Rain and a wet track in South Australia's north have ended a bid to break the Australian land speed record for a piston-driven car.

Lionel West was looking to smash his existing record of 271 miles per hour (436 kilometres per hour) in a run on Lake Gairdner this week as part of the Dry Lake Racers Australia meeting.

But rain and sitting water on the salt lake has limited his team's outings to just a couple of shakedown runs in the highly modified VR Commodore dubbed Bronze Aussie.

"With the track unlikely to improve enough by the end of the week to allow for high-speed runs the team has decided to start packing up and will look to head home," a post on the team's Facebook page said.

West set his existing record in 2017 and then went faster in an unofficial run in 2018 before crashing.

His car has since been rebuilt and upgraded with a view to cracking the 300mp/h (482km/h) barrier.

If he can do that in Australia he would smash the current world record of 297mp/h (478 km/h) though he would need to repeat it in the United States for it to be officially recognised.

"It's not out of reach with what we've done to the car," West said.