Bonneville: last roll of the dice

Rick Pearson reports:
The Salt can be a tough mistress, but to be honest she’s virtually killing us here.
Another tough day. We had the engine back together for 7.30am after working all night once Joe Amo (fastest guy ever on a sit-on motorbike at 272mph!) arrived with the parts we were missing. One shift of mechanics went to bed, and another woke to put the engine in the car. This was completed around 11.30 and we were confident of being on the Salt for early afternoon. However on firing the engine up, we realised she was running badly and needed some pretty major open heart surgery. Including more parts we didn’t have!
Once again it looked like it was all over, and once again the Salt community managed to source us what we needed and the engine was finished by 5pm. Panels back on and we whipped the car down to the Salt from the Casino car park HQ we’ve been using. Unfortunately the wind was pretty marginal for safety but we decided to make a pass anyway in a lull. The Flower of Scotland went off the line well, but lost power within the first mile. A quick investigation threw up another small failure in the transmission, clearly the destruction of the two engines so far this week had shaken stuff up more than we thought... but this time fortunately it was a quick fix... but not quickly enough to turn the car around for another run at the Salt tonight.
So we have one last chance in the morning, the car has been geared so that if it makes it the 5 miles down the Salt and I can keep my foot to the boards, we SHOULD run the record. We’ll be on the Salt for sun up, and fingers crossed our luck will finally come good. It certainly feels like we’ve paid our dues......