With hundreds of participants left hanging after the cancellation of this year’s Bonneville Speed Week, organizers of the event managed to secure another location for the annual event, moving it temporarily to the Mojave Air and Space Port, home of the Mojave Mile speed trials.
Scheduled for this weekend, Speed Week had attracted more than 550 entries from all over the globe – racers bent on testing their hot rods, streamliners, and motorcycles on the salt of Bonneville. Even after the announcement of Speed Week’s cancellation last month, enough of the people who had entered still wanted to race, so officials at the Southern California Timing Association searched for an alternative venue.
They immediately ruled out the El Mirage dry lakebed, which remains closed after it flooded last month; instead, they gathered enough support from Speed Week participants and the organizers of the Mojave Mile event to convince the Mojave Air and Space Port to let the SCTA use its paved 12,500-foot landing strip for standing-start speed trials this weekend.
While Speed Week at Bonneville typically runs on 3-mile and longer courses – and SCTA officials could only plot out a 2.5-mile course at Bonneville this year – the Mojave Mile event runs 1.5 miles at its largest event and 1 mile at its other two events throughout the year. Mojave Mile organizers noted on their website that they “are acting as hired event organizers, but it’s (the SCTA’s) show using (mostly) their rules” and that this weekend’s event is only open to those who registered for this year’s Speed Week. Spectators will be permitted.
The Mojave Mile, for its part, will not host a fall event at the Air and Space Port. Its next event will take place in April.
Meanwhile, other events scheduled to take place at Bonneville this year may go off as planned. The organizers of the Bonneville Motorcycle Speed Trials said they will still run their event August 29 to September 3. Delvene Manning, manager of the event, wrote on the BMST website that the salt is improving and that “not all of the areas we race were impacted. A report from a recent fly-over by a friend of BMST indicated that the area affected is looking more ‘salt-flats’ and less ‘mud-flats.’ That info, and the recent reports from the salt, indicate that conditions are improving and that we have a few potential course locations.” Manning noted that representatives of the BMST will head to the salt this weekend to check it out up close.
In addition, neither the Utah Salt Flats Racing Association nor Mike Cook have canceled their Bonneville land-speed events, scheduled for September 12-15 and September 17-21, respectively. The SCTA also has made no announcement on its World Finals, scheduled for September 29 to October 2, only noting last month that the event could still be run if the salt flats dry out enough
– See more at: http://blog.hemmings.com/index.php/2015/08/06/mojave-mile-to-host-bonneville-racers-after-speed-week-cancellation/?refer=musweekly#sthash.H4QTmth3.dpuf
