One of my favorite telephone conversations of 2007 was with 1950s Bonneville-racing-legend Denny Larsen. For those of you unfamiliar, Larsen built the Maybee Drilling Special that raced across the salt at 203.105 mph in 1953, becoming the world’s fastest sports car. Larsen’s team also made history in 1957 with a Sorrell-bodied, D-Modified sports car that was a record breaker at 178.068 mph. Now, more than half a century later, Denny is instantly friendly, happy to talk your ear off about all things racing and nonracing. Our three-hour “tour de phone” included tales of everything from his end-over-end airplane crash to the never-finished Bonneville car stored in his Arizona barn.
After about two hours, I was able to gently steer the conversation toward the original impetus for my call. I was researching the history of one of my own racing cars, built by Bob Sorrell in the 1950s on a Chuck Manning chassis. As Larsen and Sorrell had been friends (and since Larsen’s car set a ’57 Bonneville record in a Sorrell SR-100), I had hoped he might be able to shed some light on the history of my car. No such luck, he didn’t remember anything.
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