Word: speeding
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
...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...
Going into this week's final action, the heavy favorites to be picked by the selection committee to defend the America's Cup against Sceptre were Columbia and wily Corny Shields, who knew how to squeeze every knot of speed...
...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...
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...