Pylons Past: Offering Personal Retrospective on History and Future of Reno Air Races

After 59 years of tradition in Nevada, just how the move to Roswell will turn out is an open discussion.

Tom Wilson

Tuesday, July 15, 2025 at 08:00 AM ET

Verified

Edited By:

Travis Tingle

Scene from the Reno Air Races in Nevada [Reno Air Racing Association/Susan Koppel]

Key Takeaways:

The Reno Air Races, established in 1964, thrived for decades as a unique spectacle, particularly its "Unlimited" class featuring highly modified WWII fighter aircraft that pushed the boundaries of speed and engineering.
The Unlimited class eventually declined due to escalating costs, scarcity of suitable WWII planes, changing rules, and economic incentives that led race planes to be converted back to stock.
The emergence of the Sport class offered a new path for innovation with contemporary aircraft, and as the Reno venue closed, the National Championship Air Races are relocating to Roswell, New Mexico, marking a new era for pylon racing.

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Unlimited. Now there’s a word for you. What unfettered freedom it connotes, such exuberance for the future, an almost naive sense of limitless possibilities.

When I first came across unlimited in an aviation context. The editors of FLYING had published an annual titled Air Racing Aerobatics, with “racing” and “aerobatics” differentiated by different colors. It cost $1.95, a sobering $16.04 today, and was a thick 132 pages of tightly written personality profiles and technical features. Not incidentally, longtime FLYING contributor Peter Garrison expertly wrote many of these, and he’s still here in this issue.