If you haven’t heard the unfortunate news already, Bonneville Speed Week, which had been snowballing with anticipation all year long, was hampered with a succession of rain showers late last week and into the weekend, which forced Southern California Timing Association officials to make the difficult but unavoidable call to cancel the event in its entirety.

Originally slated to begin on Saturday, standing water on what is normal a dry lake bed — and an incredibly famous one at that — had forced SCTA officials to delay the start of Speed Week until Monday. But after more than two inches of rain fell in the northwest part of Utah, the dry lake bed turned into a not-so-dry lake, with water standing shin-high all across the racing surface.

Danny Thompson looks out over the flooded Bonneville Speedway race course where Speed Week — and his first shot at the land speed record his father attempted nearly 50 years ago — was to occur.

For Danny Thompson and his Challenger II team, which we’ve featured here extensively over the last couple of years, the parallels between this year’s Speed Week and the outing his father, Mickey Thompson, endured in 1968 are striking. That year, in the exact same car, the elder Thompson was in Bonneville with every intention of setting a new land speed record in his Autolite Special streamliner, only to have his attempt foiled by a flooded Bonneville race course. And now, nearly half a century later, the Challenger II visits the salt flats and remains silent once again.

Fortunately, for the many competitors who traveled near and far and invested years and untold dollars into their efforts to make Speed Week, another event, Mike Cook’s Bonneville Shootout, is right around the corner on September 12th, providing may of them another shot at the record books before the season comes to a close.

There are already five potential record-setting streamliners entered at the Bonneville Shootout — including George Poteet’s Speed Demon which already owns the wheel-driven, piston-powered record. The others are Thomspon and his Challenger II, Nish Motorsports and their Royal Purple machine, Marlo Treit’s Target 550, and Charles Nearburg’s Spirit of Rett.

Photos courtesy Holly Martin/ThompsonLSR