Nothing new under the (setting) sun

Ashort, sharp programme of races under lights on a balmy summer Sydney night, capped off with a reworks display – what better way to conclude this year’s Covid19-disrupted Supercars Championship on a high note? A season-ending summer night race at Sydney Motorsport Park is certainly a great idea. But it’s not a new idea.

What Supercars’ marketing gurus have dreamed up for the Eastern Creek December season nale is pretty much exactly the same as the format which Oran Park decided to go with when it hosted the very rst night race meeting in Australia way back in 1966.

Just as the Supercars 2020 nale will consist of only a handful of races for two touring car categories (with the Super2 and Super3 elds combining as the sole support race category for the weekend), Australia’s rst night race meeting 54 years ago also featured a only handful of races for two touring car categories: Improved Production (Division 1) and Series Production (Division 2).

The two divisions each got a 10-lap qualifying race, with the fastest 20 from both heats going into the main (60-lap) event. With the total entry numbering only 29 cars, not many entrants went home early.

The idea to stage a night racing meeting at the southern Sydney circuit came from the NSW Road Racing Club’s George Murray. It took Murray a bit of convincing to get the rest of the club on board, and not to mention CAMS to provide its formal approval for something that had never been tried outside of the shambolic 24-hour race at Mount Druitt in 1954, but the hard work was worth it in the end as the April 16 Saturday night meeting attracted more than 13,000 fans – the biggest crowd yet seen at Oran Park.

Regulations required the cars to be tted with perspex shields covering their headlights and, as the above pic shows, enormous, uniformsize racing numbers, in order for race officials to be able to readily identify cars in the darkness. This was a particular issue for the time keepers in the control tower (which in those early days at Oran Park was nothing more than an old double-decker bus painted up in chequered ag colours…) because half of the main straight was completely devoid of trackside lighting.

While Racing Car News described the newly installed lights at Oran Park as ‘elaborate,’ in reality they weren’t much more than a series of uorescent tubes mounted on poles in the ground. And even then they only covered half of the 2km track. A far cry from the new $16.4 million lighting installation at Sydney Motorsport Park…

The meeting featured some future big names like Fred Gibson (in a Renault R8), Peter Williamson (Isuzu Bellett) and Bill Brown (Volvo), but none was a match for Phil Barnes’ Improved Production Mini. Barnes main opposition came from Alton Boddenberg, but presumably 60 laps around Oran Park was a bit much for the brakes on Boddenberg’s Slant Six-powered Valiant. Towards the end of the race

Barnes left the Valiant behind, winning by half a minute.

The night was capped off with a reworks display from Howard and Sons – later to become long-time suppliers of Sydney’s New Years’ Eve Harbour Bridge reworks spectacular (the Howards also had a connection to the sport, competing in sports car racing, with Syd Howard affectionately known in motorsport circles as ‘Sideways’ Syd Howard).

Racing Car News declared the reworks display worth the price of admission alone, and reported that after the successful staging of the rst night meeting Oran Park was already planning future such events, most likely to also include sports cars.

Night racing would indeed be a popular xture over the summer months at Oran Park right through until the mid-‘70s.

As much as anything can be predicted with any con dence in the current Covid19 climate, we think regular night racing is about to make something of a comeback, courtesy of Supercars.