Raise your hand if you knew that the world’s largest salt flat was in Bolivia! As we suspected, not that many hands came up. To be truthful, until recently ours would not have been up either and the only reason it is up now is the fact that for the first time in history people are actively land speed racing on the massive Uyuni Salt Flats, a 4,000 square mile hunk of salt that is located some 13,000ft above sea level. Yes, it would suck to breathe there let alone tune a car to make power but the Bolivians know how to get it done.
Along with being a massive salt flat like Bonneville it is also a mine like Bonneville. Instead of the potash the guys in Utah are mining, the big deal about the Uyuni Salt Flats are its stores of Lithium. Our understanding is that this place became far more accessible to people after the government of the country made some infrastructure to entire mining operations to the area. With the place the size that it is, we cannot imagine how long it would take them to exhaust the Lithium stores there but we’re hoping it is a really long time and land speed racers in the newest venue on Earth can get after it for decades out there.
As you will see in this video a pretty awesome looking machine along the lines of the famed “Nebulous Theorem” Bonneville runners leaves the starting line with no push truck and the driver leans on the throttle pretty hard after a short trip out of the gate. This is quite literally the only video that has surfaced of the event and we’re hoping more show up to see what these guys and girls were running out there.
So now there is racing on salt in Australia, North America, and South America. How cool is that?!
I find it amazing that they can get internal combustion engines to function at such high altitude – mind it helps when you are racing on the world’s biggest stash of pure uncut Bolivian marching powder…..
This might be an altitude where running AvGas made sense.