Sunday’s torrential rains on the Bonneville Salt Flats were the nail in the coffin for this year’s speed week announced the event’s sponsor the Southern California Timing Association Tuesday morning.
“SPEED WEEK 2015 HAS BEEN CANCELED,” wrote the SCTA in a terse press release Tuesday. “The SCTA President/Race Director Bill Lattin & the BNI Chairman Roy Creel spent this morning (July 20th) on the salt. The most they could find was 2 1/4 miles of salt suitable for a safe race course. The rest of the salt flats are either wet or wet and muddy. If the wet salt gets dry, future events could be possible. The Nugget will be refunding for reservations for one week.”
Even before Sunday’s thunderstorms the odds against Wendover’s premier racing event were high.
Already last week the Southern California Timing Association warned that Speed Week could very well be canceled for the second year in a row this week in a missive to racers and fans.
“Not canceled yet, but? Seems like Mother Nature is still not cooperating with us,” the SCTA warned on their website. “The SCTA/BNI met yesterday, July 12, to discuss contingency plans. We will make a final decision on Speed Week no later than July 22nd. We can tell you how it is now, but not how it will be in 10 days.
Our advance team spent the July 4th weekend on the Bonneville Salt Flats trying to find adequate salt to conduct the 2015 Speed Week event; unfortunately without much success. A portion of the courses were still underwater and other areas were suffering from rough and /or muddy salt. A pretty good analysis appeared recently in the Salt Lake City Newspaper. You can see the “Mud flow” on Google Satellite Maps.
In 2014 Speed Week was canceled for the first time in 20 years by the Southern California Timing Association due to rain.
According to the SCTA web page the amount of water dumped on the famous race was simply was too much to drain or evaporate before the start of the event.
The last time rain caused the cancellation of Speed Week was in 1994 but according to what few records were kept and the memory of old time Nevadans this year’s cancellation could be harbinger of several more in the coming decade.
Already unusually late spring storms drenched northern Nevada for almost two weeks this May supporting ranchers claims that rural Nevada is headed toward a wet cycle.
Those heavy rains both last year and this past spring caused a layer of mud to flow down from the surrounding mountains onto the salt flats, covering roughly 6 miles of the area usually converted into a race course.
“It’s disappointing but it is not the end of the world,” said Wendover Mayor Mike Crawford. “Some local businesses will take a hit but I would not say any will shut down because of the cancellation. Anyone who has lived here more than 25 years knows that there are good years and bad ones for Speed Week of any other events on the Salt Flats. Back in the late 80’s and early 90’s they were talking about canceling Speed Week forever because we had several wet years in a row. Then we had 25 dry years. I guess people got spoiled but there is no reason to panic.”
The cancellation could however derail plans for Wendover’s newest development The Bonneville Club.
Approved late last year the Club would be a unique development for extremely high end car enthusiasts who want to see just how fast their car (s) will go on the world famous Bonneville Salt Flats.
“We are probably the only community that not only has salt flats but also an airport,” said Crawford at the time. “It is a perfect match.”
The multi million project consists of 34 duplex units with state of the art storage garages to protect automobiles that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The preliminary grading will be done by local contractor Brett Shelton.
“We want to contract with as many local businesses as possible,” Taylor said. “It will be a win-win relationship for us and for Wendover.”
However the back to back cancellations and the gloomy chatter about the future of the Salt Flats could give potential investors pause.
The Salt Flats are public land managed by the Bureau of Land Management and is known for land speed records at the “Bonneville Speedway” that has been used to test speed almost since the invention of the automobile.
There are five major land speed events that take place at the Bonneville Salt Flats. Bonneville “Speed Week” takes place mid-August followed by “World of Speed” in September and the “World Finals” take place early October.
These three events welcome cars, trucks, and motorcycles. The “Bub Motorcycle Speed Trials” are for motorcycles only. World records are contested at the Mike Cook ShootOut in September. The Southern California Timing Association and the Utah Salt Flats Racing Association organizes and plans the multi-vehicle events, but all event promoters contribute to prepping and maintaining the salt.
Salt flats or pans are some of the most geologically unstable features on the planet. A salt pan is formed where water pools evaporate. An example of a salt pan would be a lake or a pond that is located in a climate where the rate of water evaporation exceeds the rate of water precipitation. If the water is unable to drain into the ground, it remains on the surface until it evaporates, leaving behind minerals precipitated from the salt ions dissolved in the water. Over thousands of years, the minerals (usually salts) accumulate on the surface. Once created salt pans are very short lived in geological time as changing rain fall, natural erosion and earth movements such as earthquakes seem to conspire to consume the salt pan.
