I asked Jim Cosgrove to write a few lines about how he became interested in land speed racing. Jim is the builder / engineer of "Das Bullet". His comments;
"It all started at Speed week in 2000. My Father in Law Frank Cutting invited me to go to Speedweek with his hot rod club the Ty Rods. There were over thirty people all together and on the flight home a lot of the group said they are going to build a car to run, but only four did. Frank and I built a lakester, Bob Parker, Ken MaKuch?s and Carter Llovd all built roadster?s
Frank and I went back to Speedweek a couple of years later. When we arrive in Salt Lake we went to Smith & Edwards the store with everything and there is where we found a fuel tank off a A10 Warthog. We decide to buy the tank and build a belly tank Lakester. The car was powered by a 1957 Mercedes in line six.
We had the car together enough in 2007 to run it at the spring ECTA meet at Maxton. The first Inspection of the car went well. We have run the car many times with ECTA at Maxton and Wilmington and got into two club at Wilmington in 2012 at 202.375.
2007 was also the first year we took the car to Bonneville Speed week. We had fun, learned a lot and put holes in three out of the six cylinders. The next year we bumped the record from 158.399 to 218.362 which was great expect the two club had a 220 minimum for this class. In 2010 we ran the car with 2.2 Liter Audi four-cylinder engine and got in the two club with a 230.679. We have since bumped the record at Bonneville to 262.062.
One year at Bonneville I let my older brother Dennis Cosgrove drive the car for the first time. He did embarrass me some with only going 96mph on his rookie run but it was very gratifying to see how excited he was when he got out of the car.
2011 was the first time we ran the car at Loring Air force base with LTA and I got into the two club with a 202.882. I have since bumped my record to 223.347 . In 2013 Dennis got into the two club with a 217.957. I love Loring, it?s a long wide track, affordable hotels, great people, close to home at 425 miles which allows Family and friends to come.
Over the years, we have made modifications and adjustments to try to get more speed and Loring is always good to test out our changes. The last big change was to the body of the car converting from a lakester to a rear engine modified roadster. I found that the records for this class were fairly low and my daughter Amelia wanted to get into the driver's seat.
Frank and I finished the re-bodying of the car for the July meet at Loring. We had some teething problems at first but we sorted that out. Amelia did a perfect rookie run and finished off with a record at 182.356mph.
We then took the car to Bonneville. Amelia and the car passed inspection but the rains came that night."
