“The rear tire is kicking up salt, so it looks like they’re leaving a vapour trail as they go across the salt.”Ĭronkite was not in much danger of crashing, or of making a virtual vapour trail-his speed would be many miles per hour slower than a streamliner’s-but he did manage to establish a record, and to make a joke about his old Suzuki Apache being another World’s Fastest Indian. Those fast bikes, he says, are other-worldly. The fast guys use an eight-mile run, he says, which provides a lot of speed-up and a lot of slow-down to sandwich the timed mile. He was probably doing 200 miles an hour.” Cronkite was “a fair distance away” from it, but he had a clear view. “I didn’t really need to see that,” he says. He was down at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah late in August, preparing to ride his 43-year-old Suzuki TS400 Apache (which you also saw in that issue of the magazine) for a land speed record, when he observed the streamliner crashing.Ĭronkite was saddling up for his own run at the time. “It sounded like a couple of soft bangs,” recalls George Cronkite, whom you met in the August issue (First Person). When the streamliner went off the rails, the sound was not what you might have expected from a thousand-horsepower pencil cartwheeling across the salt bed.
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