Racing at Lake Perkolilli, WA

Some things happen quite by chance, and you end up venturing down a road which leads to somewhere you never thought you’d go. That happened to me in 1994. 

I was amongst thousands of people wandering around Midland, an outer suburb of Perth. The locals were running a motor racing event called the ‘Gull Speed Classic’; an around-the-houses style race for old cars. This was new to me - the smoke, smell and clatter of the old beasts was sensational.

Then, around the corner came a car unlike the rest. It was a light blue 1928 Buick, cut down and with a big fuel tank in the back.  It was a beast. Rob Stewart was the driver and he seemed to be having so much fun. I thought “I want to get involved. I could build a car like that.” The announcer said it was a replica of a car which raced at Lake Perkolilli. “Lake where?” I asked.  Despite living in WA, I’d never heard of the place.

Discovering “Perko”

It turned out that Lake Perkolilli was – and still is - a natural claypan near the ghost town of Kanowna, north of Kalgoorlie.  I was hooked and began researching the Australian-built “specials” of the 1920s that raced there. These were rustic racers, mostly built from stock passenger cars.  I wanted a quick car and I drifted towards replicating a machine called ‘Silverwings’. It was a Chrysler Six which raced with great success all over WA, but particularly at Lake Perkolilli. So, to research the car and its history, I also researched Lake Perkolilli.

I discovered that “Perko”, as it was called, was the birthplace of motor racing in WA and, arguably, the most important historic site for motor racing in Australia.

It is also one of the few places in the world where you can still drive on the original surface of a motor racing track from 1914.

Of course, at Indianapolis the bricks of the ‘brickyard’ are long gone (apart from a strip across the finishing line) and Brooklands no longer exists as a race circuit, but at Perko, the original clay surface renews itself every year after rain.

Silver and Red

When my replica of Silverwings came together in 1997, a few mates and I returned to Perko to remember the day in 1927 when the original car set a new 24-hour speed record on the claypan.  Back then, Arthur Colliver and Billy Attwood drove 2587.6 km in 24 hours, averaging 107.7km/h, beating the record previously set by a Vauxhall at the banked track at Maroubra in New South Wales.

Since 1997, we have been back to the red dust of Perko four times, camping in the bush and taking our vintage specials around the claypan. It’s a special place, even today. 

The red clay surface is rock hard and incredibly smooth — perfect for pre-war racing cars. You camp in the bush under the trees where motor car and motorcycle racers camped from 1914 to 1939.  It is impossible not to be drawn into the unique atmosphere of this treasured place.

Early history of Perko

I discovered that motor racing at Lake Perkolilli began in 1914 when the local station owner invited the Goldfields Motor Club to have a picnic racing event on the claypan.  It was an overnight success and more race meetings for cars and motorcycles were held that year. Those racing pioneers coined the nickname “The Brooklands of the West” for the natural clay track.

The Great War, however, drained WA’s goldfields of adventurous young men, with many losing their lives in the battlefields of Gallipoli, Palestine and the Western Front.

Those who came back from the war helped revive motor racing at Lake Perkolilli in the 1920s, which were the halcyon years for the track. 

Increased interest saw a company formed by the Goldfields branch of the Royal Automobile Club to develop the claypan. The grandstand from the old Coolgardie horse racing track was purchased by the RAC and transported - by camel train! – to be reassembled at Perkolilli. It became almost civilised.

Races became an annual event, conducted each spring, when Kalgoorlie was swamped by visitors from Perth for the Kalgoorlie and Boulder Cup horse racing rounds.

Stars on the Clay

Racers from those halcyon years became household names in Australia. Those men included Ossie Cranston, who took a succession of Ford-based specials to Perko, beginning with Heza Henry (a Ford Model T), a Ford Model A called ‘Cactus’ and later a Ford V8 racer.  The V8 would also be used by Cranston in the “1937” Australian Grand Prix, where he recorded the fastest overall time.

The legendary Australian distance driver Norman “Wizard” Smith drove from Sydney to Perkolilli and set a new 24-hour record in a Studebaker, eclipsing the record set by Colliver and Attwood in the original Silverwings back in 1927.

Races called the Australasian Championships were held at Perko, where the likes of Harry “Cannonball” Baker stunned the crowds riding a Brough Superior at near 160km/h.  Eric Armstrong took an Auburn boat-tail Speedster to the Lake, too, where he beat the crowd favourite Silverwings.

However, the onset of the Great Depression hit the motor trade hard, and support for travelling from Perth to Kalgoorlie for racing withered. For a couple of years, Perkolilli was silent, but when the economy picked up, the racers returned with even faster cars and motorcycles. More speed records were set and thousands of people continued to attend.

When around-the-houses style motor racing was introduced to Australia, at Albany on the south coast of Western Australia in 1936, the writing was on the wall for Perkolilli. Motor racing was now going to the people, rather than the people having to travel more than 600km to the motor racing.

Wartime petrol rationing ended the golden era of Lake Perkolilli, but after the war the legend lived on in the memories of those who braved the dust and the heat to see drivers race their cars as hard as they could go.

Bringing History Back

From 1997, I began accumulating stories from Lake Perkolilli. I scanned any photographs I could find, with the families of Perko racers lending me their precious family albums to copy. Over years of work and research, I built up an enormous archive of information. 

As the centenary of motor racing at Perkolilli approached in 2014, I thought that I should share these pictures and stories in a book – Red Dust Racers - to do justice to the centenary.

Myself and others went back to Perko in 2014, but the claypan was capricious. The planned centenary event was rained out. . . .  but it did give me another story for the book!

A 488-page coffee-table book, Red Dust Racers was published last year.

The fascinating – and largely unknown ‘til now – history of racing at Lake Perkolilli is retold in detail and illustrated with over 1200 photographs in this well-designed and quality-printed hardcover.

Red Dust Racers attracted the attention of the world’s motor racing media, and was short-listed as one of the top eight motoring books worldwide at last December’s International Historic Motoring Awards in London - not bad for an Aussie book about a pile of dirt in the goldfields of WA!

A fitting tribute to the fanatics and their racing machines, Red Dust Racers is a uniquely Australian story of how we race, our way.

Limited to 1,000 numbered copies, Red Dust Racers is available direct from the Motoring Past website and selected specialist retailers. Act fast if you want a copy, though, as 630 have already sold at time of writing.

Red Dust Racers is $149.50 RRP per copy. Go to: www.motoringpast.com.au to order and get more information.