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!