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, became a renowned event, particularly for its "Unlimited" class featuring highly modified World War II aircraft and fostering decades of intense competition and a unique community.
The Unlimited class eventually declined due to factors such as the soaring value of vintage warbirds for collectors, high operational costs, stifled innovation for new race planes, and urban development encroaching on the Stead Field location.
The introduction of the Sport class offered a new direction, promoting modern, innovative aircraft and technology that eventually rivaled Unlimited speeds and formed its own racing organization.
The National Championship Air Races are relocating from Reno to Roswell, New Mexico, in 2025, marking a new era for the sport focused on adaptation and potentially diversified events beyond the main championship.

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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.