By Dan Strohl

Hemmings

Progress on the Bill Burke bellytank re-creation ran at a rapid pace the last couple weeks, and for good reason – owner Geoff Hacker wanted to display the racer on the salt at Bonneville for this year’s Speedweek, which starts Saturday. The first fire for the engine took place July 24, then by the 29th, Ted Kempgens and Tom Bambard finalized the paint and got it out on the street for a shakedown run. Geoff packed up the bellytank and all related materials Sunday, then hit the road Monday, so if you’re headed out to Bonneville, make sure to see him and the bellytank. Plans also call for Bill Burke to join Geoff on the salt this weekend. Then once Geoff’s done there, he’ll head out to California to drop the bellytank off at the NHRA Museum, where it’ll join two other Bill Burke bellytanks. Good luck, Geoff! More pics at Hemmings

By Jim Brennan

UDMan

Welcome to the CarDomain Obscure Muscle Car Parking Lot, a regular feature which aims to expand the notion of what a muscle car is, and maybe, have some fun in the process. Pontiac wasn’t always known as the excitement division; by the early 50′s it had earned a reputation of appealing to older drivers, with plodding engines and unexciting styling. The turning point came in the fall of 1956 with the introduction of Pontiac’s first performance car: the fuel-injected, limited-edition Pontiac Bonneville.

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By Jim Brennan

UDMan

Along with some significant (and not quite significant) vehicles available at the Scottsdale Barrett-Jackson Auction that GM Heritage Museum is disposing of, there is a group of racing and racing support cars that will be offered for bid. Most of these have been saved for the Finale on Sunday, in the hopes of achieving as much value as possible. A lot of these cars will be purchased for future vintage racing, or for racing museums, but I’m guessing that more than a couple will be actively campaigned in the very near future. Sit back, and buckle up your five point harness, here are some of the racing vehicles from the GM Historical Collection.

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The guys at Factory Five are telling me that this world record holding Type 65 Coupe will be in their booth at SEMA this year. Built by Farra Snook and SoFast Racing, the Coupe has a 347 Ford small block producing a healthy 700 hp. It went 216.9 mph at Bonneville last month, which was good for a land speed record in the blown fuel modified class. We’ll get a much closer look at this car in just a few weeks, so stay tuned.

I always admire pristine garages like this one, but I don’t think I’d ever actually manage to set up something similar for myself. It just seems too clean and neat or something–I like my garages to be a bit dirtier. But the ’62 Bonneville is sick!

By Jen Dunnaway

Editor

Hot rod builder and salt-flats legend Gene Winfield has another Bonneville monster up his sleeve, having just completed work on this Brookfield-bodied 1932 Ford roadster. It’s running a race-shop-fresh Ford NASCAR engine donated whole by Robert Yates Racing, and it’ll be pushing over 800 horsepower. All the welding and fabrication was done by hard-partying father-son duo Charlie Webster Sr. and Jr., and the Ford is flaunting one of Winfield’s signature fade paint jobs. Just standing in front of this NASCAR-powered deuce while it’s taching up is more than enough to make you lose a few thousand brain cells—watch the soundwaves nearly shatter my camera lens! Can’t wait to see this wicked Ford blow some doors off on the salt flats at Speed Week in August.

Everybody’s a documentary producer nowadays. Cheap video cameras have led to innumerable media passes at every automotive event in the country, including Bonneville. Travel to the salt flats in August and you’re sure to run across dozens of camera-wielding "journalists" aiming to create yet another documentary about the pursuit of land-speed records. Only problem is, where’s the end result?

Benn Karne, however, is one of the few who actually delivered a DVD from his time spent both on the flats and with a handful of racers in preparation for Speedweek. He originally released Bonneville: Wide Open as a 52-minute documentary in 2004, but recently re-released the DVD with double the footage in bonus features.

It’s by no means a Hollywood production; it lacks narration and jumps from topic to topic with little transition. On the other hand, neither is the topic; land-speed racing remains the last ad-hoc, do-it-yourself racing venue where a slick entrant from GM might follow a rough-and-tumble entrant from a guy from Pocatello, Idaho.

Most of the bonus footage, however, really should have been included in the original version of the documentary. Some of the material expands on the stories of the individual racers that Karne profiled, but the real treat is the complete footage of a run–after all, what better use can one think of for a video camera on the salt flats?