(This ran in MidRivers Newsmagazine from a TedTalks event that I loved covering May 13 at Chaminade College Prep!)
“Buckle up, people! You’re about to go on a very fast ride with me, LandSpeed Louise. I’m a gal with a Ph.D. from the University of Concrete and 458-mile-per-hour world land speed record!”
That’s how St. Peters resident Louise Ann Noeth began her May 13 Tedx St. Louis speech. She set that record as a member of Team Vesco racing on Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats in October 2001. The record still stands.
“No one has been able to knock us off the top!” Noeth exclaimed. “To see how fast this really is, it’s about 300 miles from St. Louis to Chicago. It takes about 4 1/2 hours to get there. If I take you in our car, we’re going to get there in about 39 minutes!”
A lengthy round of thundering applause followed that explanation.
According to Noeth, courage and curiosity are the hallmarks of every land speed racer. But also is the common sense to know when to take a calculated risk, because you can blow up a car in one run then have a lot of time to think about it from your hospital bed.
Claiming the world record was a team effort, Noeth said. And, other than some piston-driven cars, the closest anyone has come to it is still about 20 mph off the mark.
“Now, we want to be the first race car that goes over 500 miles per hour with a world record,” she said. “It would be a great accomplishment and it sets a goal.”
Born and raised in Evergreen Park on Chicago’s South Side, Noeth convinced the local street kings they should let her drive their fast, muscle cars as a teenager. She traded her talent, painting designs on their cars, for a chance to race.
Eventually, she raced a 250-mile-an-hour, fire-breathing jet dragster all over North America with exhibition runs through the National Hot Rod Association (MHRA) on a quarter-mile track. She added elimination races and sold a lot of tickets at non-MHRA drag racing venues. That led to her awareness of automotive journalism.
She started test driving cars, trucks and motorcycles and writing stories and taking photos for car report newspapers and magazines.
“When I went to the Bonneville Salt Flats for the very first time in the late 1990s, I met ladies who didn’t just wear helmets, but fireproof underwear! That’s why I’m here talking to you right now,” she told the captivated TEDx audience. “In 2020, I started doing a little research. I wanted to know how many women had actually driven on the Bonneville Salt Flats. As I peered deeper into this female lens, my head exploded when somebody told me that this picture I had taken of 20 female motorcycle racers had set more than 200 records … just this one group. I wanted to know how these women had actually set records on the Bonneville Salt Flats.”
Three months later, Noeth had documented more than 300 women racers, ages 16-80. Most had gone over 200 miles an hour; quite a few over 300 miles an hour; and a couple had knocked on 400’s door.
“Who knew there were so many? Nobody knew … Until I started asking, none of us knew,” North said.
Her passion for sharing the stories of women racers can be seen in her book, “Bonneville’s Women of Land Speed Racing.” It’s chock full of historical significance in regard to land speed racing and the women who Noeth says have been severely overlooked by everyone.
“I’m a high-speed storyteller with a particular soft spot for women in racing because they have not just been overlooked, but forcibly and intentionally denied, sabotaged and wrecked,” Noeth said during a later interview. “What I said in the speech (is true), in stock car racing you see cars bang into each other, knock them into the wall and spin around.
“I’m absolutely convinced that gender has absolutely nothing to do with skillfully operating any car, truck, motorcycle, plane or boat.”
She invited every woman in the TEDx audience to try her hand at land speed racing but noted that the only U.S. site to do so is Bonneville.
“And this place is so doggone big that if you can drive your car you drove here 100 miles an hour for more than a minute, with your eyes closed, you’ll never hit a darned thing,” she said. “I know. I’ve done it!
According to the Bureau of Land Management, the Bonneville Salt Flats are “one of Earth’s most unique landforms.” They are about 12 miles long and 5 miles wide, located 120 miles west of Salt Lake City in Tooele County – and are mostly sodium chloride, or table salt. Since 1949, when the first Speed Week was held in Bonneville, the Salt Flats have been home to racing enthusiasts bent on seeing how fast they can go.
“There are no one-shot wonders here. Today, you will see anything out there that can run,” Noeth said. “If you can dream it up, build it and get it past the safety and technical inspections, you earn the right to go to the starting line.”
Noeth is an authority on Bonneville. In fact she wrote the book – or rather, books. “Bonneville: The Fastest Place on Earth” was published in 2002 by Motorbooks. “Bonneville Salt Flats,” published by Arcadia Press in 2020 traces 100 years of racing history. And then, there’s “Bonneville’s Women of Land Speed Racing,” published by Images of Modern America in 2021.
“I had approached the publisher, Motorbooks, with a different idea because I was part of a team that helped build a car that was going after the first supersonic record back in the mid-90s,” Noeth said of her first encounter with her would-be publisher. “The publisher said nobody cares about that, and shut me down. About a month later, the editorial director said, ‘Well, I know we didn’t take you up on that idea, but would you like to write the history of the Bonneville Salt Flats?’ I pinged myself on the ceiling and tried to calm myself down because I was absolutely thrilled!
“That’s how I got to be an author. I moved from magazines and newspapers to being a real life, honest to goodness author!”
More than that, she’s also an award-winning journalist and photographer whose works have been published by the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, The Late Show with David Letterman and others around the world. Noeth has also served on several auto industry technical committees developing self-regulating guidelines in tires, suspension and emission controls and contributed to regulatory discussions with the Secretary of Energy, which resulted in a shift in national policy. She is a recognized authority not only on racing but also the Bonneville Salt Flats and an avid supporter of their conservation (savethesalt.org).
“I have an enormous archive of files that I’ve been doing an inventory of – documents and articles, books and films, television shows I’ve helped produce, photos and details of radio interviews (connected to) the sport of land speed racing. I have 300 to 400 books and at least 400 or 500 films,” Noeth said. “There are places I’ve been quoted and articles I’ve written.”
She said one of her latest goals is to find a home for this rich history of racing “in a place where the general public can find it, access it and use it, because I’ve been collecting this stuff for over 40 years.”
“It’s one of the biggest private archives of land speed racing on the planet,” she said.
Throughout her racing career, her husband, Mick Lanigan, has been at her side.
“There’s no way I could have achieved as much as I have if I had not had the complete support and help of Mick. Early in our marriage (August 1992), I was all over the place and he was my constant supporter,” Noeth said. “Sometimes, all he did was babysit my photography equipment while I ran off and got a shot or did this or the other. But he’s been my partner in this without a doubt.”
