Event Coverage Bonneville Speed Week 2012 - Post Here

My first year at Bonneville. Watched him roll off on his last run.....very sad......

 

That was a horrible loss. We all felt it when he died.

 

Very sad situation but, others have lost their life running hard there too. even this year some rides had some wild spinning around out there. Take Care.

 

What was the outcome with Blowfish

 

I found no listing of car 282 C/BFCC - not all current runs are available yet at scta-bni.org

 

Good times!

 

I am thinking the Inliners have a good idea for their venue and since Chic and Tony know Lucy............................................you get the idea

 

Final Day of Official Fun on The Salt - post more pics

 

back home safe n sound had seven runs for a max of 173.286 need more motor but ws as usual a blast ill ad pics when i get them loaded. saw a lot of you there .... texoma flyer 389..........pass the salt again

 

More than just racing, the "Mr. T" made it from Portland just to give Kathy a ride.

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Nice to see you out there!

 

A friend dropped off a bottle of bubbly to celebrate our record. A very good week.


By weslake at 2012-08-17

 

It was good seeing you guys out there. I never caught back up with you, but congrats on your record!

 

Here's a few pix of the little HAMB get together in our pits. The beer/onion bath dogs were great although I must say by the time I got home I had had my fill of hot dogs.

 

Congrats to all that broke records, even their own from previous runs and to those that drove their traditional rods from all over. Thanks to all that posted pics.

 

Tim, thanks for putting up with me all weekend! Had a total blast as a gofer.

Totally looking forward to next year. Hopefully all the hotdogs got used uop this year.


jerry

 

Great pics! Thanks for sharing!

 

Here is a link to my pictures on picasa web. This was my first time to Bonneville and it was definitely sensory overload. I hung out with the South Omaha Boys who hit their goal (far from a record) of 200mph this year. The driver just turned 80 and going 200 was a bucket list item for him.

Bonneville 2012

 

Super great stuff on this post. Blam's photos were exceptionally nice. Here's some of my own, and a link to my blog post on the event. Had a great time! Next year....

http://nwrodderblog.blogspot.com/2012/08/bonneville-speed-week-2012.html

 

Sometimes on the salt, the unexpected happens- you're thrashing in the pits, things haven't went right for a day or two, and it's frustrating.

That happened to me this year-we were having fuel issues, and blew a freeze plug. We were all working to get the car back on the track. i kept noticing a gentleman of Japanese descent watch us curiously, and he seemed pretty interested in the flathead.

I got to a point where I could chat, so I made my way over to him.He introduced himself, and we chatted about the FlatCad for a while.

Walter Nakamura was his name, and he owns the Meteor lakester-very probably the first Cadillac flathead powered dry lakes racer! Needless to say, I forgot what was going on in the pits, and chatted about the car his dad and 2 friends had built. Wow, what are the chances?

This is some of the story about the car, that I 'borrowed' from elegantcars.com:



The Meteor was raced at Muroc and hit 104 mph in 1940. Records show only 29 cars broke the 100 mph barrier in 1939.In 1940, three West L.A. high school buddies were obsessed with hot rods and dry lakes. George Nakamura, Dick Phippen, and Carl Hoogoian had little in common, except their interest in fast cars.
Nakamura found the Meteor with its bird cage-like framework, which has riveted sections of aluminum scrap from Douglas Aircraft in Long Beach. It had two velocity stacks pointing skyward with a pair of Stromberg 97 carburetors. When Nakamura bought the race car, he drove on the streets of Culver City with its headlights buried inside the nose and 1939 Ford tail lights.
He drove it regularly until a minor head-on collision sidelined it. Nakamura was slightly injured, but the Meteor was relegated to a yard because he was unable to pay the storage fee. The yard owner removed and sold the flathead engine in the Meteor.
When the three friends were able to get the rest of the car back, they installed a 1937 Cadillac LaSalle V-8 engine, which still remains in the car six decades later. The lives of the three young men changed when Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941, except their friendship.
By mid-1942, Nakamura and his relatives were interned with thousands of other Americans of Japanese descent at Amache Internment Camp in Colorado. His two friends were appalled by this. Nakamura was given a 72-hour notice to leave Culver City, so Phippen offered to store the Meteor.
When Nakamura returned three years later in 1945, he started his life over again. Walter Nakamura, the elder Nakamura's son, often asked his dad about the Meteor, but his father refused to discuss it, possibly because he feared his son would be injured while racing it. After George Nakamura died, Phippen called Walter in 2003 and asked if he wanted to take his dad's car home.
Walter was able to get the Meteor back on the road with the untouched patina of storage corrosion and dust.Walter Nakamura plans to bring the 1939 Lakester Meteor to Santa Barbara from his home in Pleasanton, California.

 

What a great story, thanks for sharing it...good story back a while in TRJ about Japanese-American hot rodders during WWII, sometimes their Anglo friends did store and protect their cars when they were interned, I think that Vic Edelbrock was one who stored his Japanese-American friends' cars until the war ended...

 

Hahaha YES!!! Oh jeez.... what a night!