Peek Brothers Racing

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Peek Brothers Race Cars

 

Somewhere around 2010 Land Speed Louise contacted me looking for information on our Bonneville Roadster for the book was writing on the history of Bonneville Salt Flats racing.  One thing led to another and the next thing you know I've got the hots to get the roadster running again.  And the second chapter was about to begin.

 

I went back to Speed Week in 2013 and remembered why I had fallen in love 49 years earlier. I began to research the current status of the BSF and restoration efforts.  What I discovered is that little had changed, the mining had continued and the BLM still had it's head in the sand.  The Salt was not what it had been when I was there racing almost fifty years ago.  What had happend?

 

Many thousands of years ago Lake Bonneville drained with a break of a natural dam reducing ths size of the lake dramatically, then over the next ten to fifteen thousand years evaporation took it's tole and left two small remants of the enormous lake, The Great Salt Lake and The Bonneville Salt Flats.  Those fifteen thousand years of evaproation had left mineral deposits consisting mostly of Halite, salt, many feet thick and as flat as a billard table.  Fast forward to about 1900 and man has discovered the great white desert and with the development of the automobile it soom became the place to set speed records.  Early reports show and mention having to blast, drill and saw through the rock hard and feet thick salt in the process of building the Victory Highway or setting up a LSR pit.

 

Fast forward another 100 years and the BSF has done its best to hold up from the onslaught of man and mining.  Mining is not solely responsible for the demise of the racing surface, mother nature and man have contributed in other ways but over fifty years of BLM anthorized mining have extracted millions of tons of the precious white mineral from the once proud racing surface and moved it a few miles south.