This Is The Longest Driveway In The US (And It's A Part Of Racing History)
Could you imagine racing down the longest driveway in the United States? While you can’t do it anymore, the story behind the iconic roadway is pretty cool.
There is a road in the Mojave Desert that appears to be nothing more than an abandoned asphalt strip. For a little more than four miles, there runs an isolated, flat, and straight road that was once a driveway, not a lost highway. Thanks to one woman who refused to be forced off her land, the longest driveway in America was born.
Bonnie Margaret Orcutt was her name. In the 1960s, officials offered to buy her out when plans for Interstate 40 threatened to isolate her ranch from the outside world. “No”, she said. Instead of conceding to their offer, she started a campaign of persistent letter writing to the governor of California, state legislators, and even the president at the time, Lyndon Johnson.
The government finally gave in. In 1965, a construction crew began to pave a new road from her front door to the closest exit. What originally was intended to be a driveway actually appeared more like a desert runway given its length of over 4 miles, running alongside one of the longest highways in the U.S., Route 66. Little did she know, this was the beginning of what was to become a secret high-speed test facility for car reviewers, racers, and petrolheads alike.When the driveway became a racetrack
Upon first being built, it was just a quiet road, but by the late 1970s car magazines had cottoned onto its secret potential. A stretch of pavement with no traffic, no onlookers, and no speeding traps; it was an automotive dream that sounded too good to be true. Car and Driver had stumbled upon the perfect place to really push the limits of what were the fastest cars in the world at the time.
The magazine reported on some ridiculous automotive mischief, like a tuned Pontiac Trans Am clocking 200 mph in a cloud of dust seen from the highway. Then a Cadillac Seville equipped with a full race chassis and a twin-turbo V8 that lost a bumper at over 100 mph. Other stories tell of engines blowing apart and windows falling out at 140 mph, and a high-speed run that ended in a ball of flames. It’s said that even the police played along at times, with one California Highway Patrol officer taking a ride in the Trans Am before returning to duty as a lookout for lesser-understanding colleagues. For close to a decade, Mrs. Orcutt’s driveway was reimagined as a test track, becoming one of the most unlikely high-speed testing grounds to ever exist.Faded road with a lasting legacy
After Bonnie Orcutt passed away in the mid-1980s, her home and her driveway were reclaimed by the desert, leaving only remnants of what once was. Today, the house stands alone, abandoned, and dilapidated. Consumed by time, the road itself is now cracked and a far cry from its former self. On maps, it sometimes appears as “Memorial Drive”, but those who have seen it up close know that it’s no longer drivable at those speeds.
Even so, the legend of America’s longest driveway lives on. What began as one woman’s fight against being separated from her own land turned into a hidden stretch of high-octane glory where 200 mph dreams were chased without interference (at least not all the time). The Mojave has plenty of forgotten places, ghost towns, secret test sites, and even a U.S. Army storage site for thousands of tanks, but few can match the strange history of Mrs. Orcutt’s driveway. Built by a government trying to serve its people, it ended up being the epicenter of some of the wildest high-speed experiments of its time, leaving behind a unique legacy in the automotive world.
