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Salt of the Earth
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Salt Flats
Jeff Buchanan
12/01/2003
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Photography by Chris Chomyn
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The salt plays tricks on your mind—the look of it, the sound of it—crunching
beneath your feet like the ice of a vast, frozen lake. You expect it to be cold
but it’s not. These are the hallowed grounds of speed at the Bonneville Salt
Flats in western Utah. For decades men have wheeled machines out onto the salt
and pointed them to the distant horizon, intent on testing the limits of their
creations—the limits of their dreams.
 Breaking the salt-muted silence, the
incongruous skirl of a bagpipe greets the first blush of this particular dawn
with a rendition of “Amazing Grace.” The music becomes an anthem for the congregation of gathering racers, a solemn reminder of all the tears and hopes
that have been absorbed by this endless expanse of salt. Like so many ethereal
elements out here, the music, at first, seems merely an aural apparition, yet
another of this landscape’s mirages. But the bagpipes are real. We’re not
hearing things. (Click image to enlarge)
The drone of the Scottish pipes issues from the edge of the
pits. Silhouetted against the breaking dawn, the bagpiper and two flanking men
form a trio. Before them—presented as if in offering to the sun of the new
day—sits the Confederate Wraith XP-1. The motorcycle, born in the voodoo
vortices of New Orleans, is at rest here on the Utah salt. Its carbon-fiber
backbone, the most prominent of the contiguous, intersecting design circles that
form the flow of this machine, elicits memories of another brethren of speed;
the Cyclone boardtrack racer from the high banks of
yesteryear.
 J.T. Nesbitt (left); and Brian Case (right) with their creation, the XP-1 Wraith. (Click image to enlarge)
The man breathing life into the
bagpipes is J.T. Nesbitt, the creator behind the Wraith. Next to him, watching
the sun crest the horizon, is Confederate Motor Company founder Matt Chambers,
the soles of his shoes already caked with moist salt. Completing the trio is
Brian Case, President and CEO of Foraxis, a Pittsburgh-based industrial design
firm.
These men have arrived at Bonneville, far from their homes, via an
arduous sojourn measured as much in conviction and passion as in miles. They
have come not to prove something to the other competitors, not to prove to the
clock, but—perhaps more important and exigent of all—they’ve come to prove
something to themselves.
 This day represents the culmination of two solid
years of work in bringing the Wraith to fruition. To fathom the commitment
necessary to bring this motorcycle into the realm of a functioning, innovative
platform, consider that Nesbitt took a vow of celibacy in the six months leading
up to this moment, in order to focus all his romanticism, all his strength on
the task at hand. Case poured countless hours into marrying Nesbitt’s artistic
hand drawings with the pragmatic realities and demands of computer engineering.
The two men collaborated in taking the cerebral, theoretical design concept of
the Wraith—a distinct departure from traditional design, built without a single
weld—and bringing it into industrial tangibility. The ever-present Chambers
presided over the business to allow these determined alchemists their passions
and intense follies in the cloisters of the Confederate Motor Company factory.
In the process, a production motorcycle has been born. And now they are here. (Click image to enlarge)
Two days of rain arrived before the nomads of speed, leaving the salt wet
and slow. A silence has settled over the entire pit area—a contingent comprised
of perhaps a hundred two-wheel competitors—as everyone waits for the salt to dry
out. Teams try to dissipate the boredom, busying themselves with mechanical
tasks to pass the time. They’re eager to get onto the salt, to get to speed.
They come here, year after year, to experience the seduction and trance of the
most unusual of motorized competitions.
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