Louise Noeth asks "do fast women really need engineers?" Astronaut John Glenn used Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats as a landmark from space, but on earth amateur motorsports enthusiasts have used the blistering hot, flat pancake as a speed laboratory for more than a century. With their handcrafted cars, trucks and motorcycles, thousands of men and women have hosted pageants of power each summer since 1949. Every single one came looking for the answer to the same question: "How fast will to go?”
The decades of effort have made them the fastest people on earth reaching speeds more than 500MPH. On the salt, people find the limits of their courage, they learn what daring greatly is all about, and understand why a Bonneville Salt Flats speed record is an internationally respected pedigree. People who race on the salt flats become a family bound together by speed – a powerful force that erases ethnic, economic, political, and religious barriers: They are land speed racers.
The evening presentation shines a spectacular spotlight on how some 350 women (ages 16 to 80) designed, built and/or set more than 1,000 land speed records.