![]() The desert can easily exceed 100 degrees, and Joel was wearing a 50-pound fire suit for safety. “I fell in love with land-speed racing at Bonneville because, for me personally, it was all about beating a standard - the clock - through the best design I could create,” Joel said. In August 2018, Joel pushed his car up to the starting line at the Bonneville Salt Flats, an ancient lakebed-turned-speedway in Utah, with his eyes set on breaking the speed record for his car class during Bonneville’s annual Speed Week events.ĭespite being classified as a Model T, everything about the Wirths’ car is modern and most of it handmade, including the fuel-injected, turbo-charged engine, two onboard computers (one to control the engine and one to log data) and the long, narrow, royal blue body that sits low to the ground. Then, at the end of each summer, Joel straps himself into the car - which moves faster than a small airplane - and gets ready for the next experiment. When they noticed the car fishtailing at high speeds, they built a vertical fin to keep it straight. When the car needed more traction, they mounted a wing behind the cockpit to push down on the rear wheels. They’ve been fine-tuning their vehicle this way for years. Racing the car is treated like an experiment: they collect data, analyze it for problems and then go make improvements during the off season. ![]() The way they work together is modeled after work at Sandia. Jack Wirth, 83 and a former Sandia manager himself, uses the car to whet his skills and stay active. Joel works on the car to immerse himself in the kinds of challenges his Sandia team deals with every day designing national security technologies. ![]() Together, they’ve built one of the fastest 1927 Model T roadsters in the world.īuilding the car is more than a pastime. The weight was too far back, making the car fishtail whenever he drove it faster than 200 mph.įor the past eight years, Joel has been working after hours in his home garage with his crew chief - his father, Jack Wirth, a retired Sandia electrical engineer. Sandia manager Joel Wirth, a mechanical engineer by training, studied a problem with his car. Between racing seasons, the car undergoes extensive repairs and improvements in Joel’s home garage. ![]() RACING TEAM - Sandia’s Joel Wirth, left, and his father and Labs retiree Jack Wirth stand next to their dismantled roadster. ![]()
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