As the 100 drove almost 200!
The Austin Healey 100 of the car conglomerate BMC, which was first presented to the public at the Earls Court Show in 1952, had the number of 100 for the top speed of 100 miles per hour.
Donald Healey continued to develop his sports car with his ‘Donald Healey Motor Company’, decided to get the most out of his design and set out to attack the existing speed record. As the location for this trip, he chose the popular and well-established salt lake of the ‘Bonneville Salt Flats’ in Utah. In addition to the first-class track, there was another reason for the choice, namely that it would make the Austin Healey name and the Model 100 better known in the USA.
In 1953, his team set new records, but this was not enough for Donald Healey. In the summer of 1954, the British finally shipped a specially built car to the USA, but when they arrived at the salt lake in Utah, they found that the surface was in far worse condition than they had expected. Nevertheless, they took their chance and Donald Healey himself, as well as his fellow drivers George Eyston, Carroll Shelby, Mort Goodall, and Roy Jackson Moore achieved new best values in class D over the 5 and 10 kilometer distances in the heavily modified Healy 100. However, the most memorable was the officially stopped speed over a kilometer – 192.6 mph. The calendar on this day was August 22, 1954 and for Donald Healey it was a dream come true.
