Doug DePriest - Producer

Prior to producing the program my only experience with the Great Salt Flats was to ride through at the age of 14, in a station wagon with a family of six and a dog. I remembered the experience as hot, bright and everyone being fairly irritable. But who knows, it was a cross-country family vacation and I was one of three teenagers in the car, so we were all pretty miserable to begin with. However, this time I was heading to the Salts Flats with a film crew of six, five cameras and the nearly impossible mission of capturing people who were driving cars as fast as 300 mph on a white desert.

What we found was extraordinary. Every morning we would arrive in total darkness and drive onto the salt. The sun would come up and you felt as if you were on another planet. The beauty was breathtaking. Pure whiteness as far as you the eye can see. So far that you could actually see the curvature of the earth. As for the salt, it' not your granular Morton's, as you might imagine, but a very hard surface. And it was often moist. The salt is constantly drawing moisture from the earth. It is one of the strangest and most wonderful environments I have ever seen. So we went to work.

One of the most difficult tasks in a film like this is to capture speed on a white desert. There are no reference points to show you how fast the cars a racing. No picket fences, no winding mountain roads like the car commercials, no great shots of curvy flying women with their hair blowing back in the breeze, nothing, nada, zip. You can't tell if a car is going thirty miles per hour or three hundred. So we mounted a lot of cameras on cars to capture the sense of speed. We would sometimes have as many as three cameras mounted on a single car. The fact that the racers at Bonneville would allow us to do this is a testament to what a great group of people they are. Imagine building a car for a year, coming to Bonneville and then having a film crew show up and ask "Hey do you mind if we attach a bunch of equipment to your car? We promise that it won't slow it down." But the racers on the flats were awesome and we were never turned down.