“He did it with his brain, not his wallet.”
“He’s was pretty much one of the legends of our sport,” McDowell said. At one time, he held the land speed record for motorcycles, he said. He spent more than two decades building, fine-tuning and racing a motorcycle on which he reached speeds exceeding 300 mph, said Pat McDowell, a fellow racer and longtime friend. Wheeler, an engineer from Arcadia, California, was known as an innovator and pioneer in the sport. “Land speed racing is one of the most family orientated sports there is the world.”
“We all have real heavy hearts,” said Cook, organizer of Mike Cook’s Bonneville Shootout. Wheeler was alive when emergency crews extracted him from the car but died about four hours later at the hospital, Cook said. His motorcycle began to slide and then popped into the air and came crashing down on the caged section where Wheeler was seated, Cook said. Wheeler was going about 200 mph during a test run when the back of the streamliner motorcycle started fishtailing, said Mike Cook, the event organizer who witnessed the incident. Wheeler died Monday afternoon at Intermountain Medical Center in the Salt Lake City suburb of Murray because of traumatic injuries suffered in the motorcycle accident, hospital spokesman Jess Gomez said.
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