MAN WITH A VAN
WELL, that FX turned me on to another form of racing, circuit racing. I had my first car by now, and I could go to Catalina at Katoomba, Oran Park and Bathurst. It was a red FJ, lowered, floor shift, the most stuffed humpy engine, full of rust – what a disaster. I was paying this piece of crap off working seven days a week most of the time.
My parents must have felt sorry for me; they lent me some money and I traded the FJ for a second-hand EK panel van. Now didn’t that open some doors – in more ways than one! There was another guy in Parramatta at the time – who we’ll call KB – he had an FB panel van. KB’S van was lowered, had six-inch-wide wheels, Lukey exhaust, Repco sports engine, but what he had in the back interested me more – the mattress, the Esky. The penny dropped; other things were becoming very important!
Eventually my van was the same as KB’S. We cruised Sydney beaches every weekend I wasn’t working. I guess we started what became the van movement a little later on, but KB and I were the first. They were fun times; if the van was rockin’, don’t start knockin’! I feel I must take responsibility along with KB for starting the van movement in Australia. Well, in Sydney anyway.
Drag racing didn’t really come into my life until probably the mid-to-late 60s. The Yanks came – Tony Nancy, the Yellow Fang dragster, Wild Bill Shrewsberry’s wheelstander (below left), EJ Potter’s V8 bike. And they just kept coming: Jess Tyree’s Pontiac funny car, then the Doheny/ Fullerton Trojan Horse Mustang – that’s when we saw real nitro fire – and the Soapy Sales dragster with Steve Carbone driving. It’s fairly easy to see why drag racing became popular; it was more spectacular than anything we had ever seen before.
The Aussies caught on pretty fast. Castlereagh became a must every time the drags were on. For most of us back then, once a month wasn’t enough, and the street racing scene became huge in Sydney – and probably everywhere else. The big meeting places were in front of the Town Hall in Parramatta, and then when Big Chief’s hamburger bar (Beefies) opened on Parramatta Road at Granville. That’s when things started to liven up; it was on any night of the week and you didn’t want to miss a minute.
By now I had a brand new XR Falcon 500 complete with 289 V8 and Cruiseo-matic auto. I had realised I didn’t have the know-how to modify for horsepower but was earning enough to buy a new V8 and I could keep up with most of the hot stuff with just pipes and wheels. Not many were modifying V8s in those days, but it was coming.