1954: The Mount Druitt 24 Hour

It was Australia's first 24-hour enduro: It was also the last for almost half a century. The twice-around-the-clock classic at Mount Druitt produced a famous win but, seventy years on, the circumstances of its running seem in danger of being lost to Father Time. So let's dig into it.

Source: YouTube

If You Build Very Little, They Will Still Come
In the early 1950s, there was nothing in Australia like Mount Druitt – a tarmac-sealed, honest-to-God permanent racetrack, not some dirt track or closed-off loop of public roads. Like so many circuits in those days, it had been built on one of the many RAAF aerodromes dotting the country in the aftermath of World War II. While some were still considered operational, others had been relegated to emergencies-only status, and these proved the seed crystal of the early Sydney motorsport scene. Schofields and Marsden Park each saw some level of motorsport action, while Castlereagh eventually became the backbone of local drag racing. Mount Druitt however had a different destiny.

In its early days Mount Druitt was as primitive as could be, a simple paperclip oval à la Martinsville laid out around a pair of hairpins 1,200 metres apart, marked by empty fuel drums. There were virtually no amenities, and precious little to shield you from the Daystar, but even so the entertainment-starved public came in droves. Crowds of 15,000 weren't unusual, partly explained by the sheer accessibility of the place – it was located on the very doorstep of Sydney, near Ropes Creek (and not a million miles from the future site of Sydney Motorsport Park). The main train line to Penrith brought spectators to Mount Druitt station and from there it was only a thirty-minute walk through the paddocks to the airstrip at the bottom of the hill. Alternatively, if you were lucky enough to be driving one of these newfangled Holdens, the Great Western Highway ran parallel to the rail line, bringing road traffic to the circuit via a dusty and narrow side road (which was inevitably clogged with vehicles on race days).

Races had been run on the airstrip as early as 1948, but in 1950 the circuit was leased to one Belfred Jones – a part-time racer and full-time entrepreneur from Old North Wales, who ran a company called Speed Promotions from an office in the grand-but-dilapidated Centenary House at the crown of the hill. With the advent of Belf Jones, Mount Druitt became the host circuit of Australian Racing Drivers Club, and plans began to gestate for something far more ambitious. Over the following 18 months the club began tar-sealing a series of access roads that ran down the hill through the scrub to both ends of the airstrip. To link these together, a new section of bitumen was laid at the top of the hill, which became the new pit straight.

The result was an anti-clockwise 3.6 kilometre circuit. From the starting line on top of the hill, a sweeping left-hander dropped sharply through a slight right-left kink to a very fast double right-hand corner that led onto the airstrip. 200 metres later, the track did a sharp U-turn around the old oil drums and ran back down the strip, before another very quick left hander sent competitors back up the hill to a sharp adverse-camber right-hander around a dam, then followed a looping left leading back onto pit straight. The circuit was far from perfect, being rather narrow and prone to breaking up, but it was fast and flowing and extremely popular with drivers and, thanks to its location in a gentle valley, provided excellent viewing to spectators.

Mount Druitt in its 1955 configuration (Source: Speedwayandroadracehistory.com)

From its opening motorcycle meeting on 16 November 1952, the track became the Mecca for road racers whose only other venue in the state was the once-a-year Easter meeting at Mount Panorama. Indeed, motorcycles made up the bulk of the early race meetings, conducted by various clubs such as the Motor Cycle Racing Club, Willoughby DMCC, and the Auto Cycle Union. In 1954 however the bikes were relegated to a support category for something far more grandiose, as on that year's Anniversary Weekend the circuit committed itself to hosting a 24-Hour Race for Production Cars – Australia's first endurance race.

It was a brave move, as Mount Druitt didn't have any kind of lighting system to illuminate the track, so it was going to get awfully dark through the long hours of night. On the other hand, the substantial £3,000 promised to the victor (nearly $128,000 in 2023) was sure to attract racers from every corner of the country. The start time was set for 2:00pm on Sunday, 31 January 1954, with the event to finish twenty-four hours later on Monday, 1 February (which was that year's Invasion Day public holiday, presumably because 26 January itself had been a Tuesday, which difficult to make into a long weekend).

Official programme. (Source: The Motor Racing Programmes Project)

This was well before Australia had developed its own enduro traditions, so the model they were working from was of course the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Le Mans was the new hotness at the time, as Jaguar had taken their first-ever victory in 1951 thanks to the XK120C of Peter Walker and Peter Whitehead – followed up in 1953 with another win for the C-Type (driven by Tony Rolt, a pioneer of 4WD and one of the team behind the glider project in Colditz. His co-driver was Duncan Hamilton, famously the world's most plastered racing driver). Jaguar would in fact go on to take a hat-trick of wins with their D-Type in 1955, '56 and '57, before Aston Martin finished off the British Decade in 1959 with a win for their DBR1. Endurance racing was very "in" among the Commonwealth, and Belf Jones was not someone to leave a promotional opportunity on the table. Like the French classic, all cars entered had to be ordinary production models racing as they left the factory (bar the removal of mufflers), and crewed by at least two drivers, who would have to sprint to their cars when the race commenced.

She's Got a Jaaag
Twenty-two teams stepped forward to try their hand, among them a handful of names that are familiar even today. Doug Chivas was there, twenty years before he pushed Brock's HDT Torana at Bathurst, already 31 and scheduled to co-drive the #20 MG TD entered by Lowe's Service Station. Ken Tubman, a Maitland chemist by day but more recently winner of the 1953 Redex Round-Australia Trial, had decided to try his luck in a Peugeot 203 similar to the one that had served him so well in the Redex. One of his co-drivers was David McKay, a dapper Sydney journalist and prestige car dealer equally known for his moustache and his stutter, who would go on to found Scuderia Veloce (in its day, Australia's greatest racing team) and claim the first-ever Australian Touring Car Championship. Even Belf Jones himself had decided to join in, entering a #7 Austin A90 Atlantic in an attempt to keep the prize money in the family.

But if you were serious about winning you needed the right tool for the job, and in the early fifties that could only be a Jag: Enter Westco Motors, stage right. Westco was owned by Cyril Anderson, a Queenslander in the midst of building his Western Transport business into one of the largest trucking concerns in the country (he'd established the business in Toowoomba in 1934 with a single two-tonne truck, but at his peak would be running a fleet of over 500 trucks and trailers). As a side hustle, he and his wife Doris Anderson – better known as "Geordie" – also ran Westco Motors, the Jaguar franchise for Queensland and the Northern Territory. It was run from a showroom located on the corner of Melbourne and Merivale Streets in South Brisbane, and from there Geordie was a fixture of the local racing scene, frequently pairing up with fellow Queenslander Bill Pitt (also destined to be an early Australian Touring Car Champion), and Charlie "Chas" Swinburne (who in at least one newspaper is listed as her son, but I don't know if there's any truth to that).

With an open line to the factory in Coventry, Geordie Anderson had been able to get her hands on a Jaguar XK120 FHC, one of the first ever built (chassis no S669015). Named for its 120mph top speed, it sported a 3.4-litre Jaguar straight-six capable of 120 kW at 5,000rpm, and 265 Nm of torque at 2,500. This engine had been designed during the war to while away the long hours of blackout, with the intention of powering a new four-door sedan that could be sold to the Americans. When the engine was ready before the car, however, Sir William Lyons decided to put it in the front of a fairly conventional two-door sports coupé – which upon its launch at the Earl's Court motor show in 1948, immediately became the world's fastest production car. 0-100 in ten seconds flat was a world away from the matronly, 19-second Holden. 

If you're about my age, this is the car James May drove in Top Gear's "Race in 1949", S13E01. (Source: The Beeb)

There were a number of variations on the theme, with Mrs Anderson's being the FHC or Fixed Head Coupé model, denoting its hard roof (as opposed to the DHC, or Drophead Coupé, with its foldaway canvas roof). The price for one of these started at £1,200 (just over £35,000 in 2023), but that was in Great British Pounds – what that worked out to once the car came to Australia and added import fees and taxes is anyone's guess. This was the machine Mrs Anderson proposed to enter in the Mount Druitt 24-Hour, and as formidable as it was, she nevertheless had her work cut out for her. Because there was another Jag on the entry list. Enter Peter Whitehead, stage left.

Peter Whitehead was a scion of a wealthy British wool dynasty, and this was actually his second visit to the colonies. The first had come immediately before the war, when he'd made a business trip to talk turkey with local wool growers and, on the side, won the 1938 Australian Grand Prix in a privately-owned ERA. The intervening war years had arguably taken away the peak of his driving career, but demand for woollen uniforms had apparently done his family fortune no harm, as upon returning to Australia he'd brought along his very own Jaguar XK120C – identical to the one he'd driven to victory at Le Mans in 1951.

Whitehead on his way to victory at la Sarthe, 1951. The car behind is the Aston Martin DB2 of Reg Parnell; the Jags would beat another DB2 at Mount Druitt (Source).

The C stood for "Competition", as it was the open-top racing version of the XK120, built especially to compete at Le Mans (and then hurriedly put into production afterward to legitimise the win). It gave privateers access to a race-tuned version of Jaguar's 3.4-litre six, capable of 157 kW – 37 more than the standard car. Getting to 100km/h took a mere eight seconds, and with the right gearing it was capable of 225km/h (or more, if you removed the token windscreens). Jaguar ultimately built 54 and asked only £1,500 for them, one of which was an ex-works car sold "virtually direct" to Peter Whitehead. To help with the driving, Whitehead had opted for local expertise in the persons of Alf Barrett, well-known maestro of Australian racing, and expat sports car ace Tony Gaze – the same Tony Gaze who'd recently driven a Holden in the Monte Carlo Rally.

It was a solid plan, but then it ran smack into the realities of life in Australia.

The Messy Breakup
For the Sydney basin, the month leading up to race day was one of rain, with thirteen out of the 31 days of January marked either by drizzle or heavy showers. Compounding this, the period immediately before the race included a substantial eight-day downpour, followed by more rain on the preceding Friday. Then, after the drivers had sprinted to their cars to begin the arduous 24-hour marathon, the heavens opened and drenched the circuit yet again. The motorcycle contingent were very thankful they'd got their races in on the Saturday, as the pits and spectator areas became a quagmire and the track surface quickly began to break up.

Detailed sources are tough to come by seventy years after the fact, and nothing I've read explicitly mentions cold-mix tarmac, but the surface has been described as "flimsy" and the whole facility had clearly been done on a tight budget. With cold-mix being the cheaper option, it seems logical that's what Belf Jones would've gone with, and now everyone was paying the price. Motorcycles and flyweight Grand Prix cars were one thing, but heavy production cars on slim pizza-cutter tyres were quite another, and the potholes that were soon sinking through the tarmac and into the mud beneath it were deep and devastating.

Their first victim was Mrs Anderson, who had to pit at 9:25pm with carburettor woes. The Jag had been running into potholes so hard the engine had been rocking on its mounts until it one of its two SU carburettors struck the steering column, and either snapped off an adjusting nut or cracked a float bowl – a problem that only afflicted right-hand drive cars. As luck would have it, however, someone in the crowd had driven to the track on just such a carb, so with this Samaritan's permission the team got out the spanners and commandeered the carb, carrying on the race in a more phlegmatic manner.

They were far from the only runners to hit trouble, however. An Aston Martin DB2 retired with a cracked timing case and "shot" engine mounts, and even a Holden pitted just after dawn with a broken rear leaf. A hush fell over the crowd, however, when the leading Whitehead Jag pulled into the sodden pits around 11:30pm with a rear suspension locating link broken, the car having hit a pothole at over 160km/h. Alf Barrett had been the one at the wheel at the time, so it seemed local expertise meant little when the rains came down and you couldn't see what was waiting for you in the dark. The link was welded up and the car sent back out, but two hours later it stopped again with a broken radius rod.

That left Mrs Anderson and her boys clear to run out the clock at their leisure – there was nothing else on the track fast enough to keep up with them, and certainly not in such shocking conditions. They ultimately took the chequered flag with 573 laps, or 2,063km of distance on the board. They finished four laps ahead of the 2nd-placed Bristol 400 of Gordon Greig, Bill Reynolds and Peter Vennermark (despite the roll-over seen in the video above!), and ten laps ahead of the 3rd-placed Humber Super Snipe. A Holden 48-215 managed 4th, while Dowling and McKay brought their Peugeot 203 home in 5th. All 22 entrants were classified at the finish, even if a lot of them did it by the time-worn expedient of waiting for the time to run out and then limping across the line! Mrs Anderson's crew had won the race at an average speed of just 85km/h, which on paper compared poorly with the 170km/h of the previous year's Le Mans, but then again Mount Druitt was much shorter and twistier circuit. And considering the rain, the pitch darkness and the damage being done to the track surface, even 85 was probably a touch reckless. And of course, with the job done, they promptly returned the borrowed carburettor to its rightful owner!

Winners are grinners: The trio after their hard-earned victory. (Source: Wikipedia)

However, the race went down as a complete disaster in the annals of Australian racing, poorly-run and dogged by an almost total lack of crowd control. It took months to get the track into usable shape again, with the numerous potholes refilled by hand rather than by complete resurfacing. Unsurprisingly the race was never run again, and Australia would not see another 24-hour enduro for almost five decades. A pair of 24-hour races for motorcycles would be run in the following years, and those would prove equally chaotic, but their stories belong to a different blog than mine.

The win was nevertheless a huge boost for Jaguar's profile in Australia, and Westco Motors saw plenty of dentists and barristers visit their showroom in the years ahead. Geordie Anderson and Bill Pitt would remain in cahoots for the next decade, but poor Charlie Swinburne (whether family or not) took ill and died in the late 1950s, apparently of cancer. One wonders what else he might've achieved had he lived a little longer.

One extra detail I want to finish with, however, highlights the difference between Australia and the U.S. Later in the year, on 13 June, an XK120 FHC just like Mrs Anderson's became the first imported car to win a NASCAR Grand National race, when Al Keller drove it to victory at the Linden Airport race in New Jersey. The difference is that in Australia, Jaguar would remain a mainstay of local racing for decades to come, with plenty of silverware in their future in both sports and touring cars. The Americans, on the other hand, grimly handed Keller his winnings and then banned foreign cars on the spot!

1953: The Holden FJ

On the farm, on the street, in the garages of suburbia and red dust of the outback, a myriad of brands found themselves swept aside by the coming of the Holden. The factories at Woodville and Fishermans Bend couldn't build them fast enough, and Holden salesmen bragged they had the easiest job in the world. It seemed the company could do no wrong, so when the time came to retool for a new model... well, how iconic do you like your cars?

Kangaroo Kaizan
The 48-215 didn't stand still in its five years on sale. Even when they were selling every car they made, running updates were the order of the day at GM-H, as even after exhaustive testing in both Michigan and Australia, the Holden suffered niggling durability problems. Most serious of these was the tendency of the rear leaves to crack on early models, leading to a suspension upgrade in March 1953 that introduced telescopic shock absorbers and wider leaf springs for extra strength.

Four months later, Holden greased their fleet credentials with the aptly-named Business model, aimed squarely at the fleet buyers. Officially it was known as the 48-217 (or even the 48-215-217, which is the sort of thing better read by an IBM than frail human eyes), and while it's not clear to me exactly which extras it offered, the parts catalogue mentions mudflaps front-and-rear, Venetian blinds and cigarette lighters. Presumably, this reflects certain options only making financial sense if they were ordered from the suppliers in bulk, and then fitted on the line in batches (though if you absolutely had to have it and your chequebook didn't flinch, your local dealer was always at your disposal). That said, the Business was only produced at Woodville, which suggests the body itself took a little something extra to produce.

Holden bodies on the line at Woodville, 1949. (Source: Primotipo)

But there was no denying the Holden was a pretty bare-bones package. If you were being kind you might've called it minimalist: If you were less generous, you might say it was the next thing up from a Willys Jeep. What the customers would need in a follow-up model were more creature comforts, so that's exactly what Holden gave them.

Frugal Genius
The Holden FJ was a landmark in several important ways. For one, it kicked off Holden's "secret" two-letter naming code, where the letters stood for the number of its year of release, but in reverse order. By this system, "F-J" stood for "5-2" – model year 1952 – so it's just as well the system was so obfuscating. It helped hide that when it arrived in October 1953, the FJ was almost a year behind schedule.

The FJ also began the proud industry tradition of touching up a car halfway through its lifespan and calling it a new model, but there would be few facelifts as successful as this one. On paper, jazzing up a fundamentally-1930s shape with a jukebox grille, silly chrome fins and shiny new hub caps shouldn't be a recipe for success. And yet... when Peter Brian needed a stage name to match the fifties-nostalgia image of his band Ol' 55¹, what did he land on? Frankie J. Holden. And when GM-H decided to create a concept car as a gift to themselves for their fiftieth birthday, what did they call it? The Efijy. For cultural valence the FJ is unmatched, and no wonder: After the rather serious 48-215, the feelgood FJ was light-hearted and cheerful, a sign the hard times were finally over.

No-one with vines on their house ever bought a Holden, of course, but in advertising vibes always beat veracity.

It's true that dazzling new radiator grille hogged all the attention, but the FJ was more than just a pretty face. When it launched at the Fishermans Bend Social Hall in October 1953, it was available in four basic variants: the Standard sedan, with a list price of £870 ($37,000 in 2023; with on-roads, it was more like £1,023, or seventeen months' wages at the time); the Business sedan (£895, or $38,000); and the tarted-up Special, which offered the first glimpses of comfort in a locally-made car. If you could stand the £915 asking price ($39,000), the Special got you front door armrests, rear passenger assist straps, window winders and a cigarette lighter, and an interior light turned on when you opened the door. The big news however was the "Elasco-Fabulous" vinyl seats with two-tone colour schemes – it was the mid 20th Century, so it was completely unacceptable to encounter any kind of natural fibre (although it must be said early FJ Specials carried over the previous model's tough leather). There were also new exterior colours like Lithgow Cream, Mortlake Blue and Trentham Green.

The FJ interior was to the 48-215 as the Labor Party is to the Coalition: Same thing, but a nicer tone.

The fourth variant was the ute (£875, or $37,000), while the fifth came along in December 1953 – the all-new panel van, which debuted with the FJ range. Retailing for £890 ($38,000) plus tax, it was visibly just a utility with a roof welded on, but that roof enclosed 2.3 cubic metres of cargo volume, rated for 336kg (a little behind the ute's 375kg, but sometimes you have to keep stuff dry). Like the Business, the panel van was only produced at Woodville – all other models could be built at any plant with a body shop, which in 1953 finally included Pagewood (the Sydney plant at last ceasing the manufacture of Frigidaires and rejoining the motor industry).

Holden didn't invent the panel van, but they would certainly make it their own in the years ahead. (Source: Classic Car Catalogue)

There were no other mechanical upgrades over the 48-215, but in truth none were needed at this stage. The FJ added attractive Buddy Holly styling and new levels of kit without losing the 48-215's strengths – comfort, ruggedness, sprightly performance, fuel economy and unbelievable value for money. It also became the first Aussie car to be exported, with an initial batch of 30 sent to New Zealand, soon followed by a further 321 – not huge numbers by any measure, but a moment of pride for a country long used to importing. And on the second-hand market the FJ became a common and beloved first car for the larval Baby Boomer generation. No wonder it became such an icon, with 169,969 of them leaving the showrooms in its three years on the market – much to the chagrin of Holden's rivals, whose sales were rapidly heading in the opposite direction.

Spanners Out
The sudden availability of the car in Australia triggered a matching rise in motor racing. There had been racing here before Holden, of course – the first Australian Grand Prix had been held at Phillip Island in 1928 – but hitherto it had mainly been restricted to open-wheelers and sports cars, which required serious money to buy and run. There was such a thing as sedan racing, known as "touring car" racing (to contrast with "racing cars", you see), but they were regarded as a support category, where the Grand Prix drivers would often compete in the vehicles they used to tow their racing cars. With newspaper classifieds and wrecker's yards rapidly filling up with old Holdens, however, motor racing became a practicable hobby for the emerging middle class. One driver who spent his childhood in this era later described it thus:

Racing was a very social event back then and all you needed to enter any race was a Confederation of Australian Motor Sport (CAMS) licence, a car and a pair of balls. It was more like going to play a game of golf than going to an event like a V8 Supercars race today.

There were three main categories in Australia; Open Wheelers, Sports Cars and Touring Cars. The Open Wheelers were probably the big deal, followed by the Sports Cars and then the Touring Cars. Open Wheelers and Sports Cars were fast and expensive. You had to have specialised cars, and big-name international drivers like David Myles, Graham Hill and Pedro Rodriguez would come over to race, which added to the glitz and glamour of those categories.

In the Touring Cars category, you could race just about anything, even an old FJ, so this was the one for me. There were three main levels in this category: local, state and national. We would have ten local meetings a year between Lowood and Lakeside. They were very informal and fought out between a bunch of mates. The state races were less frequent and a little more prestigious. Every couple of years there’d be a race at the national level, such as the Australian Grand Prix. Even at these big national events, the only entry requirement was a CAMS licence. You weren’t ranked and you didn’t need to have a certain number of wins – just three stripes ripped off on the back of a card to show that you’d done three races. If there weren’t enough entries in one particular race, they would mix up the categories and often put open and closed sports cars in with the touring cars to make up the field. – Dick Johnson, Dick Johnson: The Autobiography

A Holden was the ideal tool for this job. Whether a 48-215 or an FJ, a Holden gave you a light, stiff body that didn't cost an arm and leg, with spare parts available practically everywhere, and fitted with one of the most upgradeable engines ever made – the 132ci Grey six. Holden had deliberately left a lot on the table with the Grey, which in its factory spec was held back by conservative spark timing and a very low compression ratio. With a little knowledge (and some care about your fuel), you could find some gains just via more aggressive distributor settings, without even thinking about splashing out on new parts. Bump up the compression, start hunting for a hotter cam and swap the standard carburettor for something aftermarket (Amal motorcycle carbs were the hot ticket to those in the know), and you were well on your way to becoming a racer. It wasn’t long before there was a thriving industry for hot Holdens, providing tuning tips and parts to those with a need for speed.

Jumpin' Jack
This was the "outlaw era" of touring car racing, when the races were staged by a multitude of promoters in different states, each with their own set of rules (which were only enforced when the scrutineers were in the mood anyway). The king of this era was one Jack Myers, and although it's touch and go whether you've even heard of him, he was the original Holden Hero, the first of a line that would run through Beechey, Brock, Lowndes and Skaife before terminating with Shane van Gisbergen's epic victory lap at Bathurst in 2020.

Myers at Mount Druitt, Sydney, sometime in the early 1950s (Source: Primotipo)

Based in the Sydney suburb of Kingsford, Myers was a mechanic and parts retailer by day, but a backyard engineer and racer on weekends. He spent the early 1950s in a yellow Holden 48-215 he described as "fairly stock", yet would do 110mph (177km/h) on a long enough straight! Even better, for a mere £130 ($5,400 in 2023), Myers was offering to turn your car into a 100mph Holden too. His modifications involved boring out your block to 3³/¹⁶ inches, fitting new pistons and rings, a shaved head, new cam grind, twelve inner valve-springs, an additional Stromberg carb, custom Myers inlet manifold and extractors, sports air-cleaners and a Lukey muffler. Even so he saved his best stuff for himself, and for three years he was next to unbeatable on the track. When he won a six-lap handicap race at Bathurst in October 1955, Jack Myers became the first man ever to take a Holden to victory at the Mountain.

The circuits of this era are a story unto themselves. Australian Muscle Car dipped a toe into these murky waters in the "Sacred Sites" portion of Issue #90, where they quoted Terry Walker's book Fast Tracks: Australia’s Motor Racing Circuits 1904-1995, describing the small country circuits of north-east Victoria as being sprinkled through the region like, "currants in a bun". The seven listed were Wangaratta, Barjarg, Bright, Hume Weir, Tarrawingee, Undera and Winton: Of these, Winton is the great survivor, and Hume Weir needs no introduction, but the rest are probably completely unfamiliar. Frustratingly, AMC only went into any detail with the Wangaratta/Tarrawingee saga, but to be fair there don't seem to be a lot of details out there about the rest.²

The Tarrawingee circuit more properly belongs to the late 1950s, but its origins lie here, in 1953, when the Wangaratta-based North Eastern Car Club gained the right to hold car and motorcycle races on the old Wangaratta Commons Airstrip (just out of town on Greta Road). The barrier between circuit and speedway racing was quite porous in those days, and all the moreso when road circuits tended to be short and had unsealed surfaces. So it was with Wangaratta, a short blast around a rather suggestive layout that could've been designed by Alan Davies. The club held events here for some four years before the drainage problems became too much, and when they were offered a parcel of land in the Tarrawingee Recreation Reserve, they packed up and moved there instead.

It was like this everywhere. In addition to Wangaratta, Victorians also raced on airfields at Ballarat and Fishermans Bend. In NSW, you might race at the established Mount Druitt or Panorama circuits, or you might take your car to the new Gnoo Blas road course just outside Orange instead. In South Australia, you could try your luck at the new Port Wakefield circuit (created to host the Australian Grand Prix, in the teeth of a state government ban on the use of public roads) or, if that crowd was a bit too serious, head for Gawler airstrip instead. In Tassie, since neither Symmons Plains nor Baskerville yet existed, it would have to be the Quorn Hall airstrip near Launceston. In Westralia, it was probably one of a multitude of layouts around (or within!) the south-western town of Collie.

The triumphs, tragedies, heroes and villains of this era of Australian racing are mostly lost to us today – but they existed. Knock off work on Friday arvo, spend the evening converting your daily drive, take it to the track and then have a brilliant weekend kicking up the dust with your mates. When Monday came around, you converted it back and drove it to work again, with no-one the wiser. It might not have been high-stakes racing, but it sounds like it was a lot of fun, and in the process the foundation was laid for what was to come. The Holden 48-215 and FJ in fact fulfilled the same role in Australian touring car racing the venerable '36 Ford coupé did in NASCAR – an inexpensive school for a generation of drivers, a fertile seed bed for the DIY hot-rodding skills of their mechanics, and a spectacular show for spectators who were drawn to the track in ever-increasing numbers.

Notes For Mod-Makers
I'm going to start signing off with some ideas for anyone who might want to make the mod for rFactor 2, Assetto Corsa, or whatever the Kids These Days™ are into. You might think a "Humpy Heaven" mod would be horribly slow and therefore boring, but I say (appropriately enough), not so fast! First of all, bear in mind the James May Principle – no, not "Christian motoring", the principle that a car becomes interesting at the limit of grip of its tyres. With the pizza-cutter crossplies of the era, a Humpy Holden wouldn't need a lot of power to be interesting, providing you got the physics and "car-feel" just right. Moreover, short tracks mean short straights, so the next corner would never be far away (and short tracks also tend to be crowded, meaning there'd be plenty of scope for elbows-out racing). And lastly – the most important factor, for my money – don't overlook the sheer variety of surfaces in this period. By my count there are four distinct surface types to race on here: dirt, oiled dirt³, cold-mix tarmac and hot-mix tarmac. Throw in that Assetto Corsa can model rain, dust and the process of rubbering-in across a weekend, and one need never run the same race meeting twice – and that's before you get into replicating the more extreme modifications the cars were undergoing by the end of the decade.

Too niche? Maybe. But I still think it would be fun, and also a handy way of preserving our motoring heritage for future generations (no, digital is no way to store anything long-term, but it would create some fond memories for people who might otherwise never hear about it). And I think anything's better than yet another GT3 league...

¹ You can tell someone's age by where they know Frankie J. Holden from. For me he'll always be Mr Gribbles from Round the Twist, and I had no idea he was in a band until I began researching this very blog. I didn't think I'd be running into Wilbur Wilde from Hey Hey It's Saturday either, until I saw the music video. There must've been a rule that to be on Australian TV in the '90s, you first had to be in a band in the '70s.

² All links go to speedwayandroadracehistory.com, a very Web 1.0 page, but no less fascinating for that. I recommend hitting up the "lost circuits" tab in your own time, as you're very likely to find something close to your town that you had no idea was ever there.

³ Did I forget to mention they'd often "seal" a track by pouring used motor oil all over it? Horrifying...