BUTLER TWP — Rob Freyvogel has been waiting a long time to reach 500 mph. He hopes to do that this week.

Butler Township’s own speed demon was one of 450 preregistered who will compete in Speed Week going on now until Friday in Wendover, Utah.

Freyvogel’s goal? To drive his custom-made car up to 500 mph.

“We’re trying to be the first wheel-driven car to 500 mph,” he said. “We’d like to try to get up to 450 mph. We don’t think that salt conditions are going to get to 500, but we’ll see when we get there. We’re going to try to go as hard as we can.”

Freyvogel, an engineer and the president of Carbinite Metal Coatings in Forward Township, began designing his car, named “Carbiliner,” with Brandon Barnhart of Harmony in 2009.

They completed the car in 2011, and planned to race at the Bonneville Salt Flats in early 2013.

However, rain dashed that. Then in October 2013 the federal government was shut down, which led to the shuttering of the site.

In 2014, rain again canceled all of the events in which Freyvogel planned to compete. The same thing happened with Speed Week in 2015.

“It’s very frustrating,” said Freyvogel, who left Butler County on Thursday on his trip west. “It’s a lot of work to prepare for such a thing and to have it cancel. We try to take advantage of it and just be more and more prepared.”

Freyvogel and his team have made use of that time off, driving all the way to Nevada to test the Carbiliner. They raced it up to 360 mph on a dry lake bed.

“We’re going to push it a whole lot more because we really didn’t have a safety crew out there, so we were just testing the system in the course of the winter,” Freyvogel said. “The soil doesn’t really allow us to get going that fast, also.”

Freyvogel will aim to go fast enough to break three records at Speed Week. The record for the streamliner class of vehicle — which is the class Carbiliner is in — is 348 mph. The record for piston engines is 439.5 mph, and the record for turbine engines is 458 mph.

Freyvogel has a team of 20 people, including some in the western United States with whom he communicates electronically. Together they make improvements on the Carbiliner.

The car is 28 feet long and weighs 3,000 pounds. Its front wheels are discs with no tires. In the past year, its back wheels were changed from Kevlar-banded tires to nylon cord tires.

“That’s what we’ve found to keep the tire to be able to live and survive the speed that we need to go,” Freyvogel said.

There are wings on the back of the car which keep it stable at high speeds. Its engine runs on gasoline, ethanol and methanol. It has a 2,600 horsepower engine, and a backup 1,800 horsepower engine.

All of these attributes will be in play when the Carbiliner takes to the course. It will have four miles to accelerate, one mile where its speed is averaged and recorded, and two miles to stop. Parachutes will be deployed and brakes will be applied once the car gets under 200 mph.

The entire ride will take about 50 seconds, while the recorded stretch will be about seven seconds.

“It’s smooth and it’s a gradual thrusting all the way through,” Freyvogel said of the ride.

The conditions for the race are fair, and Freyvogel expects to be able to race.

“We’ll be racing on some fairly thin crust, but I think it’s going to be good enough,” Freyvogel said.

What is less certain to Freyvogel is how the competition will fair.

“I don’t know what to expect,” he said. “You’d think everybody has a shot at (500 mph), but there’s so many things that can go wrong, and we’ve been trying to get over 500 for so many years. So it’s a difficult thing. So far it’s proved elusive to so many people that thought they could do it.”