Bonneville: A Century of Speed

As we’ve discussed here before, the broad expanse of salt that makes Bonneville so unique is disappearing, and with it the black line that once seemed to stretch out to infinity, to this point a hundred-year timeline of human beings striving on the Salt Flats for refinement and perfection through speed.

People have come to the dry lake to go fast since Teddy Tetzlaff, who, in July of 1914, arrived with a trainload of other racers and spectators and broke the land speed record that Bob Burman had set in Florida on Ormond Beach earlier that year. Though the 142.73-MPH speed didn’t receive the AAA’s official stamp, no one has forgotten that Tetzlaff was the first to go that fast at Bonneville. But, as it turns out, there’s more to the story.

All images from Bonneville: A Century of Speed; apologies for scan quality.

In fact, the first person to drive out onto the salt flats and push the pedal to the floorboards—according to Bonneville: A Century of Speed—was Ferguson Johnson. Johnson was the lone shop owner in Wendover, the settlement sited at the western edge of the flats, and in 1909 he drove his Packard to a speed of 50 MPH. Though Tetzlaff would soon more than double it, this was a real thrill for the mercantilist, considering that, prior to then, he, like most motorists in America at the time, couldn’t find a road smooth enough to go faster than 15 MPH.

From that starting point on the searing white salt, the likes of Ab Jenkins, Sir Malcolm Campbell and George Eyston were among the first in what would become an almost steady stream of shooting stars to wriggle off toward the horizon chasing the limits of speed at Bonneville.

It’s stories like theirs, accompanied by over 600 mostly full-color photographs—several that have rarely been seen before—and a yearbook of racing at B-ville that make this 328-page, hardcover table thumper a must-have for fans of land speed competition.

David Fetherston and Ron Main wrote Bonneville: A Century of Speed to “honor the last 100 years and help preserve its future.” Officially debuting at the 65th-annual Grand National Roadster Show in Pomona in January of 2014, it celebrates Bonneville and raises funds for the Save the Salt campaign, which is tasked with maintaining the surface of the flats by an often laborious process of physically redepositing the salt that has been removed during ongoing potash mining in the state park.

Now in its second edition, and longer by 26 pages in spite of a rained-out 2014 Speed Week, the book is an invaluable record of the machines—oh, such a wondrous diversity of machines!—and the people who dreamed, built and drove them to their limits over the last 10 decades.

Innovation continues, pushing designs into alternative shapes, configurations and fuels, even as teams sometimes look backward for inspiration, and this compendium seems to catalog very nearly every one of them, occasionally providing profiles in greater depth of those people, organizations or events that are especially noteworthy.

To be truthful, the greatest challenge in writing this review—aside from getting this tome’s bulk, 12-1/4 inches wide by 9-1/4 inches tall by a whopping 1 inch thick, and glossy pages to scan well—was restraining myself in the number of pictures I included. There are just so many that are remarkable, not just for what they depict, but also for how beautifully they depict it. Whether in sepia tones or reds, yellows and knock-the-wind-outtah-ya blues, these historical and modern photographs are saturated with the intense colors of life lived in the Elysium of speed.

While readers will revel in the photography and up-to-date chronology of Bonneville: A Century of Speed, they will also appreciate its large font size and heavy, durable pages. While the occasional editing slip happens—to be expected and, to a degree, excused with grassroots efforts like this one—they never blunt the excitement of encountering through this book the very special place that is Bonneville.