Sport: Hottest Hot-Rod

The sounds and smells of speed blistered the white Bonneville salt flats of Utah. Engines revved up to blatting roars. Whiffs of alcohol and nitromethane mingled with the tang of high-octane gas. With anxious care, some 200 men in oil-blotched coveralls coaxed their handmade cars to bellowing perfection—long, low, lean monsters with as many as three engines crowded beneath their sleek hoods. In the tenth annual speed trials that ended last week, the world’s hottest hot-rods were shooting for 300 m.p.h. on the world’s fastest race course.

Among the dedicated men who set out for speed behind the steering wheel of an automobile, the Bonneville hot-rodders are a class apart. They are amateurs with professional skills, willing to spend months —and every spare nickel—to create from standard parts a car so far improved over ordinary hot-rods that it can be opened up only at Bonneville. The drivers race not against each other but against the clock, on solitary, screaming runs through the timing traps on the ninemile, arrow-straight course. “These men aren’t a bunch of scatterbrained kids like the hot-rodders who race around every town in America,” said Southern California Timing Association Director Jim Lindsley.

Push-Pull Power. Even in such company, a 29-year-old pressman for the Los Angeles Times stood out from the start. Calm, calculating Marion (“Mickey”) Thompson had put together an $8,000 streamliner that seemed to howl with speed just standing still. For push-pull power, Thompson remade two 1957 Chrysler engines and geared the first to the front wheels and the second to the back. To soup up the engines to a total of 850 h.p., Thompson and his buddy, Fred Voigt, added a magneto to each for hot-spark firing (standard ignition gradually weakens as engine speed increases), lengthened the piston strokes by five-eighths of an inch, rebored the cylinders and boosted the compression ratio from 8 to 1 to 12 to 1. At the heart of the retooled engines were specially ground camshafts that let the engines wind up to 5,800 r.p.m.

But to Thompson, “the most important factor in automobile speed is aerodynamics.” His streamliner was as slippery as loving work could make it. The entire car, including wheels, was enclosed by a curved aluminum shield. “If your aerodynamics aren’t good,” said Thompson, “your car will take off on you and fly. This car is the fastest in the U.S.”

It was. Nudging 286.9 rn.p.h. on a trial run, Thompson whistled back and forth across the measured mile for an average speed of 266.866 m.p.h., a record for a U.S. driver and a U.S.-built car.*

“An addiction.” On the last day of the trials, Thompson crawled into his car, which stands only 32 in high, settled himself in the driver’s seat, got a push from a truck until his engines thundered to life at 45 m.p.h., and set out for glory. Astonished timers caught his blurred passage on the first pass through the traps at 294,117. A new record seemed certain. But on the return trip, when Thompson got up to 280 m.p.h., three connecting rods on the front engine suddenly snapped under the strain, punched a hole in the engine block. Thompson was able to wrestle his wrecked car to a safe stop.

Despite his accident, Mickey Thompson remains a hot-rodder. “It’s an addiction, like dope or alcohol,” he says. “I couldn’t leave it alone if I had to. That car will do 300. It’s a challenge. I’m betting my ingenuity against my own life.”

* But far short of the world mile record of 394.2 m.p.h. set at Bonneville in 1947 by British Sportsman John Cobb in his 2,600-h.p. Railton Mobil Special. Cobb was killed in 1952 when his jet-propelled 6,000-h.p. speedboat disintegrated during a try for the world’s record on Scotland’s Loch Ness.