Images: Salt Lake Tribune

Last week the Salt Lake Tribune had some less than encouraging news to share about the state of the salt flats for this year’s competition, and it turns out their prediction that the event would be canceled proved true.

For the second year in a row, the Southern California Timing Association has officially put the kibosh on the event, citing that conditions were nowhere near where they would need to be to run Speed Week.

According to a post on SCTA’s Facebook page, “SCTA President/Race Director Bill Lattin and the BNI Chairman spent this morning on the salt. The most they could find was 2 1/4 miles of salt suitable for a safe race course. The rest of the salt flats are either wet or wet and muddy. If the wet salt gets dry, future events could be possible.”

The group typically tries to find at least seven miles of usable salt yet reportedly would have settled for four this year, but came up short even at that truncated limit. Weather and mining projects near the site have both played a role in making the salt flats inhospitable to high speed events in recent years.

The group did say that they’re still open to the idea of rescheduling the event if the salt dries up in the near future, and for now, the SCTA still plans on running its World Finals race from September 29th to October 2nd of this year.

This year’s event, had it gone as planned, would have seen one of the largest turnouts in the event’s more than six decade long history.