Post by Admin on Aug 11, 2019 12:48:51 GMT -8
Unlimited speed - for a limited time only
Photo Credit: STEVE MOHLENKAMP
By Aaron Robinson
The speeding ticket costs $627 if a deputy from Nevada's White Pine County sheriff's department clocks you at over 100 mph out among the mountains and endless piñon-pine flats traversed by Nevada Highway 318. The law gives him discretion to haul you off to jail, where cash is always welcome.
Alternatively, you can wait for the Silver State Speed Week in late September. For as little as $395, the cops will throw a parade for you in downtown Ely, Nevada (pronounced " ee-lee"), stand by while you perform multiple burnouts, then close that same highway for a day so you can drive the 90 miles from Lund to Hiko going as fast on the 7- and 14-mile-long straightaways as your vehicle and your nerves will allow.
Some people have amazingly big, hairy nerves. Enshrined in the Guinness Book of World Records is the record average speed in an open road race: 207.7801 mph set at the Silver State Classic Challenge in 2000 by Chuck Shafer and Gary Bockman in a tube-frame Chrysler LeBaron. Pizzeria owner Rick Doria of Costa Mesa, California, drove a Corvette to the Silver State's current instantaneous-trap-speed record of 227 mph, coincidentally also the average qualifying velocity at the 2003 Indy 500.
Most people aren't this gonzo. In fact, most people win their Silver State trophies by driving in speed classes between 95 mph and, with more safety equipment, 150 mph. Just cross the finish line at the exact second of the target time for your class, which is the 90-mile distance divided by the class speed, and you win.
Cars in the 95-mph Touring class, for example, try to cross the finish line in 56 minutes, 50.526 seconds; 100-mph cars seek to do it in 54 minutes even; 105-mph cars in 51 minutes, 25.714 seconds; and so on. Bone-stock production cars with no extra safety equipment like, say, a certain silver 2004 Pontiac GTO borrowed from an unwitting GM for a week of, ah, "testing," can run as fast as 110 mph in the Touring class.
But our navigator, Paul Wright, figures most drivers gravitate to the highest speed class available to them. Wright has worked for Jack Roush for 20 years. He is trained to win like Dobermans are trained to go for the esophagus. In Wright's world, losers are killed and eaten.
Wright figures a car in Touring has a better shot at winning something in the 100-mph class even though the GTO's thumping LS1 small-block can shove it to 158 mph.
"So," the protest of your author goes, "we drive 2000 miles to Nevada to race the new GTO— at 100 mph? The readers'll use this story for fish wrap."
"Trust your navigator," barks Wright. "Emotion is for losers. You are a robot. You have ice water in your veins!"
A quick scan of the entry sheet shows the upper speed classes clotted with Vipers, Corvettes, and Porsches. Standouts include Joel and Diane Hannig's 1962 Dodge Polara 500 that goes 202 mph burning methanol. Charlie Friend's 1965 Chevy Corvair packs a 400-cubic-inch Chevy small-block, a Porsche 930 four-speed transaxle, and the suspension from a C4 Corvette. Then there's John Schneider.
Schneider, of course, filmed 158 episodes as the blond outlaw brother Bo in the 1979-85 yokel soap opera The Dukes of Hazzard. He and dad John Schneider Sr. will try and fail at their seventh attempt at a Silver State trophy in an orange 1969 Dodge Charger with the Stars and Bars emblazoned across the roof, of course. It is not one of the 229 or so Chargers Schneider says were purchased for the show, but a $125,000 copy he commissioned himself, complete with the Dixie horn, of course.
Mike Vogel and his teenage son, Patrick, are from Las Vegas. They roll up to the starting line in their 2001 Ford F-350 crew-cab dualie, modified in the auto shop at Western High School in Las Vegas to make 700 horsepower and, oh, 1300 pound-feet of torque. Mike waits for the green light, then together floors the brakes and the gas. The screaming turbo-diesel discharges a cloud of soot while its rear tires vanish in a gray fog. The truck lurches forward, its front tires dragging on the pavement while the howling rears deposit four straight stripes of smoldering ash.
"The d**n thing looked like it was on fire," an eyewitness said later.
The Vogels are our main competition. Somewhere ahead on Highway 318, having already made our start, the GTO's cruise control is set on an effortless 100.1 mph, but Wright is cursing. His main stopwatch has died—just flat expired in his hand. "I don't care if I have to make a sun dial," he growls. "We are not getting beaten by a truck."
Rick Doria figures you need at least 500 horsepower to get a Corvette safely over 200 mph. His current car was built using the 630-horse, 430-cubic-inch splay-valve Chevy V-8 race engine from the wreckage of his last one, destroyed in 1999 when it blew a tire at 190 mph.
The new car has handling problems. "We can't get it to go straight," Doria says. "Will [White, the navigator] has twice thrown down the clipboard and grabbed his seat because he thought we were going in."
Doria knows he won't have a shot at the record this year. That spotlight is on driver Daijiro Inada and an all-Japanese team running a 2002 twin-turbo 3.8-liter Nissan 350Z. Inada is president of Options: Exciting Car Magazine, a Japanese rag for aftermarket tuners and the car's main sponsor. The carbon-fiber-bodied, 690-hp Z cost about $100,000 and was screwed together in only three months, according to the car's chief wrench turner, Hiroyuki Tsuchida.
"It was nightmare," he says.
Before the start, Tsuchida is candid about the Z's chances. "Maybe next year, the record. This year, to finish is enough." In fact, the Z doesn't finish, blowing a tire only seven miles in and rolling up into a ball of scrap on the desert floor. Inada earns a free helicopter ride to the hospital and is okay. Mike Powers in a 1993 Chevy Camaro wins the Unlimited class with an average speed of 186.0908 mph and a trap speed of 207.
Convinced we are slightly behind, Wright orders me to fly through the Narrows—a four-mile stretch of twisties with rock walls on either side—at an even 100. The GTO leans in but tracks through the apexes without drama. Wright is scribbling calculations furiously, checking our laptop display and his backup chronometer, a battered Timex Ironman wristhingych. At the 86-mile mark we're less certain. Are we behind or ahead?
The answer comes as the GTO approaches the finish line at the rate of 147 feet per second. Suddenly, Wright yells, "We're ahead! Slow down, slow down!" But it's too late. Cross the finish at anything less than 80 mph, and you are disqualified. But we cross at 80.2 mph by our GPS speedometer, and 18.9 seconds ahead of schedule by the Ironman.
A few minutes later the F-350 rolls in, 1.2 seconds ahead of schedule. Wright is ashen-faced. "We got beat by a truck. I can't go home," he says mournfully, pondering a walk into the desert with a box cutter. Instead, he interrogates the other drivers in our class and discovers that we have actually taken third in class and a chrome trophy plate. Sure, it was a lot of effort for just 54 minutes of thrill, but the plate does look better on the wall than a speeding ticket.
(This article was from car and driver magazine December 1, 2003 from the SSCC.us website)
Location: www.SSCC.us
