By Chad Meyer
Bill Cook’s first laps as a race driver were in a 300-lap Enduro that took place during the Kossuth County Fair. The track wasn’t back to holding races weekly yet, but on occasion, the facility hosted a fair race or an Enduro.
That changed in 1986, when Steve Krapp, local volunteers and the Kossuth County Fair Board worked hard to reestablish weekly racing competition in Algona. 2024 Kossuth County Hall of Fame driver, John Simpson, remembers how he and Bill Cook got started racing on a regular basis.
“It was the year the track reopened [1986] that I was sitting in the bar having a beer after work, when Bill Cook came in and said, ‘We’re building a car!’ Bill took his wife Angie’s brother’s Nova [that had an expired engine] and that’s what we built it from. She had no idea he was going to do that,” Simpson laughed.
Simpson and Cook took turns racing the Nova in ’86, but the real success with that car came when another hall of famer, Gene Schattschneider, wheeled it to a couple of wins that season. “John and I both looked at each other and said, ‘What are we doing wrong?’ Gene taught us a lot that year.”
Over the years, Cook was a regular competitor at the Algona and Britt tracks, also competing occasionally at Fairmont, Belmond and Spencer. During his career, he raced Street Stocks, Hobby Stocks, Stock Cars and Modifieds
A multi-time race winner, his best year at Algona was in 1992 in Hobby Stocks. He had multiple wins that year, including the NCAR Wetherell Mfg. series race, Ryan Wildin Memorial, the Kossuth County Fair Race and the NCAR Nationals in the fall. In IMCA Modifieds, his biggest win at Algona was the 2000 Gene Schattschneider Memorial at Algona.
His biggest win away from his home track occurred at the Hancock County Speedway in Britt. “We beat Kevin Stoa that night, which was a big deal then. He beat us earlier in the year, but we got him back,” Cook said.
Cook recalls that he should have had one more Kossuth County Fair race trophy in his collection. “I had a big lead one year during the fair and I got conservative. Keith Schmitz ran me down and beat me on the last lap. That one still stings, but it was my own fault.”
Cook built a lot of race cars over the years, and it was a way to help keep his own racing going. “We built roughly 150 cars, sometimes to the detriment of my own racing schedule. I had a lot of good help over the years, and I really appreciated it all. We took pride in building safe cars and we stayed up with technology. I’m proud of the cars we built because we didn’t cut corners.”
In addition to helping many area drivers scale their cars and supplying the parts and pieces needed to keep racers on the track, Cook and his wife Angie were also track officials at the track in Belmond.
Cook joins his late father Dwight and his late uncle Elmer as inductees into the Kossuth County Racing Hall of Fame.
