There aren't many places left where you can legally drive at more than 200mph on a public road. I've come to one of the remaining few.

Twice each year, the Silver State Classic Challenge closes a vast section of Nevada's Route 318 and transforms it into the world's fastest public road motorsport course. No barriers. No run-off. No catch fencing. Just endless desert, distant mountains and a strip of Tarmac stretching to the horizon.

The May event, the Nevada Open Road Challenge, uses a two-leg format totalling 151 miles, making it the world's longest sanctioned public road race. The Silver State Classic Challenge in September runs as a single-leg shootout at 90 miles. Having run since 1988, it might be the least-known yet most wonderfully unhinged form of motorsport in the world.

A drag strip in the desert

The host town of Ely is deep in eastern Nevada, more than 200 miles north of Las Vegas. It feels like an old mining town that moves at its own pace. Casinos and motels wear faded signs from another era, diners serve towering pancake stacks and coffee in thick white mugs and there is a sense the modern world passed this place by.

Then race week arrives, and suddenly Ely fills with Porsches, Corvettes, Mercedes-AMGs, Dodges, Vipers, Shelby Cobra replicas and homebuilt monsters producing absurd amounts of horsepower. Parked among them this year was my car: a Volkswagen Golf GTI.

Much of the field is obsessed with horsepower figures and elaborate aero packages, but VW's front-wheel-drive performance hatch represents a different philosophy: accessible performance. Some 50 years after the original redefined the affordable fast hatchback, our 2.0-litre turbo four-pot Golf GTI, with a comparatively modest 241bhp and 273lb ft, was about to take on a whole new challenge.

But the deficit of power shouldn't be an issue, because the Nevada Open Road Challenge is not simply about going flat out. The event is divided into different classes based on target average speeds. Touring classes run from 95mph to 110mph; above them sit various divisions running at up to 180mph, before arriving at the Unlimited class, where competitors simply drive as fast as they can.

In 2017, during the Silver State Classic Challenge, Robert Allyn and navigator David Bauer set a Guinness World Record for the highest average speed ever recorded on a public highway during sanctioned competition. Driving a 2001 Chevrolet Monte Carlo Nascar, Allyn averaged 219.643mph across the 90-mile course. At one point, organisers recorded the car travelling at 243.3mph.

What strikes you first, however, is not the speed but the atmosphere: it lacks the corporate feel of most modern motorsport environments and resembles a community built around enthusiasts. Some arrive with professional motorsport trailers and support crews; others look as though they drove in directly from somebody's backyard workshop.

Because it is a closed-road event, cars do not need to be road-legal, but the overwhelming majority remain road-registered machines driven to the event. All first-time competitors must complete a mandatory Rookie Instructional Session held at SpeedVegas, a private circuit south of Las Vegas. There, we went through classroom sessions and track instruction. There are explanations of timing procedures, safety protocols, overtaking etiquette and emergency procedures and then, once we reach Ely, course orientation drives pointing out landmarks and reference points hidden in the desert landscape.

Only after completing this programme are drivers allowed to compete. Even then, rookies are restricted to Touring classes: progression into the faster categories must be earned.

The Touring division is aimed at standard to lightly modified production cars. Grand Touring raises speeds to between 115mph and 125mph; Grand Sport from 130mph to 155mph; and Super Sport from 160mph to 180mph averages. Then there's the Unlimited class.

Each step upward requires increasingly serious safety equipment. The regulations also contain a series of wonderfully old-school details. For example, tyres must use metal valve caps: rubber or plastic caps can fail in the heat generated by sustained triple-digit desert speeds.

While the event may look outwardly relaxed and wonderfully eccentric, the organisers take safety extraordinarily seriously. Since its inception, there have been four major accidents resulting in five fatalities. Those incidents hang quietly over the event, even if competitors rarely dwell on them publicly.

Electric vehicles are permitted in the Touring divisions but are not currently permitted to run in the Unlimited category. Race director Blue Offutt explains why: "We simply don't have the capability out there for the sort of fires those cars can create." Route 318 cuts through vast empty sections of Nevada where the nearest infrastructure can feel impossibly distant. Fire crews, emergency services and rescue teams are stationed strategically along the course, but this is still remote desert.

Race week

Friday and Saturday gradually transform Ely into a giant motorsport festival, complete with parades, shows and specialised speed events. Then there is perhaps the most wonderfully surreal tradition of all: the Hookers' Choice Award, presented by workers from Ely's brothels to their favourite car entered in the event.

Race day begins on the outskirts of town before competitors depart in convoy towards a truck stop farther south along Route 318. Drivers sip coffee beside their cars; final tyre pressures are checked; navigators stare intently at their timing sheets.

The Unlimited cars are sent off first. From the truck stop, competitors make the short drive to the start line just outside the sleepy town of Lund, before heading into the desert at 30-second intervals with the local sheriff looking on.

The priority is to get beyond your target average speed as quickly as possible. The standing start means that for the first few miles you remain technically below the 110mph average, but gradually the numbers begin climbing back towards target. The goal is to reach it and build a buffer.

The early long straights are surreal as the Nevada desert opens out in every direction and the GTI settles into its stride. With the road closed and, for long stretches, no other car in sight, you can choose your line freely. Most drift towards the middle of the road, straddling the yellow centre lines and rumble strip to maximise visibility and smooth out the sweepers. At sustained triple-digit speeds, Route 318 develops an almost hypnotic rhythm. The Nevada desert begins coming towards you in enormous uninterrupted waves of asphalt and heat haze.

Suddenly reality snaps back into focus. Just as we are trimming our speed to get as close as possible to our average target of 110mph, we are confronted by debris scattered across the highway: long strips of rubber spread across both lanes. Further down the course, sitting damaged in a neighbouring paddock beyond the roadside fencing, is a Ferrari 488 Challenge Evo. The car has come to rest battered and coated in dust, dirt and dry Nevada grass after leaving the road at close to 180mph.

The sight is a sharp reminder that the dangers remain very real. Fortunately, driver Michael Davis and navigator Ken Reese walked away. Later, during the evening presentations back in Ely, the organisers award the pair the event's Balls of Steel Award for 2026.

At this stage, the mathematics of the Nevada Open Road Challenge become very real. In our 110mph Touring class, every mile should take 32.73sec. Arrive at Mile 20 0.4 seconds early and you are Plus 0.4; 0.6 seconds behind? Minus 0.6.

In the lead-up to the event, this timing variance was on everyone's lips. But every conversation circles back to one place: The Narrows. It sits roughly 70 miles into the southern leg, a tight canyon section carved through the mountains and universally regarded as the most intimidating part of the course.

The route notes alone are enough to raise your pulse rate: "Off-camber 64deg into a short straight into The Narrows." Followed by: "Most treacherous blind curve on the course!!!"

After that, the notes descend into a blur of tightening corners and increasingly urgent instructions for multiple bends, before the understated final note: "Exit The Narrows (resume breathing)."

All while trying to hold a 110mph average. Veterans constantly warn newcomers about it. "You need to build a buffer before The Narrows," one experienced competitor told us, "because you're going to lose time in there." Another laughed and said: "The road decides what speed you do through The Narrows. Not you."

We take the advice seriously. Long before reaching the canyon section on the outward leg, we deliberately build a healthy margin over our target average speed, knowing we would bleed seconds once the road tightened around us.

Another aspect of the challenge in the Touring classes is that competitors are not simply given a target average speed: they are also assigned both a maximum and minimum speed. Our maximum permitted speed was 124mph, with the minimum set at 80mph. Drop below it and you risk disqualification for going too slow. Organisers do not want competitors bunching together or creating dangerous speed differentials across the course.

To enforce it, hidden speed traps are scattered throughout the route. Exceed your maximum or fall below your minimum speed and you are disqualified immediately and not permitted to run the return leg competitively.

That pressure becomes particularly intense approaching The Narrows. By then the road has lulled us into a strange rhythm. Route 318 is so open that 110mph gradually begins feeling oddly normal as the Nevada desert blurs around you.

Then the canyon walls suddenly close in, the road tightens and the corners begin stacking one upon another. And, for the first time, you genuinely have to work for the average speed. The focus changes completely. The challenge is no longer simply maintaining momentum it becomes damage limitation.

Once we emerge from The Narrows canyon section, the priority for the remaining 17.5 miles of the southern leg becomes brutally simple: recover the lost time without overdriving the car. The desert begins flattening out again as we gradually claw our way back towards the magic 110mph.

After 90 miles across the Nevada desert, we cross the line just fractions away from our prescribed target time of 49min 05.455sec. The world suddenly slows down.

After almost an hour of concentration and speed calculations, the abrupt reduction in pace feels surreal: your eyes take time to readjust; your breathing changes; the silence inside the car suddenly becomes noticeable again. Competitors funnel into the tiny town of Ash Springs for the turnaround before the run back to Ely, and the place briefly transforms into an improvised Le Mans pit lane.

Then, less than an hour later, everybody heads back out in the opposite direction for the 61-mile return leg - and this year there is extra uncertainty. Weather forecasts throughout race week had repeatedly threatened rain. Organisers made their position very clear: if rain fell during the event, all competitors would immediately be reduced to a mandatory 70mph average speed regardless of class.

Out on Route 318 the weather has shifted constantly. Some sections remained dry beneath brilliant blue desert skies; other sections grew colder as dark clouds drifted across the distant mountain ranges. And then, after the finish line on the return leg, Nevada desert snow begins falling on the mountains surrounding the town.

That contrast perfectly captures the absurdity of the event itself. One moment you are calculating timing variance at triple-digit speeds while crossing Nevada at full commitment. The next you are crawling carefully back into a tiny mining town through falling snow.

Somewhere amid all of that madness, our Golf GTI quietly delivered a result we could scarcely have imagined. We finished seventh in the 110mph Touring class with an average speed of 109.9808mph or just 0.0192mph shy of the prescribed 110mph target.

By the end of the event, however, the mathematics, psychology and sheer craziness of Nevada's open-road racing culture had started to make sense - enough to understand why so many competitors return year after year. A completely legal flat-out race across the desert run largely on trust and camaraderie.

There is simply nothing else quite like it.