John Edwin Mason: Racing Photography

Last Dance at the Maxton Mile

I fell in love at the Maxton Mile, and, when it's gone, a piece of my heart will go, too.

Ok, that's putting it much too strongly, but it was the Maxton Mile that sparked my deep infatuation with land speed racing.  Besides drawing me back to Maxton repeatedly, it has lured me all the way out to the Bonnevile Salt Flats for Speed Week.  (But that's another story, for another time.)

Sadly, however, the Maxton Mile is coming to an end.  The East Coast Timing Association [ECTA] has been staging land speed races at the Laurinburg-Maxton Airport, in North Carolina, for over a decade.  Last year, it learned that it wouldn't be allowed to use the airport and its nearly two-mile-long runways after the 2011 season.  That season ends this coming weekend -- October 29th and 30th -- and, with it, a brief, largely unsung chapter in motor sports history.

 

Tim Hunter's '70 Plymouth GTS (converted into a replica of a legendary Nascar Superbirds) on the starting line at the Maxton Mile, 23 June 2011.  [Click on the image to see a larger version.]

Land speed racing has become my favorite motor sport for several different reasons.  For one thing, it's the purest form of racing you can possible imagine.  It's all about going faster than the other guys and gals -- in a straight line, over a measured course.  (At Maxton, the track is a mile long, as the name implies.)

It's also pure in the sense that it's not about money.   Racers aren't in it to get rich or famous.  There's no prize money to be won, few, if any, sponsorships to be had, and record setters won't get their picture on the cover of Sports Illustrated.  Oh, it costs plenty to build one of the very fastest cars or bikes, but a backyard mechanic who's both skilled and clever can create a machine that's competitive in its class without spending a lot of cash.

I also like land speed racing because of the people -- they tend to be smart, eccentric, and friendly -- and their machines -- which range from the sublime to the ridiculous, with every stop in between.  Needless to say, the people and their cars and bikes make land speed racing a lot of fun to shoot.

The ECTA has announced that it will hold its 2012 races at the Airpark, in Wilmington, Ohio.  It's a fine facility and the racing ought to be terrific.

This season, however, I'm saving the last dance for Maxton.

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Find out more about the last running of the Maxton Mile by visiting the ECTA's website.

Professor Speed on the Salt: Robin Dripps at Bonneville, Speed Week, 2011

My story about Robin Dripp's attempt to set a new land speed record at the Bonneville Salt Flats appeared in the Charlottesville Daily Progress last Sunday.  The layout in the print edition looked terrific and the two-page spread included several of my photos.  The online version is less spectacular, but you can read the text, here, and see a slideshow of my photos of Robin and the Gibby and Dripps Racing Team, here.  (As an online bonus, the Progress added a slideshow of my photos that capture the scene at Bonneville more generally.  You can see it, here.)

 

Screen shot of my article about Robin Dripps.

 

This is how I begin the story:

The first thing you hear is static on the CB radio, telling you that there’s a car on the track. Then there’s nothing but the silence of sun, sky, distant mountains and salt.

When the car first appears, it’s a mirage. Five miles from the starting line, through binoculars or your camera’s telephoto lens, it shimmers motionless, a mere speck hovering over the surface of the salt.

The illusion evaporates as soon as it registers. Sound returns as a steady drone, turns into a wail and quickly becomes the anguished shriek of a race-tuned V8 engine being pushed almost to the breaking point.

The car itself is no longer a speck and hovering mirage. The speck has transformed itself into vintage hot rod, a jet-black roadster hurtling forward at an improbable speed.

As the car passes, the shriek subsides. A parachute blooms; the car slows and drifts out of sight, disappearing again below the curvature of the earth.

Welcome to Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats, the fastest place on earth.

As I mentioned, you can read the rest (and see many more photos) on the Progress's website.

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Robin was one of over 500 racers who competed during the Southern California Timing Association's annual Speed Week races.  I've blogged about Speed Week 2011 a couple of times.  You can see a visual diary of my experiences at Bonneville, here, and a portfolio  of images that I made on the salt flats (a landscape of stark, other-worldly beauty), here.

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In a blog post that I wrote about Robin several months ago, I called her Professor Speed.  She's got a heck of a story -- a former teenage hot rodder, who rediscovered speed when she was in her sixties.  In between, she became an architect with an international reputation and the T. David FitzGibbon Professor of Architecture at the University of Virginia.  Pretty cool.