NHRA News: Land-speed record-holder, CHRR honoree Vesco dies (12/18/2002)

Land-speed record-holder, CHRR honoree Vesco dies

12/18/2002

Don Vesco, a land-speed record-holder for motorcycles and cars whose accomplioshments recognized at the 11th annual California Hot Rod Reunion Oct. 4-6, died Monday in Scripps Mercy Hospital in San Diego of prostate cancer. He was 63.

Vesco, the dry-lakes racer among this year's honorees, has the distinction of holding the Land Speed Record for wheel-driven/turbine cars with a clocking of 458 mph in October 2001 at Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats and is the only driver in motorsports history to have held the World Motorcycle record as well.

He began as a drag racer at Southern California tracks Paradise Mesa and Lions Drag Strip in the 1950s but found his racing venue of choice when he began competing with a motorcycle at Bonneville in 1957. He later became a factory rider for American Honda, Yamaha, and Kawasaki and won the 1963 U.S. Grand Prix Open class in Daytona Beach, Fla., giving Yamaha its first American victory. That same year, he earned membership in the Bonneville 200-MPH Club in his father John's Offenhauser-powered streamliner with clockings of 222 mph.

Vesco's highlights of the 1970s include becoming the first motorcycle rider to exceed 250 mph; he set an American Motorcycle Association record in 1974 with an average speed of 281.702 mph. One year later, he broke the 300-mph barrier for motorcycles with a new AMA record of 303.928, then 333.117 mph at the Bonneville Speed Week meet in 1978. Vesco was inducted into the AMA Hall of Fame in 1999 and was awarded the Car Guy of the Year honor at the Auto World conference in Dearborn, Mich., in 2002 with his brother, Rick.

Vesco was honored at this year's Reunion along with Bob and Don Spar, the Surfers' Tom Jobe and Robert Skinner, Bobby Tapia, and Doug Thorley.

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