The Mint 400

The Mint 400 holds space in a special segment of cells in my head.

First off, it's an epic desert race of historic proportions which will likely never be seen again.
Hundreds of machines battling through the worst of conditions for giant purse money.


Then, besides all ot that, somehow a publisher thought it would be a great idea to send a young-ish Hunter Thompson to the Mint 400 to function as a reporter.
It is possible that without the Mint 400 that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas would never had been written.










Big stuff.
One of my favorite reads of all time was due, in part, to some fool giving HST credit and an excuse to go to Vegas.







Thompson doesn't linger in his description of the race.
He admits he only, really, saw the start.






After that, some time bouncing through the desert with a random earnest photographer, a trip to the casino at the start line - well, the dust and the drugs and the booze begin to cloud the view of the race.









Reports are that the photog assigned to the story, with HST, kept with job.
He continued to snap pics of dust clouds.






These are not those pics, as far as I know.
I lifted these from the LIFE magazine archive, I mentioned previously.

I always like to add perspective to my reading, historical context, images, all that sort of thing.
These photographs fill in some grey area of my own vision of HST's story.

You can click through the little ones to enbiggun 'em.