I won’t leave you in suspense—we went 411mph on our first run today. That is well over the current AA/FS class record (the engine category in which our car completes), so the Challenger 2 is now in impound awaiting a backup pass. In case you’re unfamiliar with the system, the SCTA (Speed Week’s sanctioning body) only grants two-way records. This means that all speeds have to be achieved twice (on subsequent days, with no runs in-between) in order to count. Simply put, if we want the official record, we have to do as well tomorrow morning as we did today. The car and the crew have both been performing like champs, so I feel like that is probably achievable.
The quality of the salt surface is decent, particularly when compared to the last several years, but conditions are not ideal for full speed runs. The big end of the long course in particular is quite rough. We were planning to run an 80% nitro blend, but stepped back down to 72% in hopes of maintaining traction. That said, it’s terrific to be back at Bonneville, and I’m confident that we, as well as many of our friends and competitors, will continue to lay down more epically fast runs over the course of the weekend. A huge thanks to all of the SCTA folks for their hard working in preparing this event.
Thanks for keeping up with our progress. If you'd like to follow along in real time, we’re posting regularly throughout the day to our Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram accounts. More tomorrow!
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