It?s not easy living in the long shadow of a famous dad. You have two choices?run from your inherited legacy or run with it. This week at the Bonneville Salt Flats in western Utah, Danny Thompson, the son of drag racing and Indy 500 impresario Mickey Thompson, took a 48-year-old handoff from his late father and ran 406.7-mph with it, tying up a loose end dating to 1968 and writing the Thompson name into the compendious book of Bonneville records, where it?s likely to stay for some time.
Even with the fragile surface of the ancient Bonneville salt playa fraying out in the latter stages of the eight-mile course, Thompson, 68, pedaled his Challenger 2 streamliner with its twin 500-cubic-inch Hemi V-8s to a class record of 406.7 mph, topping his father?s best recorded speed by 0.1 mph and absolutely crushing the previous record for a non-blown, non-gas fuel streamliner, which since 2009 has stood at 392.5 mph.
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Meanwhile, Challenger 2 had been sitting in storage for another 22 years until the younger Thompson decided to revive the project. He poured $2 million of his own money into restoring and updating the cobalt-blue ship, just a trickle of private donations helping to offset the bills for a nitro-powered streamliner with twin top-fuel dragster engines that costs as much...