The Art of Speed
Sculptor Jeff Brock races into history
Carrie McCarthy
It was a shy 14-year-old who called his attention to it, just over a year ago at Pomona, California’s annual Grand National Roadster Show. Had the teenage friend not been with him that fateful day in January 2009, Jeff Brock, 48, a born-and-bred gearhead and lifelong sculptor of metal and wood, might never have seen his future. “I saw that car and it changed my world,” recalls Brock after gazing upon one of his favorite “leadsleds” of all time—a mid-’50s beauty hand-formed by the legendary land-speed racer Bill Burke. “It was something I could wrap my head around.” And his arms, ideas, time, and energy.
Brock decided then and there to chop, drop, wedge, stretch, and streamline his own lead sled; he’d customize the 1952 Buick Riviera he’d found the year before and get it ready for a rumble on the salt flats at Utah’s 61st annual Bonneville Land Speed Week in August. Little did he know that this whim would not only reinvigorate his art it would earn him a place in racing history. “It’s a sentimental car to me,” says Brock, looking wistfully at the tricked-out Buick here at the 120-year-old adobe home, horse ranch, and art studios he shares with his wife, sculptor Star Liana York, just outside Abiquiú. “Built in my hometown, and in the same year my wife was born.”
Sexy as the car was, automotive aficionados questioned its racing abilities (too big, too bulky). Brock remembers the advice he got last May from one of the organizers at Speed Week. “He said, ‘You should rethink your build. It’s not an aerodynamic car.’ And I thought, I’m not going to break a world record. I just want to race it at the Salt Flats. It wasn’t like I wanted to prove anybody wrong.”
As honest as he no doubt is when he says this, one might also find it a tad disingenuous. After all, it takes all of five minutes around Brock to palpably feel his enthusiasm, his drive (so to speak), his intensity, his stubbornness. Not to mention his wonderfully self-deprecating and irreverent sense of humor, strong moral code, and respect for his elders and for the Way Things Should Be—plus charisma up the yin-yang.
Unfazed by the naysayers and determined as ever, in June, Brock enlisted locals Sergio Juarez, 22, and Lupe Nino, 23, to work with him in his garage/studio. It was part of his and York’s community-outreach efforts—what they later named Rezerrection Racing—to revive the work ethic and pride of the area’s younger generation. “I wanted to share my technical knowledge,” says Brock, “and show kids other avenues that are worth seeking out.”
Inspired in part by The World’s Fastest Indian (starring Anthony Hopkins as legendary speed-bike racer Burt Munro, who set numerous world records at Bonneville), and perhaps just as much by Warner’s—and others’—doubts as well, Brock and his apprentices put in 10-to-12-hour days, six and seven days a week. “We just hit it hard to build that car,” marvels Juarez, who still works for Brock. “A lot of the locals never thought I could do something like this.”
Brock also turned to veteran drag-race machinist Doug Anderson, of Albuquerque’s Automotive Machine Services, to help with the design and machining of the necessary high-performance modifications.
At 2 p.m. on August 7, the day before check-in, Brock and his two-man crew made their final tweak: installing a home-built windshield. He and Juarez then drove all night (Nino’s community college commitments prevented him from coming) and arrived in Bonneville at 4 a.m. They caught three hours of sleep in their truck, checked in for a mandatory 9 a.m. meeting, and were then subjected to the longest tech inspection in Speed Week history.
“Unknown to me, it was very controversial, what we’d done,” says Brock. “It’s an unorthodox car.” Unorthodox in that a car like his had never raced at Bonneville before. “It’s an XO/GCC,” he says of the XO—straight-eight-cylinder inline engine—Gas Competition Coupe. “It’s not normal to make a Buick straight-eight go fast. But this was my interpretation of how to build a race car. The officials would ask, How’d you get this? And I’d tell ’em, ‘That’s how I read the rule book.’ It was real touch-and-go for a while. Luckily, the old-timers took me under their wing. They saved my ass.”
Unintimidated by it all—the 568 other racers, the 9,000 fans, the never ending inspection, the other race crews with their matching outfits and sponsors on their uniforms—Brock and Juarez went about their business. “We looked like thugs,” says Juarez. “There were all these guys in their rigs looking at us. They had the money, but we had the coolest car.” Cool, but still untested. They touched it up Sunday and Monday, to meet various last-minute requirements, and didn’t drive it before Tuesday’s big day, because doing so would disqualify them from racing.
Born and raised in Flint, Michigan, Brock had his own gallery and electrical contracting business before chucking it all to move to Santa Fe and become a full-time artist. Almost immediately after arriving, he fell in—and in love—with York, whom he met while pointing up her Touch the Earth sculpture. (Point-up artists enlarge another artist’s sculpture.)
Brock had raced motorcycles all his life and was nationally ranked in ice racing and dirt drags. Two years ago, he decided to merge his passions by building art cars. “I had to get the vintage motorcycle thing out of my head,” says Brock, whose father, 74, still rebuilds and races vintage bikes. “I’m a lean and mean hot-rod builder. So [I decided] this is how I’m going to express myself in the arts.”
One way he’s expressing himself is through the 1929 Nash roadster he’s transforming—with York’s involvement—into a turquoise-bejeweled art car. The other way was at Bonneville.
“Fear?” Brock asks rhetorically. “People always ask me that: Was I scared? There is justifiable fear. But when they drop that flag and you’ve got to go, your fear is gone. You satisfy some primal need that is very close to sex. It’s euphoric. You feel like a gladiator.”
“I was just thinking, Jeez, I hope it makes it down the track,” laughs Juarez.
Negotiating the salty, slippery three-mile speedway, Brock, whose experience in motorcycle racing gave him an advantage, didn’t level out till he hit 120 mph. (“A lot of guys spin out,” he says. “You can run and slide on it like it’s snow out there. Three cars in front of me that day, a guy crashed and died.”) He then punched it up to 132 miles per hour—setting a new world record (the old one: 127 mph) for inline-engine competition coupes. Weeks later, at the Land Speed World Finals, Brock topped his own record, reaching 136 mph.
Racing success has brought Brock, Juarez, and Nino a sense of personal accomplishment. “Instead of me getting in trouble, my little brother and my dad, they’re watching me do something in my life,” says Juarez. “Jeff showed me if you set your mind to it, you can do it.”
As for Brock, he’s found the ideal outlet. “People are just drawn to this car, and I want to make more like it,” he says. Turns out, he has plans for making a belly-tank racer that he thinks can top 200 mph. “After all,” he says with a grin, “mankind has always had a need for speed.”
