Years ago, I did the PR work for the very first "Silver State" open road race. A guy named Phil Henry somehow convinced the Nevada Highway Patrol to close about 50 miles of highway near Ely (where whorehouses were MORE than legal at the time, and even sponsored some of the entrants), home of the "Loneliest Road in America", and allowed jerks who wanted to see how fast their cars would go to drive them as fast as they liked on public roadways. With our without any training. I do NOT remember any safety inspection, other than entrants' paying the entry fee. It was a big deal, a lot of cars showed up, and ONLY one person was killed, the wife of some dentist (I kid you not) driving his, what else, FERRARI. Having placed the editor of HOT ROD magazine in a red car just minutes before the NHP radioed us with the news of someone dead "in a red car", I went through quite a time hoping it was NOT the red car I had put the HOT ROD editor in ... I was rooting for it to be SOMEONE ELSE DEAD! Thank goodness, my prayers were answered ... It does my heart good at these End of the World Times, to see Utah, home of the Mormon Church, take this important lead from Nevada, and allow paying American citizens to kill themselves on their lovely, long and straight (read: sleep inducing) roads.
In a recent issue of Road and Track is a piece penned by Richard Losee,describing how he cracked 200 mph in his ultra-rare Enzo. That was probably one of the last high-speed runs the Enzo 
The idiotic Utah Fast Pass Road Rally involves the Utah Highway Patrol shutting down a 15-mile stretch of State Route 257 so 25 to 30 supercars can drop the hammer. Car owners pay $5,000 for the privilege of opening their cars up on public roads, and the money goes to a yet ANOTHER stupid "Foundation" which supposedly supports families of troopers who have fallen in the line of duty. Those wives and kids must be thrilled to know they are receiving money from people who try to kill themselves on the open highway.
With Ferrari having limited the Enzo's production to only about 400 units, at least three have been destroyed in publicized high speed crashes. If you're in the market, get your Enzo now cause they're going fast. Or just wait for the automotive carpetbaggers in their, ahem, "repair shops", to rebuild SEVERAL Ferraris using the number plates and tags from the wrecked ones. I'd guess there will be a total of about 15 MORE Enzo units than Ferrari ever produced.
By the way, vis a vis UTAH: Once, while driving my rent-a-Lincoln from the Bonneville Salt Flats back to Salt Lake to fly back home to LA, my photog and I came upon a real-live ROAD BLOCK in the middle of the freeway. All traffic was directed off the highway and to an off-ramp. At the top of the ramp, everyone had to show their car registrations, drivers licenses and insurance cards. EVERYONE. No exceptions. And the Utah Highway Patrol wear these stupid hats shaped like bee hives (for some reason the state, uh, hive of Utah). And they are all 7 feet tall, VERY white and blonde, and VERY intimidating to a 5'5" Jew like myself.
Anyway, it was the first and to this point ONLY time I have ever seen an Interstate highway CLOSED for the purpose of "checking your papers". All we wanted to do was get the Lincoln to a car wash so we could steam clean the SALT from its undercarriage ... OF COURSE we took it down the Salt! And OF COURSE Hertz charged us an extra $150 for "salt cleaning". Which my boss at the time, POPULAR MECHANICS, happily paid. By the way, I was there covering the GALE BANKS effort to set the Land Speed Record for a door-slammer, which he did! It was in 1986 and Gale got that dawg to go almost 280mph average combined on its two runs! It was also one of the first times a laptop computer (a Tandy 100!) was used to monitor a race car's systems at the Salt, and it indeed pointed out cylinder heating problems at the end of the first of the two required runs, which the Banks' Boys were able to fix.
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