A record worth its salt

Taken from Motor Sport, September 2014, A record worth its salt

It is 50 years since Donald Campbell broke the world land speed record on Lake Eyre in South Australia with his gas-turbine car Bluebird. On July 17 1964 he recorded the incredible speed of 403.100mph in a wheel-driven car, before the age of jet and rocket propulsion took over. But the bald facts do not do Campbell’s achievement justice, as I found out when I went to visit Lake Eyre to discover what it would have been like all those years ago.

It seems strange that the LSR should be set on a lake, but this is one of the largest lakes in the world. The Lake Eyre Basin covers 1.2 million square miles, one sixth of the total of the vast continent of Australia. Yet because it is such a dry, arid country the lake is rarely full, and for much of the time it is dry. This enormous parched level area of salt was seen for the first time by a European, Edward John Eyre, in 1840. Here at the lowest point in Australia, 15m below sea level, water covers the lake only every seven or eight years, and it has only been at capacity three times since Eyre first stumbled upon it. Even today in a modern 4WD vehicle it’s an adventure to access the very heart of Terra Australis, the great Southern Land.