM, engaged the clutch, and raised his boots onto the pegs as he picked up speed. I could see he had a straight launch as he accelerated and hear that he continued smoothly through the lower gears with clean shifts.

I was half-watching Smitty and The Red Baron, and half-scrambling around to get the starting motor tied back onto the trailer. Thank you to Derek McLeish and Mike Fitzmorris for helping me!

Smitty approached the 3/4-mile marker, at over 100 MPH and went to shift from 4th to 5th gear. The roughness of the track jostled the motorcycle and Smitty enough in the moment that the transmission went into a false neutral and revved up to the limiter. Smitty tried to shift again, but the RPM peaked at 9000 again. Undercut gears plus high revs didn’t make shifting easy. I was still scrambling with the starting motor on the start line when I stopped in place hearing this moment through the exhaust notes. Smitty rolled off the throttle, slowing the engine, and went to shift up again. Third time was the charm — he found a higher gear. I jumped into the Pathfinder, knocking my feet together twice to hopefully remove any massive salt build-up, then drove off toward the return road after Smitty.

Later reviewing the audio and video footage of the speedometer and tachometer, we saw that Smitty had actually skipped 5th gear and was in 6th gear for the entire second mile. Having lost pace during the false neutral, Smitty crossed the 1-mile marker at 79 MPH and steadily accelerated up to a 2.0-mile exit speed of 110 MPH. That’s an average flying-mile speed of 100.03 MPH. That’s a new record!

The official standing record, set last year in 2018, was 70.5 MPH. The official record is earned by completing two consecutive flying-mile attempts that have a combined average over the standing record. Yesterday, in the first record run, Smitty’s qualifying flying-mile average speed was 111 MPH, so today we knew that we needed a little over 30 MPH to average over the current record. He definitely did that!

I can hear the speed being announced on the CB radio, followed by a congratulatory “Take it to impound!” from the chief timer Willie ‘Villie’ Boelcke. The final technical inspection in impound was relatively simple. Smitty pulled the right fairing off to reveal a safety wire and official seals from when the engine displacement had been measured in 2018. Smitty signed the official program and wrote his new record speed at 105.5 MPH to commemorate the new record.

Debriefing Notes

Try to discuss communication symbols before using them on the starting line.

Inspect the motor oil for excessive metallic traces which could indicate transmission wear.

Remove the intake and exhaust value pushrods to test that are still straight and round.

If you got this far, thank you for reading! It was a great day! I’ll post the instrumentation video footage soon.