History 101
The story of Winton begins at a place named Barjarg. It was there in 1958 that the edgling Benalla Auto Club and its 20 members carved out a simple 1.5km motor racing track in a paddock loaned to them by local farmers. It was a good oil/dirt circuit, typical of the time, but in the late 1950s Barjarg was a remote location, a long way from anywhere. There were no shops, no services; Barjarg as a motor racing venue was never going to amount to much.
So within a year or so the BAC began looking elsewhere. The site they settled on was at Winton, near Benalla. Or Winton Common, to be more precise.
In simple terms, a ‘Common’ in Victoria at that time was state-owned land on which community activities could take place. In the 1860s, for example, there had been horse racing on Winton Common. A community hall was built on the Common; there was a cricket oval, which in the 1930s allegedly hosted a Sheffield Shield cricket match between Victoria and NSW.
Founding BAC member (and the local school teacher) Bruce Watt led the club’s submission to convince Council that the Common might nd a more favourable public use as a motor racing track. The late Bruce Watt today is thus considered the founding father of Winton, although there were others who also played crucial roles.
Such as fellow club founding member, Barry Stilo. Barry enjoys the unique distinction of not only being the man who dug out the original layout, but also of being the rst outright lap record holder – as well as being the current club president!
There is a story that does the rounds of how the Winton circuit came about. It’s said that one afternoon after a counter lunch and a few beers at the local, Stilo and two other BAC members decided they would lay out the new track. So
they left the pub and went down to the Common, and then ‘designed’ the circuit simply by driving a bulldozer around the vacant paddock!
The story is more or less true, 78-year-old Stilo con rms today.
“Gordon Lowen and Ken Cox were the main instigators,” he says. “I was on the dozer, an International TD-18 182 Series. I said to them, ‘what do you think I should do?’ And Ken says, ‘I’ll go out in the car, and you just follow my wheel marks’.
“So he goes out, does a few squiggles in the grass, around and around the paddock, and I just followed him in the dozer, and that’s how we dug out the track! Ken was an ex-speedway man, so he knew how to tear the grass up…”
Cox’s squiggles in the grass amounted to a total of 10 corners. With a length of only 2km, the new track was tight and twisty. Ironically, the fastest corner, the sweeper, was shaped by the constraints of the adjacent cricket oval.
Critics of the original Winton circuit always point to the low average speed lap and the proliferation of corners. Certainly it was far from the fastest track in the country. However, given the shape and comparatively small size of the Common land area, it’s hard to imagine even today’s professional circuit designers coming up with anything better on their computers than the freehand efforts of Cox and Stilo in his bulldozer.
And what some saw as a weakness was in lots of ways the track’s great strength: Winton was a great leveller, especially in the early days.
It didn’t suit the bigger cars, and that meant epic struggles in touring car racing as the Mustangs fought off the Minis and Cortinas. Invariably the likes of Norm Beechey would blast away down the straights, only to have the smaller cars such as Peter Manton’s Mini and Jim McKeown’s Cortina nipping at his heels under brakes. Sometimes the little cars would slip by through the corners, only for the V8s to grunt back past on the straights. But near the end of the race, when the brakes on the