© Wes Allison,James Champion
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The HRM Spl. rides again...at 208 mph.
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Wow! I recently conquered a career-long goal and defeated a 37-year-old land-speed record to become a member of the El Mirage 200 MPH Club.
Like most HOT ROD readers, my first and initially only exposure to land-speed racing was through the pages of the magazine when I was a young teen. My generation read about people such as Al Teague and Barry Kaplan in the prose of HOT ROD's Ol' Dad Gray Baskerville. He drew a mental picture of the glories of racing for top mph upon Southern California's hard-packed silt dry lakes-the very same earth where hot rodding germinated in the '30s-and he turned the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah into the centerpoint of all that was important in the gearhead world. I bought in. I was incredibly fortunate to have made my first trip to Speed Week at Bonneville with Baskerville in 1992 as a fresh HOT ROD editorial staffer, and he was there when I first visited El Mirage a year later. The dream of heritage-style land-speed racing stuck with me.
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By early 2001 when I was the editor of Rod & Custom magazine, HOT ROD staffer Will Handzel introduced me to Keith Turk who was informally doing PR for the East Coast Timing Association, which had operated a standing-mile series of land-speed races in Moultrie, Georgia, and then Maxton, North Carolina. Keith set me up with a ride in Brett and Regan Yates' roadster at Maxton, and later on I had another ride in a former NASCAR car owned by Bob Gribble. Keith had also been inspired by the pages of HOT ROD and bought a Camaro that had raced at Moultrie and Maxton. He brought the Camaro to Bonneville in 2001, blew up a 302 Chevy, and suckered me into helping him change the engine. By summer 2001, I had become the editor of HOT ROD, and it'd be a couple years before I ran into Keith again, though I kept swindling rides from other people. The December 2002 issue of HOT ROD has a story about a road trip and Bonneville race I did along with Tony Thacker and Jimmy Shine in their roadster. I think it was 2003 when I did my first 200-mph pass at Bonneville in Bob Gribble's former NASCAR race car.
© Wes Allison,James Champion In early 2004, I bought a '73 Camaro and announced that I planned to build my own land-speed race car. Keith, who had just married Tonya, instantly called me and said, "I have a burned-up Camaro sitting in my garage; send an engine, and you can be somebody," or something to that effect. And that's how our now 17-year partnership began. You may have followed the HOT ROD stories as I jammed together an engine with Dougan's Racing Engines and Steve Brul then overnight-shipped it to Keith in Alabama, and we ultimately got me, Keith, and Tonya into the Texas Mile 200 MPH Club in the Camaro. At Bonneville just weeks later, I raced the Camaro and Tonya raced the Turks' Berkeley, and we both got into the Bonneville 200 MPH Club. We subsequently set a bunch of other records with the Camaro, including a run of five records in five days in five different classes at Speed Week 2007. Our fastest pass ever had an exit speed of 261.602 mph, and we never ran slower than 200-something. (And that '73 I bought became the infamous F-Bomb.)
I ended up racing Wayne Jesel's former NASCAR Dodge at Maxton to get into the East Coast Timing Association 200 MPH Club in 2005 (also setting top speed of the year, 220.275). In 2010, both of the Turks and I entered the Loring Timing Association 200 MPH Club in Maine using the Camaro. At the end of 2016, we shipped the Camaro to Australia but never ran it on Lake Gairdner because of a rainout. So in 2017, Keith and I flew to Oz and drove Jack Rogers' '68 Camaro to get into the Dry Lakes Racers Australia 200 MPH Club in a documentary called "200 MPH Club" that you can see on the MotorTrend App (sign up today for a free trial).
After all of this, I still had not succeeded at getting into the 200 Club that mattered most to our heritage: El Mirage. Prior to yesterday, we'd attempted it twice in the Camaro, and I spun the car twice-once in excess of 190 mph. Unlike the paved standing-mile venues or the salt surfaces at Bonneville and Lake Gairdner, El Mirage is hard-packed, finely textured silt. It gets torn up easily, and the winter often leaves the surface in a lousy condition for racing. Even in 1949, Wally Parks cited bad conditions as a reason to initiate hot rod racing at Bonneville. Unlike Bonneville where you race whenever you get in line, El Mirage has a season-long points standing that determines run order, because the first cars down the track in the morning have the best shot at getting traction. Also, the El Mirage surface is only 1.3 miles long. Even if surface conditions are good, the events are often cancelled due to wind and dust storms. Also, I should point out that 200 MPH Club entry at all the venues I've mentioned is not just awarded to anyone who exceeds 200 mph-instead, it's required that you set a record in excess of 200, which is a far more difficult proposition. Furthermore, the class we chose at El Mirage has far fewer aero mods allowed, leading to even more potentially poor handling and traction at high speeds. It adds up to making the so-called Dirty 2 Club the most difficult and exclusive to join, in addition to being the one with the most heritage.
© Wes Allison,James Champion Three years ago, Keith and I decided that nothing could stop us from getting the El Mirage record done. Time, money, weather, and COVID-19 shutdowns slowed our progress, but I built a 347ci small-block Chevy with a ProCharger supercharger, and it made 1,070 hp on episode 40 of my Engine Masters show on the MotorTrend app. Keith, his friends, and his grandson Christian restored nearly the whole Camaro and replaced salt-rusted sheetmetal. Steve Dulcich (who was also part of the 2004-2005 program) helped paint the car and install the engine. We are older and slower and feeling the pain of long hours, but Keith got the car fully assembled and dragged out from Alabama to California just days before the 2021 Southern California Timing Association season opening meet at El Mirage.
On Thursday, Ismael Candia and Troy Goldie at Westech Performance helped shake out the bugs on the chassis dyno until 2 a.m. and tweaked the Holley EFI to 1,007 rwhp and 700-plus lb-ft of torque. On Friday, we got to El Mirage in time for rookie orientation, which was required because I had not raced there since 2013. On Saturday, our 20-year support team of Ed and Linda Van Scoy showed up to help, and by Sunday morning, I'd completed some licensing passes with a bunch of frustrating bugaboos with the tach and rev limiter. Racer Ed Fenn loaned us a tach, and soon the SCTA officials told us it was now or never because a windstorm was coming in, and they predicted the meet would have to shut down. I had one chance. Ed pushed me off the line, and a mile and a third later I'd blasted 208.791 mph, beating a record in C/Blown Gas Coupe that had been held by Andy Granatelli (of STP and TuneUp Masters fame, among many other things) since 1984, right when his turbocharged, mechanically injected Camaro appeared on the August '84 cover of HOT ROD. What a wonderful way to finally join the hard-earned El Mirage 200 MPH Club.
It takes a village to trample a land-speed record, and my village finally won.