![]() ![]() ![]() He disengages the clutch, fires up the engine and revs his modified Nissan V6, which booms out a rolling roar. ![]() After a year of planning and building, tuning and tinkering, the time has come for Calvert to push his car to the limit. Orange flags, a pair per measured mile, recede into the heat-hazed distance. And all he can see is an expanse of empty whiteness split by two black lines that mark the 5-mile-long, 90-ft.-wide timing course of the renowned Bonneville Salt Flats. Sealed inside his machine, Calvert stares into a periscope prism, looking upward in order to see straight ahead. ![]() He scoots his legs forward until he's lying nearly flat on his back, then watches as his chief mechanic, Gary Tripp, lowers and secures the hatch over him. Gary Calvert, a 65-year-old member of the Muckleshoot tribe, lowers himself into the coffin-size cockpit of a 14-ft.-long cigar-shaped race car that he built back home in tiny Enumclaw, Wash. Though a record setting attempt anywhere other than Bonneville doesn’t hold the same gravitas for the company based on its developed history on the flats, an attempt and a record setting run proves the capability of the machine and the tremendous efforts accomplished in the short timeline it has taken the company to conceptualize, build, test, and prepare the Triumph Rocket for speeds over 350+ mph.IT'S TIME. Triumph has been unavailable for comment today, but based on the amount of money put into the project by the UK and its sponsors, I hope the team is considering an alternate site for an attempt. Will the Ack-Attack record stand for another year? It seems likely as a nine mile course for vehicles seeking speeds of 400-500 mph is the minimum allowed by the SCTA. The current land speed record of 376.363 mph (605.697 km/h) was set by Rocky Robinson in 2010 in the Suzuki powered Top-Oil Ack Attack streamliner, and has stood for five years. In the motorcycle world, there continues to be a lot of eyes on Guy Martin and the Triumph Rocket endeavor to break the land speed record in the Division-C Blown Fuel Streamliner Motorcycle class. ![]()
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