I went into this thinking the Bonneville coverage in the archive would unfold neat and tidy, like a proper timeline. The file names sure made it look that way. But nope… We got hoodwinked by a mislabeled roll. The directory says “Bonneville, 1958 Part 3,” but the truth is this film was exposed at Speed Week in 1957. Damnit.
Still, how the hell can I bitch when the photos look like this? Somewhere around ’56 or ’57, Tom Cobbs hit his stride as a photographer. Compare these frames to Hot Rod Magazine’s coverage of the same years and the gap is brutal. Tom wasn’t just better, he was in another league entirely.
Naturally, most of his lens time in ’57 went to his own machine – the former Pierson Brothers Coupe, reborn as the Cobbs Engineering Coupe. And they weren’t just playing dress-up. The car dominated, crushing the C Competition Coupe class with a 193.86 mph pass, over 20 mph faster than the next guy.
But that’s just the start. You get late shots of the Kenz-Leslie streamliner… Eight years straight of dragging that monster to the salt, and still the fastest thing out there. One way, they clocked 274.56 mph.
OR, check out Jim Khougaz’s #7000 rear-engined roadster in its earliest, rawest form. Today it’s been polished into museum-piece oblivion, but back then? It was just a Frankenstein of sheet metal and hope… and still quick enough to take the D Modified Class at 212.76 mph.
All of this history, but I think my favorite shots are those taken in front of Tom Cobb’s Santa Monica home as he prepared for the pilgrimage. Not only because nothing in the world is more charming than a mid century California neighborhood, but also because a secret is revealed. You know that Ford pickup that we have seen Tom drive around all over this archive? There was TWO of them.
I’ll be damned.
Enjoy the shots: