

The race car's speedometer twitches to life: 15 mph, 30, 40. On a signal from the chief starter, Tripp puts the '85 Chevy push van in gear and shoves Calvert across the starting line and onto the track. He disengages the clutch, fires up the engine and revs his modified Nissan V6, which booms out a rolling roar. After a year of planning and building, tuning and tinkering, the time has come for Calvert to push his car to the limit. Orange flags, a pair per measured mile, recede into the heat-hazed distance. And all he can see is an expanse of empty whiteness split by two black lines that mark the 5-mile-long, 90-ft.-wide timing course of the renowned Bonneville Salt Flats. Sealed inside his machine, Calvert stares into a periscope prism, looking upward in order to see straight ahead.

He scoots his legs forward until he's lying nearly flat on his back, then watches as his chief mechanic, Gary Tripp, lowers and secures the hatch over him. Gary Calvert, a 65-year-old member of the Muckleshoot tribe, lowers himself into the coffin-size cockpit of a 14-ft.-long cigar-shaped race car that he built back home in tiny Enumclaw, Wash.
