Tell you what, if you've never stood on the salt flats at Bonneville with the sun coming up and a streamliner howling by at 300 miles an hour, you haven't seen the purest form of racing there is. A writer over at MSN made the case recently that Speed Week beats Formula 1 as a motorsports destination, and I reckon he's onto something.

The difference is simple. F1 costs you a mortgage payment to sit in a seat far enough away that the cars look like toys. Bonneville costs you whatever Utah charges to get out on the salt, and you can walk right up to the pits and watch a team tear down an engine between runs. No fences keeping you a quarter mile from the action. No security guy telling you to put your camera away. Just folks with greasy hands chasing a number.

And that's what Bonneville really is, when you get down to it. It's not racing wheel to wheel. It's man and machine against physics, one at a time, on a course laid out on a lake bed that's been baking in the sun since before any of us were born. The salt is white as a fresh bedsheet and it goes to the horizon in every direction. Drivers push flat-out for miles, then coast down for another few, and the whole run is timed to the thousandth. You're racing the clock and you're racing the guys who came before you, and that's the whole race.

The machinery is the other half of the story. You'll see lakesters built in somebody's garage from old tank parts. Streamliners that took ten years and every spare dollar a man had. Belly tanks off WWII fighter planes turned into the fastest bathtub you ever laid eyes on. Some of these cars have more miles of duct tape and prayer in them than welds, and they go out there and set records anyway. It reminds me of the guys back home who'd build a mud truck out of three dead ones behind the barn. Same spirit, just pointed at a different kind of dirt.

The people are what sealed it for me though. Every team out there will stop what they're doing to talk to you, show you the car, explain what they changed since last year's pass. Try that at a Grand Prix paddock sometime and see how far you get. The racer running next to you on Monday might be the same one lending you a torque wrench on Tuesday, because out there a competitor's broken car means one less record chaser and nobody wants that. Half the fun is sitting in a folding chair at sunset listening to old-timers argue about tire compounds.

Now, a few practical things if you're thinking of going, because the salt doesn't forgive the unprepared. It happens in August, usually the second week, out on the Bonneville Salt Flats just east of Wendover. Bring sunglasses, serious sunscreen and more water than you think you need, because that white salt throws the sun back at you from below and it will cook you like a brisket. Wear closed shoes. Boots if you've got them. The salt eats everything it touches, including vehicles, so folks rinse their undercarriages like they're baptizing them before they head home.

The schedule runs on weather and course conditions, so check before you drive out. Some years the salt's too wet and runs get shortened. That's just how it goes. You're at the mercy of a lake bed that doesn't care about your vacation plans.

I've watched plenty of racing on TV, and most of it's fine. But there's nothing fine about Bonneville, there's nothing fine about standing a hundred feet off the line when a streamliner leaves. You feel it in your chest before you hear it. F1 is a spectacle somebody sells you. Speed Week is a thing that just happens out on the salt, and you're lucky enough to be standing there when it does. Next August, burn the tank of gas. Take the back roads through Nevada if you've got the time.