When the FIM Land Speed World Records event is staged this summer from 23-28 August on the world-famous Bonneville Salt Flats in America, it will mark the twenty-second straight season of involvement for Delvene Reber.
The First Lady of Land Speed, the forty-eight-year-old elementary school teacher is a co-founder of the Bonneville Motorcycle Speed Trials (BMST) and has been the Owner / Director of the event since 2014. Unsurprisingly, she is a huge advocate of this unique branch of the FIM Family tree.
“It’s a highly accessible type of racing to participate in and it does need to have a place in the calendar and I’ve been lucky to have the support of people who are really passionate about it,” said Reber. “I do believe that motorcycle people are the best people and Land Speed people are a slightly different breed of motorcyclist.”
Passion fuels all forms of motorcycle sport and nowhere is this more apparent than the incredibly specialised Land Speed discipline and each year Reber calls upon the support of an army of volunteers who travel from around the world to Utah where a multitude of records are attempted.
Whenever the subject of Land Speed records arises, there is a natural tendency to think of just the outright record, currently 605.697 km/h set by Rocky Robinson on a Suzuki Hayabusa 2600 at Bonneville in 2010, but the BMST feature a wide variety of classes determined by a range of factors including, but not limited to, cubic capacity, engine type and whether they are faired, naked or totally encased in a ‘streamliner’ body kit.
“I think Land Speed has probably the widest variety of different bikes and different people from different backgrounds in any discipline. Our racers don’t do this for a living – they take a week off work every year and come out here – and you see so much variety in the motorcycles.
“We have everything from 50cc to 3000cc and some have fairings, some don’t have fairings and then there are streamliners. Some are turbo-charged, some are super-charged, then you can break it down into twins, singles and multi-cylinder machines.”
Reber’s own background is hardly conventional. Brought up in a family of racers, she met her first husband at a Land Speed event in her native Australia and emigrated to the USA where her new father-in-law, Denis Manning, ran an exhaust business – BUB Enterprises – while masterminding numerous attempts on the absolute Land Speed record that resulted in success in 2006 and 2009 with Chris Carr behind the handlebars of the BUB Seven Streamliner.
“I grew up with my dad building hot-rods. He used to go out to the salt flats at Lake Gairdner in South Australia and never shut up about it so in 2000 I finally went out there. There were some teams that had come over from America and my future father-in-law – who was in the process of attempting the absolute world record with his streamliner – and his son were among them.