Ab Jenkins & His Amazing Mormon Meteor | Bad Blonde #Auto History

A man who has set more speed records than ANYONE, the man who put the Bonneville Salt lats on the map, considered one of the pioneers of speed, and at one point was the Racing Mayor of Salt Lake City.. We are talking about Ab Jenkins..Salt Lake City was known as the “birthplace of speed” at the turn of the century and soon Ab would get bitten by the bug. He’d soon take to racing motorcycles on dirt tracks and cross-country races.Ab got his first taste of racing behind the wheel in Studebaker racing the Union Pacific train. He won by 5 minutes. And he wasn’t done, he liked it so much a year later he raced his Studebaker again against a train from NYC to San Francisco. He managed that trek in 86hrs and 20 minutes which was 14hrs faster than the train.Ab nails 175 miles per hour out of the Pierce-Arrow V12 driving across the Utah salt flats. He did over 100 miles per hour for 24hrs along a 10 miles course covering 2,710 miles – 3k more miles than what he had promised Pierce-Arrow. He was just shy of a world record with this attempt too! During this he stopped to refuel every two hours but never left the driving seat. And He was basically deaf by the roar of the engine.But wasn’t enough for the motivated Mormon, the following yea he broke that record by driving 25hrs at around 117 miles and coving 3k miles.In the 1930s the popularity of the Bonneville Salt Flats would grow and grow as more speed records were bring broken there. Really, you could say this was the man behind Bonneville.It was in 1935 that Ab got behind the wheel of a new supercharged Duesenberg Model J and took back his speed record title from Jobb Cobb who’d swooped it up the year before. BUT he didn’t hold on to it long as it would be then swooped up by Sir Malcom Campbell in one of his bluebirds who’ve we’ve covered on this radio show just a few shows ago.Then in 1938 Ab debuted the Mormon Meteor III and set even more records. One of his most famous was in 1940 when Jenkins managed 3,868 miles in 24hrs at an average speed of 161mph. A record that stayed unchallenged all the way until 2005.The Mormon Meteor III Built on a 142-inch wheelbase with specially-made 22-inch Firestone tires, it used the same Curtis 12-cylinder airplane engine from the Mormon Meteor II. The car was nearly 21 feet long and was once again engineered by Augie Dusenberg. It was designed to run with two airplane engines, although only one was ever installed.