Columns

Bob Morris is our new legend columnist, while we welcome back Aaron Noonan

I’ve been retired from motor racing for more than 30 years. That’s a long time! People ask me what I do these days, so I thought I’d use my rst column to outline how I spend my time now and relate it back to what you all know me for – racing. Sometimes I get asked whether or not I do any quick driving these days. I don’t, really, apart from demo runs. I’ve driven some of David Bowden’s cars: the Beechey Monaro and the Super Falcon; plus my old A9X and some others. That sort of thing I can do in short stints; the things I can’t cope with are really bad gear oil smells and things like that. It may sound funny, but with the sensory confusion that I suffer, because of the inner ear damage I sustained in the ’81 Bathurst crash, things like that, which most people would never be bothered by, can actually affect me quite badly.

I was surprised to hear one of my old A9Xs sold recently for more than $700,000! That’s a huge sum, but if they are worth that much, then people are going to preserve them and they’re going to be around for a while. So for me, personally, that’s great.

I met the buyer, a fellow named Andrew Cannon from Melbourne, when I was at Bathurst last October. He also bought the other 1979 championship car privately. Andrew has the cars on display in Tasmania and plans to race them.

To me, the A9X will always be a special car. I won the championship in one, and to me that was more difficult than winning Bathurst. Winning Bathurst is great, obviously, but to beat Peter Brock and the HDT, both of us in A9Xs, over the full championship, that was very tough, and as a team we all felt a huge sense of achievement.

As the patron of the A9X Torana club, I enjoy meeting the guys who own these cars. It amazes me that there are people who are obviously too young to have seen these cars race other than in historic events, and yet they have so much enthusiasm for that period of racing. A lot of them know more about the cars than I do! It’s great that they’re so enthusiastic, and how they preserve and look after these cars – the racecars and the road cars.

I don’t get to as many of their functions as I’d like as I seem to be working a lot when they’re on, but I stay in touch with them and it’s really good.

My work at Scots College keeps me busy. I’m part of the school’s outdoor education programme at its campus in Kangaroo Valley, near where I live. They have a programme where Year 9 boys stay at the campus for six months.

I look after the safety aspect of the programme. The campus has been going for 27 years, and every weekend we’ve got 100 boys in ve groups doing different activities: bushwalking and mountain biking during the week, hiking, canoeing, rock climbing, or caving on the weekends. There’s a fair bit involved.

Of course, few of the boys know about my racing as it was well before they were born. But there’s odd parent, like Chris Ioanidis, who owns the Graeme Smelt A9X – he knows about me!

I’ll be turning 70 later this year. For the last 37 of those years I’ve lived here at Kangaroo Valley; I came here even before I nished racing. I’ve got a 40-acre horse stud, and over a long period we’ve bred and shown quite a few champion Arabian horses. I also breed pigeons – something I’ve done since I was about seven years old. I do a bit of colour genetics with them; I don’t do it regularly now but I used to show them quite a lot and we had a few champions.

About 15 years ago I got into mountain biking – and mountain bike racing. Kangaroo Valley is the perfect place for it, and I just thought it would be an interesting thing to do. I haven’t raced for a little while but I have done quite a few events with the local club. They’re not short races: one event I did with our local club team was a ve-day, seven-stage race at Alice Springs. The stints can be as long as 100km over a day, all off road. There was one a bit over 100km in that race; I think I did it in just over six hours.

It’s great fun and you meet some good people. Some events are quite big: the Highland Fling they have here attracted 1700 people. That was a one-day event, and when you get 1700 people at the start line, it’s pretty exciting.

I’ve done 24-hour races in Canberra, where I raced as a team of four – but I’ve not done a 24hour race solo. Racing through the night in the bush with just a head torch is pretty interesting!

The competitive urge in biking is similar to motor racing, to a degree, but without the adrenaline rushes you get in car racing. It’s not really like motor racing; it’s more relaxed, but having said that, I’m not racing for the lead. As part of a team in the long races, it’s not like we’re out there thinking we’re going to win the thing. But it’s probably like when I started car racing; we were never racing for prizemoney; we were racing because we wanted to race.

There’s a lot of things we teach the boys on mountain bikes that I think relate directly to driving a car. The skill aspect; how to brake without skidding; using both brakes, reading the road surface, assessing grip levels, being able to pace yourself and think ahead, those sorts of things.

It’s great fun, and tness-wise it’s good – they say that mountain biking is the best overall body workout next to swimming.

Back when I was driving, we all had our own tness regimes. There was no one saying ‘you’ve got to get t’, but we were doing things anyway that kept us t – I was sailing, skiing, all those things, and I also did some speci c tness activities: I had a stationary bike, I used to row and play squash. Trail bikes too, they kept you t. But that’s another story!