This weekend I made a trip to Southern California to visit family. I had seen some information about El Mirage Dry Lake bed on the Southern California Timing Association (the guys that do Bonneville Speed Weeks) website, and some posts on G35driver.com from members that had gone there, and decided to make a trip out there. It was basically on the way between different houses, so not a huge detour for a bit of fun.
So here's the deal, about an hour northeast of LA, you can pay 15 bucks to get out on the lake bed, and from there it is up to you. No speed limits, and about 3 miles across of smooth, hard packed dirt called Playa. its relatively rock free, and the surface is very even across a majority of it. Although being that it is at the end of the season, there are a lot of tire tracks that can make it rough at places. The surface is resurfaced every winter when the rain will put a few inches of water on top, evens it out, and the spring sun dries it out again to make it ready for another year of driving.
My car's previous personal best was 141 mph, and i was hoping to beat that by a fair margin, but that wasn't quite to be. It was a hot day at 97 degrees, so not the most ideal conditions for extra horsepower. Also at the ends of the lines I was running it was getting pretty bumpy and that didn't help the stability of the notoriously bump averse G35. I kept the AC on low for the first few runs, but ran out of steam around 137. It would have gone faster, but covering a mile in 25 seconds or so means that you run out of lake bed pretty quickly, and over 120 it takes a long time to build up the mph. Later on, I turned the AC completely off, and that allowed me to reach my highest speeds of the day. I was using my Garmin GPS, which has a top speed recorder to verify my "official" top speed. While I saw a little bit higher on the speedometer than the GPS said, I am still going by it.
The playa was difficult to keep traction on, especially when shifting. Think of concrete with a layer of chalk on top of it. I kept the TC on the whole time, as I felt it gave me more predictable responses from the car at a very high speed. Shifting in to 5th at 120 I had it kick on, and was spinning the wheels. A bit intimidating to say the least. The traction issue I think also prevented my top speed from being higher. Never before have i seen the merits of downforce on this car, but now i think it would be crucial to actually hitting the limiter.
The verdict: 143 mph. So not much faster than it's previous best. But it was definitely an awesome experience, and I aim to be back in the next few months. I'd like to get something to give a few more hp, because I could definitely feel its limitation at the top end. And if you are in the LA area and have an afternoon to kill, DO IT!
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