{"id":36117,"date":"2017-02-02T08:53:13","date_gmt":"2017-02-02T16:53:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/?p=36117"},"modified":"2017-02-02T08:53:13","modified_gmt":"2017-02-02T16:53:13","slug":"how-i-met-danny-thompson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/how-i-met-danny-thompson\/","title":{"rendered":"How I Met Danny Thompson"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"How
Despite international exposure on the cover of the January 2017 issue of Hot Rod magazine, Danny Thompson is looking for sponsors for his racecar. At 68 years old, Thompson drove his streamliner at just over 406.7 mph.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Let me be frank – I actually met land speed racer Danny Thompson because of a hot dog. I was out to lunch one day during the PRI Show in Indianapolis. I sat down next to a man dressed in black.<\/p>\n

\u201cAre you into racing?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cYes,\u201d said the man.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat kind?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cLand Speed Racing,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou must know Danny Thompson,\u201d I surmised.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am Danny Thompson,\u201d the man said.<\/p>\n

\u201cHoly Cow!\u201d I thought. This was the same Danny Thompson we had called about a year earlier, and the same Danny Thompson featured in the previous month\u2019s Hot Rod Magazine<\/em>. Danny was on the cover, in fact. Last fall, he drove his dad’s \u2014 Mickey Thompson\u2019s \u2014 old 1968 Autolite Special Streamliner to a two-way average speed of 406.769 mph on the Bonneville Salt Flats. The significance of that was mostly in going faster than the 406.6 mph Mickey Thompson\u2019s Challenger I had set for a one-way run 48 years earlier.<\/p>\n

Our phone call to Danny in 2015 had to do with attending a meeting about the fate of the Salt Flats at that year\u2019s PRI Show. During the meeting, Dave Sarna and I had put out the idea of doing another movie about Bonneville to raise money for the well-known \u201cSave the Salt\u201d effort. We figured that if \u201cThe World\u2019s Fastest Indian\u201d had done well, a movie about Mickey Thompson would do even better. Dave drives the Fox Valley Tech Firebird, which went 192 mph on the salt in 2012. He got very pumped about the movie idea and called Danny Thompson. We had a conference call, but things never moved past that. And now I was sitting in the lobby of the Indiana Convention Center next to Danny Thompson.<\/p>\n

I immediately asked Danny Thompson if I could interview him for RacingJunk.com, <\/em>and he said he was at the PRI Show looking for \u201canything that will help our streamliner project.\u201d He was looking for sponsorships, which he described as \u201calways the ever-elusive, hardest thing in motorsports; finding the money to keep running.” I asked if being on the cover of Hot Rod didn\u2019t help.<\/p>\n

\u201c<\/em><\/strong>Yeah, it\u2019s pretty cool when you walk through an airport and see the cover of Hot Rod<\/em> magazine sitting there and you\u2019re on it,\u201d he answered. \u201cWe\u2019ve had a lot of exposure. We had good exposure in Hot Rod<\/em>, we had good exposure in Roadkill.com<\/em> and we had good exposure in Racer<\/em> magazine. We\u2019ve even done some TV stuff and some commercial stuff, but we still need a big sponsor.”<\/p>\n

According to Danny, the Autolite Special is now called Challenger II. \u201cThe car is 48 years old,\u201d Thompson noted. \u201cIt will be 49 years old this coming year. When it ran in 1968, my dad did about 360 mph with it. Then it sat for 46 years. I got it all back running. Mostly it\u2019s the same as it was. The basic shape is the same. It\u2019s about two feet longer and has a couple of little aero tweaks. The air intakes from the front to rear engines are placed differently. It has a different engine and transmission, but the basic car is the same one that ran in 1968.\u201d<\/p>\n

The car set a record during Bonneville Speedweeks 2016 at 406.769 mph, but now Danny is gunning for more. He was going to retire the Challenger II after the FIA race, but ran into some problems and hurt the car bad. \u201cI\u2019ve decided that I left too much on the table,\u201d he said. \u201cNow we want to go back and run in 2017.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thompson was still trying to evaluate what went wrong. He lost the drive shaft and it took a tire out and did more damage. \u201cWe were at 415 mph when it went,\u201d Thompson emphasized. \u201cSo, we had one hell of a ride.\u201d<\/p>\n

The car now has Brad Anderson aluminum block Hemis. It has a drag race combination, but the HEMIS are fuel injected. They are 500 cubic inches and injected and 2500 hp running on nitro.<\/p>\n

Concrete Plants. Inc., from New York, and Mickey Thompson Tires are still backing the car. Near the end of 2016, United Health Care and Ball Watches also came on as sponsors. \u201cWe\u2019ve got some help for sure,\u201d Thompson said, \u201cbut not enough. Right now we have Concrete Plants, Inc. for sure and we have Ball Watches, but that\u2019s about it as far as definites.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thompson said he wishes that Ford would hop on his project. \u201cThey were the only one involved with this car initially in 1968,\u201d he pointed out. \u201cIt was a Ford-Autolite project at the time. But they have not (come aboard). We have asked them once. So, that\u2019s all right.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thompson said he and the car will be back on the salt whether anyone comes on board or not. \u201cIt\u2019s happening,\u201d he promised. \u201cIt\u2019s because of the passion about Bonneville; passion about trying to get and keep that record and passion for trying to continue being the world\u2019s fastest piston-engine car.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Let me be frank – I actually met land speed racer Danny Thompson because of a hot dog.<\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":36118,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3470,5029],"tags":[968,1638,304,1184,41],"class_list":["post-36117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-racing","tag-danny-thompson","tag-interview","tag-john-gunnell","tag-land-speed-racing","tag-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/RJ143-Danny-Photo-01.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p42YSK-9ox","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36117"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36117\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36135,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36117\/revisions\/36135"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}