not forgotten - remembering Nolan White

[PorkPie]

20 October 2002

Nolan White

a great racer with a big heart

Nolan, you are not forgotten

[SPARKY]

  NOLAND!

[SPDRACR]

A Great man, and visionary, and Often Misunderstood as stand -offish. I have had the great opportunity to call Nolan a Boss, and a friend, along with his Son Rick.

[deucemac]

Nolan White is the reason  I became  fascinated  with  LSR. I was a 12 year old kid attending  Marston  Jr. High in San Diego. Two black away, on the corner of Clairemont  Drive and Balboa  Ave. Was a Flying A gas station  that Nolan owned. I would  walk by there every  day and stop to watch him assemble his red  A/SR car very off season from a pile of parts. When the season started, the car would  be ready to go .  I   always knew when he raced the car  because  it either  had dust or salt on it and was  soon cleaned up and ready to run again. Pretty  heady stuff for a 12  year  old  eaten  up with all things race car or hot rod. We pitted a couple of places down from Rick a few years ago  and shared  the lasting impression  he made  on  me. Thanks  Nolan!

[Speed Limit 1000]

A racer at heart, gone too soon. Always an inspiration.

[Tom Burkland]

Thanks for the memories in that photo Pork Pie. Nolan was a great friend and competitor during our years of streamliner racing. I had the honor of resetting his AA/BFS record in October of 2004, and we proudly carried his 131 number on our car in his memory during each run from then forward.
For those of you that did not know Nolan, you really need to read this story written by Tom Bryant and published on his Bryant Family Racing web site. It describes how the content of this photo happened.

                                                                               Nolan White
                                                                February 26, 1931 - October 20, 2002
 

I don't really remember when I first had a conversation with Nolan, but I became aware of his presence on the Salt soon after I began attending Speedweek in 1957. Nolan got my attention by his performance in his Modified Sports entry, a highly modified Devin roadster which he converted to a coupe by installing a fiber glass top. His car was powered by a small block Chevrolet with a roller chain driven 4-71 supercharger. Nolan was always a bootstrap racer who designed and made most of his own specialized parts. This, of course presented problems when breakage occurred, but since the word "quit" was not in his vocabulary, he usually managed to make repairs and continue in competition.  In later years he did acquire sponsorship that gave him the ability to compete with a higher level of equipment.

There are not many of pictures of Nolan's cars appearing in the racing publications until the later years. He ran two different sports cars at Bonneville, but to date, I have been unable to acquire pictures of either. He always ran hard, but so far as I can tell he never set a record on the Salt until 1963 when he set two records (A/Sports Racing @ 213.402 mph and B/Sports Racing @ 210.474 mph) which gave him membership in the Bonneville 200 MPH Club. In 1964 he raised the A/Sports Racing record to 224.477 mph and set the D/Sports Racing Record @ 200.595 mph. Then, in 1966 he set the E/Sports Racing record @ 184.284 mph.

I believe it was 1966 that he crashed his Devin and received a broken neck in the process. As is evident, however, he continued to chase speed with a vengeance. After the crash, he built a new more slippery Sports Car and continued in this class for a few more years but was unsuccessful in setting further records. He had stiff competition from Jack Lufkin who dominated the Sports Racing Classes for a number of years. His entry showed up in B/Gas Streamliner in 1978 & '79 as White & Sons. I am not sure what the car was, but I think that it was the same car that he had been campaigning in Sports Racing with further modifications.

Nolan was entered in B/Fuel Streamliner in 1980. This entry is the car that he ran for the rest of his racing career. In 1990, at the World of Speed Nolan became the first hot rodder, running a single engine entry, to be timed in excess of 400 mph. Al Teague also ran 400 mph at the meet, but Nolan preceded Al. I think it was 1999 that Nolan appeared on the Salt with an additional engine in his car. We were both at the nine mile and visited a while. He showed me his new creation and told me of his decision to add the second engine a couple of months before Speedweek. He said that he had always been critical of those who ran multiple engines, but just decided that he would join their ranks.  From that time on he had continual problems with his belt driven 4WD setup. He rarely made a complete run without breaking the drive belt.

At Speedweek 2002 I greeted Nolan on the starting line and asked him if he had been able to cure his belt drive problem. He grabbed my arm and led me inside his trailer to a drawing on the wall and proceeded to tell me about his gear drive setup that he had designed and had built. He said that he might have other problems, but that the drive was the strongest "link in the chain".

The rest is history! His gear box did cure the drive train problem and he qualified @ 404.313 mph and returned at 422 mph for a BNI AA/FS Record of 413.156 mph. He had accomplished a dream that he had been chasing for twenty years. Now his sights were set on the FIA record. He firmly believed that he could run 450 mph (he had been timed at 442 mph at a private timing after the world finals in 1999) my guess is that he would have succeeded had he not met with the fatal accident.
There were two occasions that gave a hint to how dedicated Nolan was in his search for speed. In 1982 and '83 the Salt was under water so we had no meets. Nolan went to Black Rock Desert and tested his car. Another time a few years later, SCTA/BNI decided not to run the World Finals because of a lack of entries. Nolan got on the phone and rounded up those who were interested in running and organized his own meet.

On Friday morning, October 18, Nolan stopped by our pit on his way to the nine mile. He was going to make the first leg of the FIA record attempt after the completion of Record Runs. He asked if I would push him off. I had forgotten, but he said that I had pushed his car off on the run that gained him his 200 MPH Club Membership in 1963. Of course, I felt honored to be asked and accepted without hesitation. We spent the next hour or so recalling the earlier days, joking and having a great time together. Nolan and I were good friends for more than forty years. We didn't usually get to spend much time together because one or the other, or both of us, were focused on our own car and problems we faced. We did manage to make contact every time that we were on the Salt together, however. I will sorely miss him.

Nolan was the "racer's racer".  He did not receive a great amount of publicity, primarily because he didn't set a lot of records. Most of us identify with Nolan because we fall in that same category.  He did have the respect of his peers, however, and after all, what greater honor can we hope to achieve.

Nolan loved the Salt Flats. There is no better way to honor him than with a donation in his name to...

Save the Salt
c/o Mike Waters
39937 90th West
Leona Valley, CA 93551

Thanks to our friend Tom Bryant for his words written not long after this fateful run in 2002. We miss them both as they have gone on to greater rewards and left us with great life lessons from their examples.
Tom Burkland

[jdincau]

Thanks for posting that Tom, it embodies what everyone I know thought of Nolan.

[PorkPie]

Tom (Burkland),

I knew that story, as Tom (Bryant) has told me...

and this was the reason why I choose that photo...I also got close up photos from Nolan of that final run...

but I liked to have Nolan and Tom at the photo....both were great friends of mine....I miss both

[Tom Burkland]

Also in the photo is our dear friend and expert starter, Bill Taylor (RIP). Always so reassuring to have him check the car over and tug the belts before telling the driver "the course is now yours".
Tom Burkland

[kiwi belly tank]

I don't recall the timeline, we were kinda busy back then but was Nolan still running one engine when he made his first 400 pass or had he gone to two by then? He was like the salt phantom back in those days, never really set up a pit, just worked on it in the trailer wherever he parked it. Most of the time we didn't know if he was going to run or he'd gone home!
  Sid.

[salt27]

I believe this was at World of Speed 2002. (sorry about the quality, picture of picture)

[Stainless1]

I remember those days... Nolan and Al were the Breedlove/Arfons of SpeedWeek.  Both legends, and great guys.  The crowd hushed a bit and watched every run... as Glen announced heads up everyone, a potential 400 MPH car is on the course.

[Stan Back]

. . . or maybe a little back of the Starting Line.

[TrickyDicky]

I don't recall the timeline, we were kinda busy back then but was Nolan still running one engine when he made his first 400 pass or had he gone to two by then? He was like the salt phantom back in those days, never really set up a pit, just worked on it in the trailer wherever he parked it. Most of the time we didn't know if he was going to run or he'd gone home!
  Sid.

I think this has been discussed here before, and the consensus was that he didn't go to two engines until the late 1990s.  There must be somebody who can remember, but information like this is not well-documented.

Nolan's first 400 pass was at World of Speed in 1990.  He was the fifth person over 400 with a wheel-driven vehicle and is claimed to be the first with a single-engined/piston powered vehicle.

Al followed with a 400 mph one-way pass, but Rick White finished the event with the FIA class record.  Some of the information published in the years since appears to be misleading or inaccurate; does anyone have access to a detailed set of results from WoS 1990 (September 28-October 1) to clarify who made which runs on each day?

[PorkPie]

1990 first run over 400 mph with a single engine car by Nolan White during Speedweek...a day later Al Teague run also over 400 mph with his Betsy...
1990 World of Speed (the 4th) Rick White set the record at 384.738 mph...hope this answered the question