Bonneville 2025

2025 was always planned to be our last visit to Bonneville. Land speed racing is an expensive past time and doing it in a foreign country no matter how well supported is even more so.

With this in mind we all took the opportunity to make the most of every moment on and around the salt.

After a few days work rebuilding the bike engine and being even more impressed by Bruce’s engenuity as he repaired the salt damaged remote bike starter.

We headed out on the thirteen hour drive to Bonneville, with an overnight stop in Ely Nevada to break the journey up a bit.

Next stop, the bend in the road and then the salt.

After a very blustery pit set up. we got both the bike and the car through tech inspection without any problems.

After the drivers meeting we went straight to the short course to get a few runs on the bike, while the line for the long course shortened.

Then it was time for our first run on the long course with the car

Alas our first run was not very successful. The oil filter worked loose and emptied itself all over the engine bay. Fortunately no serious engine damage.

Again a few more runs on the bike, which uncovered some poorly tightened items and a mystery gearbox issue, things were getting faster and faster.

The car, survived it’s escaping oil problem, but decided to throw a completely new mystery electrical problem at us. This created a spark shortage to a couple of cylinders. The net result of this was a few runs with a maximum speed of 160 mph. Not too bad for a V6 but not what we were looking for.

Finally we found the electrical problems and we were now making consistent runs over 180 mph. We had however run out of time. After a few minor adjustments we managed two runs on the last day and topped out at 181.546 mph. A little down on our previous efforts.

There was the usual array of vehicles at this years event, this is just a taster of some of the wonderful people and vehicles we were honoured to share the event with.