For fifty-nine years, every September, the high desert north of Reno filled with a sound you felt in your chest before you heard it: the shriek of Merlin engines wound past their limits, warbirds built to kill fascism now screaming around pylons a few metres off the sagebrush at more than 500 miles an hour. The National Championship Air Races billed itself as the world’s fastest motorsport, and it was not exaggerating. In September 2023, at Reno-Stead Field, it flew for the last time.

Nothing else in aviation was quite like it. Cars race on the ground and everyone can see the whole track. At Reno, the racecourse was the sky itself — a ring of fifty-foot pylons that pilots rounded in a banking blur, judging their line by feel, wingtips seemingly close enough to snag the desert scrub.

Warbirds, wrung out

The rancher and racing pilot Bill Stead founded the races in 1964, and from 1966 they lived at Reno-Stead, a former Air Force field. Six classes shared the sky over the decades — nimble Formula One racers, biplanes, T-6 trainers, jets — but the crowds came for the Unlimiteds. These were P-51 Mustangs, Hawker Sea Furies and Grumman Bearcats, stripped, clipped and boosted far beyond anything their wartime designers imagined, thundering around the course at the ragged edge of control.

In 2003 the modified Mustang Dago Red set an Unlimited record of 507 miles an hour. The jet class went faster still. To watch it was to watch the Second World War’s finest fighters given a second, stranger life — not preserved behind museum ropes, but flown as hard as metal allows.

The cost

Speed that close to the ground has a price, and Reno paid it more than once. The darkest day came on 16 September 2011, when a heavily modified Mustang called the Galloping Ghost, flown by 74-year-old Jimmy Leeward, pitched up during a race, rolled and dived into the box-seating area in front of the main grandstand. Eleven people died, including Leeward, and some seventy were injured. Investigators traced the loss of control to flutter in a tail trim tab, tied to untested modifications and worn hardware. It remains one of the worst airshow disasters in American history.

Even the farewell was touched by grief. On the final Sunday in September 2023, two T-6 Texans collided after their race, killing pilots Nick Macy and Chris Rushing. The remaining races were cancelled. The community that had gathered to say goodbye instead said it in mourning.

An era ends, another begins

Reno’s end was not really about any one accident. The city had grown out toward the airport; the airspace, the safety demands and the economics no longer fit. In March 2023 the Reno Air Racing Association announced that year would be the last at Stead.

The races did not die. After a nationwide search, they found a new home at Roswell, New Mexico — open country with room to breathe — and flew there for the first time in September 2025. The pylons still stand, the Mustangs still run. But something of the old Reno, the desert cathedral of speed, stayed behind in Nevada.

Sources: Reno Air Racing Association; AOPA; NTSB (report AAB-12/01); AVweb (2023–2025).