{"id":14688,"date":"2014-07-07T18:37:00","date_gmt":"2014-07-07T17:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/issue_content\/a-bonneville-triumph\/"},"modified":"2021-07-23T11:43:27","modified_gmt":"2021-07-23T10:43:27","slug":"a-bonneville-triumph","status":"publish","type":"issue_content","link":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/archive\/article\/april-2013\/96\/a-bonneville-triumph\/","title":{"rendered":"A Bonneville triumph \u2013 Honda’s incredible F1 Land Speed Record"},"content":{"rendered":"
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“You go to Bonneville and you take a really heavy car with narrow wheels. We turned up with a really light car with big balloon tyres, and the first time we wheeled the car out the Americans started laughing…”<\/p>\n

Alan van de Merwe didn’t even know where Bonneville was before 2005, when he was asked to head out there with BAR-Honda’s Formula 1 challenger and set the first official Land Speed Record for an F1 car.<\/p>\n

“I had just been taken on as one of Honda’s development drivers,” says the 2003 British Formula 3 Champion, “and the guys at Lucky Strike [which was sponsoring the team at the time] called me into their offices. ‘We’ve got a project for you,’ they told me. ‘It should only take 10 days of your time. You’re going to Bonneville. We’re sending an F1 car, we’re going to run it up and down, take some photos and that will be it’. Two years later we were still trying to set a record.”<\/p>\n

British American Tobacco was keen to get some publicity and to become a member of the ‘Bonneville 400’ club \u2014 an elite group of men or women who achieve more than 400kph (248mph) on the famous salt flats. “I think the whole thing was dreamt up by a marketing team,” says van de Merwe. “In fact they might have come up with 400kph before they had even spoken to anyone technical about it.”<\/p>\n

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Van der Merwe’s greatest achievement up to this point had been as 2003 British F3 champion<\/p>\n

\n Getty Images\n <\/p>\n <\/figcaption>\n <\/figure>\n

No matter, F1 cars were reaching speeds of 360kph (223mph) on the straights of Monza. How hard could it be to eke out another 40kph? As it turned out, no one had a clue just what they had taken on by running a thoroughbred F1 car on the unpredictable salt flats. It was a long way from Monza, and not just in miles. The project would continue into 2006, switching to a Honda RA106 after the Japanese manufacturer took over the team.<\/p>\n

“We ran at various airfields before going out to Nevada,” says John Digby, the project’s team manager, “and we were doing 415kph in both directions. We knew we had a good car \u2014 Honda had given us a great engine [which was producing close to 1000bhp, we had it geared right, but it simply wasn’t heavy enough when we got to the salt. We were breaking traction all the time and measured some jumps the car made at 22ft. It was literally launching itself off the ground.<\/p>\n

“What’s more, down between mile markers seven and eight there was a small valley that hit the speedway at an oblique angle. The wind blew through there and it would push the car 40ft sideways when it was doing well over 200mph.” Van de Merwe hasn’t forgotten the effect it had. “I quickly gained a huge amount of respect for the guys who raced on the salt flats,” he says. “You’re driving flat out and using the whole track, which measured about 40 car widths. It was huge, but we were drifting for 300 or even 400 metres. It was pretty different to what I was used to… You’re in control the entire time with an F3 or an F1 car. You feel it sliding, but we’re talking inches. When we went to look at the tyre marks after one run, we just couldn’t believe it.”<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n\n

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