Great news! The car has finally made it back from Las Vegas.
For those who have recently joined us or have forgotten our previous adventures. On the way home from Bonneville in August, one of the trailer wheels decided to take a different direction. This resulted in us having to leave the car, still on the damaged trailer in Las Vegas with our good buddy from the bend in the road.
After a month in the care of the absolutely wonderful Alan Clarke at his mums house. The equally wonderful Bruce organised for a couple of his employees to make the drive out to Las Vegas with a large flatbed trailer to collect both the car and the errant trailer.
Whilst all of this has been going on Ian has been trying to arrange the parts required to repair the trailer.
As a complete surprise to fix this one wheel a complete new axle is required. Obviously quite literally no small item. Fortunately a replacement part was relatively easy to obtain.
What was not quite so straight forward was the shipping out to America.
The axle required boxing, in such a way that the crate was stackable. As luck would have it, the helpful people at Tuplin are just at the end of the road from Ian’s shop. Then our friends at Transglobal Express arranged the collection from Horley and delivery to Bruce’s house in California.
Not a cheap exercise, but a necessary one.
Whilst all of this was going on the absolute star of the show and irreplacable team member Bruce was recovering from a long overdue surgery.
This led to an enforced hiatus of all of his physical work and offered him the opportunity to get the more mundane and laborious home and systemic parts of work and life we all try to avoid.
Obviously this has led to a lot of planning on how we can best prepare the car for the November meeting at El Mirage and still further next years Bonneville Speed Week.
Once the car was back at the workshop in Pinon Hills and Bruce was fit enough to take on some light duties, the first job was to double check that we had not harmed the engine during our high speed runs in August.
Step one double check the compression pressures in every cylinder, if one measured low, that would indicate a problem. Thanks to Rich and Bruce’s attention to detail during the engine build, the incredibly resilient engine is showing no signs of damage or premature wear.
As such all looks good for a promising return to the dry lake in November.
Ian and our Italian friend Daniele Restelli are flying out a few days before the event. We’ll keep you posted on their adventure.
Daniele is joining us primarily as a photographer for this event, but this follows on from his own really successful trip to Bonneville.
A few weeks after Speed week is the BMST (Bonneville Motorcycle Speed Trials) which, as the name suggests is a motorcycle only event. At this years event Daniele set four world records on his beautiful Gilera 50 cc motorcycle.
Riding with and without the fairing and being measured over a mile and a kilometer, Daniele set the following records which have now been ratified by the sports governing body the FIM.
So, Daniele’s dream to emulate one of his heroes and inspiration to us all Burt Munro from New Zealand with his Indian has now been realised.
Obviously, we are now encouraging him to try new adventures.
The more eagle eyed amongst you, may have noticed that we have sneakily mentioned a return to Bonneville next year.
After Ian Glover’s mishap with the Triumph at this years event, we have agreed to come back and crew for Ian at next years speed week. The upshot of this is, as we have to attend the event anyway and the car is still in America we may as well give it one last attempt at the 200 mph target before we ship the car back to the UK.
