Danny Thompson and Ferguson Racing Win the Hot Rod Magazine Trophy at Speed Week 2025

Each year at Bonneville Speed Week, drivers and riders vie for land speed records in a hostile environment. The Great Basin Desert can prove challenging for engine tuners as temperatures often swing, making the air dry and hot in the afternoon. The salt racing surface is also fickle. A single rogue overnight thunderstorm can thwart all the effort that volunteers put into grading and maintaining multiple courses, each several miles long. For their efforts, racers get little more than their names in the record book, but one driver gets a bit more fanfare. At the driver’s meeting to start each Speed Week, the driver of the single fastest mile is presented with the Hot Rod trophy and get to etch their name alongside land speed legends Alex Xydias, Dean Batchelor, George Poteet, and Mickey Thompson. At Speed Week 2025, another Thompson joined that exclusive club as Mickey’s son, Danny, drove the Ferguson Racing A/FS (Fuel Streamliner) to a blistering 411.948mph pass. Combining that run with his 400.318mph pass the previous day resulted in a 406.133mph record.

Powering the Ferguson Racing streamliner was a 490-cubic-inch V-8. Don’t let the Ardun valve covers fool you—it’s a Chrysler Hemi. The Ferguson Racing crew also earned a C/FS record (learn more about how Speed Week classes work here) running a smaller-displacement Hemi running on seven cylinders—on purpose. The engine used a bobweight in place of one rod and piston to keep things balanced. Danny and the Ferguson Racing crew moved that record from 335mph to 370.756mph.

Thompson’s hard-fought journey to the fastest pass in Speed Week started decades ago, racing production-based cars. Then he invested a tremendous amount of time and effort to significantly rebuild the Challenger II streamliner that his father had built in 1968. Challenger II was completed in 2013, but a 400-mph record eluded the team as poor salt conditions in 2014 and 2015 led to Speed Week being cancelled both years. The project finally paid off with a 406.769mph AA/FS record in 2016. Danny’s record was just faster than the 406.6mph single pass that his father recorded in 1960 in the original Challenger, which was powered by a quartet of Pontiac engines. In 2018, 50 years after his father debuted the Challenger II, Danny increased the record to 448.757mph! In a sport where records are often broken by only a fraction of a mile per hour, Danny’s record was a blowout. As impressive as those runs were, Thompson had the third-fastest run at Speed Week 2018, behind both the Speed Demon team streamliner and Team Vesco’s Turbinator II. It wasn’t until Speed Week 2025 that Danny was able to capture the Hot Rod trophy and put his name next to his father’s.

Congratulations to Danny and everyone at Ferguson Racing for a hard-fought Seed Week 2025 and a well-deserved place in racing history.