The desert is silent except for the wind. My comm radios rest against my chest as heat rolls off the sun-baked pavement of Highway 318. For a moment everything is still, and then it comes. Faint at first, the distant roar of a V8 somewhere beyond the horizon. Pistons hammer in rhythm, tires rapidly claw at the asphalt. Air rips across the body of a machine built for one purpose: speed. In seconds the car tears past my position at well over 165 mph, off into the distant horizon quickly as it came. One heartbeat later all that’s left is the sound of the motor fading into the Nevada desert.
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Prestige
The Nevada Open Road Challenge (NORC) serves as the more experimental sibling of the Silver State Classic Challenge (SSCC). Many teams use it as an opportunity to test new equipment, dial in their cars, and refine their strategies before returning for the marquee event in September. It is what happens when you shut down miles of Nevada highway and hand the keys over to people who think triple digit speeds are just a warm-up. It's full-send blast across open desert where precision matters just as much as guts. There is no wheel-to-wheel racing and instead a high-speed time trial where drivers pick a target average speed, often pushing well north of 150 mph, and then rocket through the hills as fast as possible on an unforgiving stretch of public road turned into a temporary racetrack. Out here there are no barriers, no runoff, and no room for sloppy driving. Just you, your co-driver, the math, and a whole lot of throttle. It’s fast, it’s technical, and it’s just a little unhinged. In other words, pure Nevada.
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A brief history
What started in 1988 as a scrappy last-minute idea to show off a few vintage race cars on a closed stretch of Highway 318 near Ely NV, has grown into one of the most unapologetically wild motorsports traditions on the planet. An event so unique it dragged open-road racing out of a 50-year hiatus and straight into the Guinness World Records. Back when the event was just getting started organizers had barely two months to convince counties, law enforcement, and insurers that letting people rip down a public highway at full tilt was a good idea. Somehow, it worked. The early days were equal parts chaos and ambition: Ferraris, Porsches, muscle cars, blown engines, and a whole lot of figuring it out as they went. In time the formula evolved. Speed classes based on target averages, tighter safety rules, international drivers, and eventually two flagship events: the September Silver State Classic Challenge and the springtime Nevada Open Road Challenge. Along the way came record runs faster than 200 mph, NASCAR-bodied land missiles, and a steady climb from a niche experiment to a bucket-list event with global reach. Today it’s a polished operation backed by volunteers, sponsors, and a surprisingly serious infrastructure. At its core it is still the same slightly insane idea: shut down a highway, point fast cars at the horizon; see who’s brave, and precise enough, to chase perfection at speeds most people will never experience.
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Arrival
This year I was able to attend NORC as a Safety Officer. I blasted from Reno to Ely in my RWD Lexus GS350 via old Highway 50, the Loneliest Road in America, making the trip in a little over four hours. During the week of the event, Ely transforms into a perpetual car show with exotic sports cars parked all over town, on every street and around every corner.
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| HWY 50 speeds |
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| My Lexus GS350 RWD |
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| Parking lots look nice |
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| Factory5 Daytona |
I stayed in a hotel and casino called the Jailhouse. It earned its name because it sits on the site of Ely's original jail, where some of the West's toughest criminals were once held. The hotel itself refers to the rooms by cell number.
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| Jailhouse historical marker |
This hotel specifically is great because it is right across the street from all administrative NORC related activities, the Bristlecone Convention center. My cell had a direct view of the convention center. Also, the hotel owners must know one of the racing teams because in the main halls you will find the awards won by the "Old Fart Racing Team" over the years.
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| The Bristlecone from my cell |
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| Old Fart wall |
After getting settled into my cell I made my way to the other side of town to meet the drivers and cars. They were all meeting by the local high school to stage themselves for the parade. Yup that's right, the town of Ely loves this event so much they host a literal parade for all the competitor cars. Ely relies on the tourism revenue generated by the SSCC and NORC every year. Check out this page dedicated to the pictures I captured in the staging area and during the parade itself: 2026 NORC Parade Photos.
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| 2026 NORC Parade |
Once the parade was over everyone met up at the Bristlecone convention center for the opening banquet. This was a catered event with introductions to members of the administrative staff, MC'd by the charismatic Chairman, Blue Offutt.
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| Blue Offutt |
The following day, Saturday, was going to be busy with classes for Safety Officers, Navigators, and Drivers, along with last-minute adjustments to the cars.
Prep Day
I enjoyed a pancake and sausage breakfast provided by the local Lions Club and spent some time talking with Event Director, Frank McKinnon, while cars underwent their final tech inspections. Before long my coffee cup was empty and it was time to get down to business, so I trekked back to the Bristlecone Convention Center.
Safety officer training proved to be a comprehensive and worthwhile experience. Assistant Event Director, John Bigley, covered a wide variety of topics relevant to the safety officers in his slide deck, complete with audio and video examples to supplement the pictures and text on display. He talked about how the event operates and what our priorities as safety officers are. We were shown how to use the flags, radios, and other gear provided to us by the event organizers. One of the most important tasks for a safety officer working this event is simply to make sure no one enters the roadway between the hours of the race. When a driver is going down this road at 165 miles per hour or more, it is literally impossible to react in time to unexpected obstacles on the road. Bigley provided a few recorded examples of how quickly things can go wrong on this road when the stakes and the speeds are this high, blink and you'd miss it.
Once the training session wrapped up it was almost noon and I decided to grab a bite at Racks, a local bar. I was delighted to discover a familiar sight from back home in Reno. My eyes could barely believe it: they served the "Awful Awful".
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| AWFUL AWFUL |
Naturally, there was no way I was leaving without ordering one. I settled in with a cold beer and tried my luck at the blackjack machine built into the bar, while the kitchen worked its magic. After polishing off a burger large enough to live up to its name, awfully big and awfully good, I figured I had better walk it off. With that in mind I made my way to the town's largest park for the competitor car show. Follow this link to check out pictures from the 2026 NORC Competitor Car Show.
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| 2026 NORC Show |
The afternoon at the Bristlecone Convention Center was devoted to navigator training and the driver's meeting. Although neither session was required for my role, I attended both out of curiosity, and they turned out to be some of the most informative parts of the weekend. The presentations offered a behind-the-scenes look at how the event is coordinated, from timing procedures to communications between checkpoints spread across the course. Better yet, the radio frequencies were shared openly, giving me the perfect excuse to load them into my scanner for race day. One topic that came up in every meeting was the weather. There was a chance of snow for the race day in Ely, and the general consensus was that we would race rain or shine. The highway was scheduled to close at 5AM on Sunday morning, which meant my day would begin at 3AM to give me enough time to collect my gear, locate the gates I was responsible for, and get set up before the first cars arrived. Knowing race day would start long before sunrise, I decided an early night was in order once the driver's meeting wrapped up.
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| Cellblock Steakhouse |
I grabbed a surprisingly great steak dinner at the Cellblock Steakhouse before making the short drive to Lund NV, where the starting line for the following day's race would be located. To save myself a predawn drive from Ely, I had already reserved a room at the All-in-One Motel and Truck Stop. It wasn't fancy, but it put me exactly where I needed to be when the alarm clock went off a few hours later.
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| All In One Truck Stop |
Race Morning
Three in the morning is very early for me on Sunday. Heck, that is early for me any day. A short walk from the motel led to the truck stop where a much-needed cup of coffee helped shake off the last traces of sleep. I happened to be the first safety officer to show up for gear pickup which gave me the opportunity to spend some time talking to the HAM operators before heading out to my gate. I wish I had gotten pictures of the HAM operator vehicles, they looked like rolling RF shacks, but my mind was too busy waiting for the caffeine to hit.
My assignment placed me roughly 45 miles south of the starting line. Highway 318 stretched into the darkness ahead, its mile markers illuminated only by my high beams. Anticipation of the race to come, knowing that the drivers would be flying down the same stretch of highway, just a few hours from now was a strange feeling. There was something surreal about driving that lonely stretch of road knowing that the competitors would be hurtling down the same pavement at more than twice the speed limit. Eventually mile markers NY5 and NY6 emerged from the darkness. Somewhere between them were my gates. A few passes up and down this mile stretch in the dark eventually revealed my gates, set back from the road by a couple hundred feet on either side.
As I locked down my gates, set up my chairs, cooler, cameras, radios, and flags; the sun slowly crept over the horizon and swept the high desert in a bath of golden light and much welcomed warmth. I shed my gloves and beany and took a moment to soak in the natural beauty of Nevada as the birds sang their morning chorus.
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Watching the clouds for a bit felt comfortable that the weather would hold for the day. After a few crackly comm checks over the radio, from each checkpoint to every safety officer, it was time to get the race started.
The 2026 Nevada Open Road Challenge
SSCC and NORC are both time-speed-distance events, not traditional races where the fastest car wins. Instead, the winners are those who finish closest to "on time" for their speed class. Being early is just as much of a penalty as being late. Competitive times are thousandths of a second away from the target time. Even being hundredths of a second off is considered good, but not on the level of the highest performing drivers here. The race is two parted, a southbound run, quick break, and then a northbound run back up the same stretch. One hundred and fifty-one miles in total.
Southbound
My radio scanner crackled as it picked up a message from the start line announcing that the first car had started begun its southbound run. Before long I could hear that very car roaring somewhere on the other side of the horizon. Just moments later it tore past me and off into the distance again.
The variety of cars at this event is astonishing, Euro exotics, American classics, and even a handful of JDM offerings. Over the past few days, I got plenty of opportunity to talk to drivers about their cars. Here are the ones which stood out most to me.
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NORC is an American event, and what is more American than a Corvette. Out of the 109 competing cars, 36 of those were Corvettes. But this C3 Corvette stood out to me over all the others. Not only is it the most vintage corvette here, but it had an LS3 swap in it. Ray Maione and Tj Groenenboom were having some trouble with the serpentine belt in the parking lot back when I was checking in to the Jailhouse hotel, looks like they may have gotten that sorted out.
The Nissan 350Z isn't the fastest car in the world, nor the most sophisticated, but give it a big naturally aspirated V6, rear-wheel drive, and a willingness to misbehave, and suddenly you remember why sports cars were invented in the first place. I spent a lot of time talking to these guys, Ken Lindsey and Steve Nesdore were probably the coolest competitors. They also were running a new experimental timing and prediction software using highly accurate positioning systems to calculate target speed. Of all the innovations encountered that weekend, this struck me as one of the smartest. I couldn't help but wonder how useful something similar might be for my own CannonMiner Cannonball-Run software.
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In an age where sports cars have become rolling computers with the personality of a tax return, this bright yellow Toyota GR86 arrives like a cheerful hooligan, reminding us that lightness, balance, and rear-wheel drive are still the ingredients that matter. This is the car that gave me hope that my own roadster could compete here one day. The driver and navigator combo, David and Stephanie Zeh, were both really nice and welcoming competitors.
Since the dawn of the automobile, mankind has occasionally produced machines so utterly outrageous that common sense packs its bags and leaves the country, and the V12 Lamborghini Diablo is one of them. According to the stories making the rounds in Ely, Bjoern Flesland journeys from the European Arctic Circle to Los Angeles, collects the car, and drives it across the American West to compete in both NORC and SSCC.
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The Ferrari SF90 Stradale is what happens when Italy takes over a thousand horsepower, a pair of batteries, and every known law of physics, stuffs them into a purple missile, and then has the audacity to call it a road car. This absurd machine was piloted by William Griffiths who traveled from the UK to New York and then drove to Ely to compete for the first time ever in this event. I think he is a natural foil to Bjoern and his V12 Lambo.
I did my best to snap a picture of every single car that flew by on the southbound run, but at least 3 of then snuck by without capturing them on film. Check out this page to see all the photos from the southbound run. After a couple hours of marveling at these wonderful machines the final car passed by, I settled in for a quick lunch and break from the sun in my Lexus. Then it was back out to the field for the second half.
Northbound
Every competitor on the northbound section of the course was captured on video with my DJI Osmo. The long gaps between cars were edited out, condensing the field into a few minutes of uninterrupted speed.
To my dismay I didn't see Ray and TJ in their C3 LS3 Corvette pass by on the northbound run, that belt which was giving them trouble earlier must have given up the ghost on the southbound run. The rest of the field continued through without much drama. As the final car went by again, and the all-clear came across the radio, I started packing up.
The drive back from my gates through to Lund felt different now that the course had gone quiet again. Along the way, I passed a red Ferrari 488 Challenge EVO that had blown a tire on the southbound run and spun off the highway. Another quiet reminder of how quickly things can go wrong out here. Later I found out that the driver of this vehicle and his navigator were unharmed. The weather finally turned when I was between Lund and Ely. Light snow began drifting across the highway and started to pile up softening the edges of the desert, timing that couldn’t have worked out better for the weekend.
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Closing Ceremony
Back in Ely at the Bristlecone Convention Center, everyone gathered for the closing ceremony. We ate well, we drank well, and traded stories from the weekend while the award ceremony played out and brought the event to a close.
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| A full house |
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| Driver of the spun-out Ferrari recounting the experience |
By Sunday evening, Highway 318 was just another Nevada highway again. The checkpoints were gone, the timing equipment packed away, and the drivers getting some much-needed rest. If you happened to drive through a few days later, you'd never know that hundreds of volunteers had transformed it into one of the fastest racecourses in North America. The following morning, as I pointed my Lexus west toward Reno, I couldn't help wondering what it would be like to see Highway 318 from the driver's side of the windshield. Maybe next year I'll find out.
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