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Nancy and Jon Wennerberg spent last weekend in southeastern North Carolina, trying to see just how fast their 2008 Kawasaki ZX14R motorcycle can go.

The Maxton Monster Mile is sanctioned and staged by the East Coast Timing Association, and the Wennerbergs have been racing there for nine years This past weekend was the first of five events in North Carolina this year.

Nancy and Jon also attend the speed trials at the Bonneville Salt Flats in western Utah each August, September, and October.

Jon was this weekend's rider, racing their new bike with a hot-rodded engine. The bike competes in a factory production class, but the rules allow some engine modifications. The bike makes about 200 horsepower now, quite a bit more than the 160 when the Wennerbergs bought it.

On the first run down the one mile course Jon's speed was measured at 193.8 miles per hour, which was about 2 1?4 mph faster than the existing record in the class.

"I was happy, tickled, excited", Jon said about breaking the record on the bike's first run after all the work done over the winter. The Seldom Seen Slim team has the modifications and other work done on their four race bikes at Twin Jugs Racing in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

The next run Jon made on Sunday morning netted a speed of "only" 189.9 mph, but two hours later he made one more pass down the WWII-era aircraft runway that the racers have used for more than a decade. Jon managed to squeak a few more miles per hour out of the bike, going through the timing light traps at 196.798 miles per hour, upping the record he set just the day before.

He and Todd Dross, the SSS crew chief and owner of Twin Jugs Racing, decided that they had not only run the bike about as fast as it was likely to go with the present setup, but that enough information had been collected during the three passes down the course to continue improving the performance to the next stage, which will take the bike into the low 200 mph range.

Nancy, Jon, and Todd all hope to get the bike to at least 210 mph by August when they'll all go to Wendover, Utah, for the biggest speed trials event in the world, SpeedWeek, which is sanctioned by the Bonneville Nationals Inc. and the Southern California Timing Association.

Both of Seldom Seen Slim's riders already hold numerous records at Bonneville, including Jon's 207.065 in 2003. His best single run at the "Salt" ended with a timing slip showing 216.985 mph.

The SSS team operates two websites about land speed racing, their personal site is www.nancyandjon.org, and they also own and run www.landracing.com, a site where most of the land speed racers from around the world share information about the vehicles they're building and racing.