200 MPH Club member Bill Lightfoot’s take on Bonneville 2010.

Another Year, Another Record, Another Great Time

200 MPH Club member Bill Lightfoot's take on Bonneville 2010.

This year's Bonneville Speedweek was another successful, record-setting effort. We had the usual trials and tribulations that go with racing, but it was great fun overall. Of course, it always is when we're running Richard Kreines' amazing yellow Alfa Spider on the fabled Bonneville Salt Flats.

Thanks to the meticulous car preparation by Jim Steck and his cousin Doug, we came right out of the box with a good run that put us into record-qualifying territory. But we got a little greedy and decided to forfeit that first run in hopes that we could get a better one later. That looked like a bad bet for a while because, in the middle of my next run, the car cooked its AEM electronic ignition module and I was forced to pull off the course.

It looked as if we were going to be down for a couple of days waiting for a replacement but after a frantic search in the paddock, I tracked down a guy who is an engineer at AEM. Miraculously, he had an extra four-cylinder module with him, which he gave to us AT NO COST! That's part of the Bonneville experience--lots of sharing.

With a new module, we were back in business. The car was really running great although we weren't getting the boost that Jim expected. We had hoped for 28 lbs. of boost, but the most we could ever muster was 25. Also, we were having problems with our data collection system, so Jim wasn't able to get enough data to figure out the boost problem. It turned out that, although neither Jim nor I could feel it in the car, we were bumping up against the rev limiter, which kept the turbo from spooling up as high as we wanted it to.

New for this year was a streamlined head fairing that Jim fabricated to go behind the roll cage. The fairing probably bought us a few miles per hour, but unfortunately, there was a downside. On every run I made, the car started “porpoising” (bobbing up and down as if it was going over waves) at about 200 mph. Both Jim and an aerodynamics expert I spoke with thought that this was probably caused by the fairing. In any event, this sort of oscillation gives one pause and we were anxious to get rid of it. The guys were finally able to do this by dropping the nose of the car about an inch.

After making some other changes, we got back out on the salt and made a really good run. The car was clocked at 233.841 (about 8 mph more than we needed for a new record and the fastest that I have ever gone) and we registered an “out the back door” speed of 233.948 mph. We decided to put that run in our pocket, take the car to impound and get ready for our record back-up run the following day.

The next morning (Aug. 19) we were out on the salt at dawn (incidentally, it is absolutely beautiful out there at dawn and dusk) and made a run as soon as they let us. That pass yielded a speed of 230.590 mph, which was more than enough to set a new record. The old record, which I set last year, was 225.839 mph and the new one (the average of my last two runs) is 232.215. This is the fastest record the car has ever posted.

The car was then torn down for inspection. After it passed, the SCTA (Southern California Timing Association) announced that we had officially set the new world record for the G/BFMS (Blown Fuel Modified Sports, under two-liter) class!

As soon as I had completed my record runs, Jim took over the driving duties in hopes of resetting his own G/BGMS (Blown Gas Modified Sport) record from 2009. Jim and I run in different classes; which keeps Jim from dialing down the boost when I run or me pouring sugar in the fuel tank when he runs! Just kidding, of course--it's all about getting more runs and setting more records.

Jim, also a 200 MPH Club member, made an extremely fast first run (the fastest run the car's ever made, in fact) and put the car into impound. However, on the back-up run, the usually-reliable Alfa suffered some sort of mechanical failure, so Jim was not able to set a new record in his class this year. But we did come away with one new record and the whole team (especially me!) feels great about that.

I need to note here that the engine/car combination is of paramount importance in this type of racing. The driver is of some importance, of course, as an error in shift timing or steering input will ruin a run, but the engine/car combination is most critical. In road racing, for example, a brilliant driver can make even an ordinary car a winner. That's not the case in world speed record competition. Even a Michael Schumacher or Mario Andretti can't make a slow car go really fast in a straight line.

With that in mind, I would like to once again thank Jim Steck, who built upon the earlier work of the Besic brothers, Richard Kreines, Craig Bielat, Eric Storhok, Ed Argalas, Kim Tonry and a number of others to put together a record-setting car/engine combination.

Bill Lightfoot
Vienna, Va.