Gary Matranga is 86 years old, closing in on his 87th birthday, and this summer he drove a highly modified 1966 Barracuda across Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats fast enough to set two speed records. Now the Sacramento driver and his crew say they want more: a run at 400 mph in a rocket-shaped streamliner, a car built with its wheels lying on its side rather than standing upright.
According to KCRA, Matranga raised his gas-division record by 17 mph to 308 mph and reached 310 mph in the fuel division, surpassing a fuel-division mark of 305 mph that had stood for eight years. An official Bonneville Vehicles Daily Runs sheet from Aug. 1, 2026 lists Matranga's entry, number 651, with a fastest recorded figure of 307.646 mph — a number that doesn't line up precisely with KCRA's reported 310 mph figure, though both accounts describe speeds in the same range for the same driver that day.
Matranga told the station he's been obsessed with speed for almost all his life, and the résumé backs that up. He's raced on dragstrips, circle tracks and the Bonneville Salt Flats, per HOT ROD, and he's not new to the 200 mph club either — Bonneville's own membership records show him joining in 1971 at 224.806 mph, with his recorded speed since climbing to 291.215 mph. He's also the owner and president of Sherm's Custom Plating, the same HOT ROD profile notes.
A Car That Fights Back at 300 MPH
The Barracuda isn't an easy machine to tame. Matranga said the ride is sometimes difficult to handle, and the car doesn't settle down until roughly halfway through Bonneville's five-mile course, stabilizing around the 2.5-mile mark. Even past 300 mph, the car keeps moving around and demands constant input from the driver just to hold a line.
Powering the effort is a twin-turbocharged Hemi engine with more than 500 cubic inches of displacement and over 2,400 horsepower, and the team believes engine tweaks could push the car's speed up to 340 mph. Car chief Glen Hutchison said the crew sets goals and feels driven to fulfill them, and the plan now is to spend the winter testing the Barracuda's engine in search of more power, all while working nights and weekends around members' day jobs.
How fast the car ultimately goes depends on more than horsepower — the condition and grip of the salt itself plays a direct role in performance. That's a familiar headache at Bonneville this year: high heat early in the 2026 Speed Week may have kept some racers from going all-out, according to Hagerty, and this year's event opened with a drivers' meeting where representatives from the Southern California Timing Association, the Bureau of Land Management and the Save the Salt foundation briefed racers on surface conditions.
The 400 MPH Club Isn't Empty
Matranga's target of 400 mph would put him in rare company. Danny Thompson's Ferguson streamliner captured the lead at Speed Week 2026 with a 396.949-mph run, the same Hagerty gallery reports, while the Strasburg/Wolf Blown Fuel Lakester hit 382.528 mph. A year earlier, Thompson's Ferguson car calculated to a 406.133-mph average during the 2025 event, shattering the previous A Fuel record of 379.606 mph, and its backup run clocked 411.948 mph in the fifth mile with a 421.943-mph exit speed, according to HOT ROD. That same Ferguson car also set the C Fuel Streamliner record in 2025 with a 370.756-mph average, topping a previous mark of 335.325 mph.
Streamliners are built differently from Matranga's Barracuda specifically to chase these numbers — wheels tucked underneath the body and only a sliver of windshield poking above the deck, as Hagerty describes the design philosophy in its coverage of racer Jim Knapp's own pursuit of the 400-mph barrier in the 5,200-pound Knapster 500, built around a twin-turbo Brad Anderson Hemi. The bar keeps rising elsewhere on the salt, too: in August 2026, Andy Green set a world record of 406.320 mph in a hydrogen-fueled internal-combustion vehicle at Bonneville, a mark confirmed by the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile, according to The Salt Lake Tribune.
Even the course itself leaves little margin for error. The fast cars race on a flat five-mile stretch, with four additional miles available afterward just to slow down, per ClassicCars.com Journal, which also notes that the Speed Demon streamliner once ran 388 mph in a single mile before reaching 475 mph overall. For Matranga's crew, the winter ahead means testing, tweaking, and hoping the salt cooperates when Speed Week rolls back around.
