John Walker
For John Walker, doing US F5000 was never about the money. “I really had no intention to go racing overseas as a living,” he says. “I just wanted to go and see how competitive I really was compared to just racing in Australia.
Walker put together a shoestring campaign with the help of a mate, Phil Freebain.
“I bought two airline tickets around the world; I only paid $750 because I had a friend that worked at Qantas. I went there with $5000 cash, which was all the money I had.”
Walker based himself in Los Angeles. There he got some help from no less than Carroll Smith, the American who would mastermind Allan Moffat’s triumphant 1977 touring car season. Smith leant Walker a Ford F100 and a trailer so they could get the car out of the airport and up to Riverside.
As luck would have it, Walker stumbled upon some free accommodation.
“There was an Australian lad there living in LA, and he knew we were coming. He was staying in these apartments in Hollywood, a huge place, and the manager let us stay in one of the empty apartments for nothing.”
If Walker was wondering how he stacked up against the world’s top F5000 drivers, Riverside revealed that he wasn’t too shabby. He qualified 17th in the 40-car field, and then finished fifth in the heat – behind professional international star drivers like Brian Redman, Jody Scheckter and David Hobbs.
In the final Walker’s Matich broke a driveshaft and hit the fence. They went back to LA to repair the car, and returned Carroll Smith’s ute and trailer.
Then Walker dropped into the Bank of America to withdraw some of the $5000 to cover expenses and to buy a car and trailer.
“The bank asked me what I was doing and they ended up giving me a bank loan for $3000. So I bought a Ford Transit panel van and a trailer.”
They missed the following week’s round, Laguna Seca, while they repaired the car. But they made it to Michigan.
“I went up to the Goodyear guy to get some new tyres and he looks at my old ones and says, ‘Where’d you get these?’ And I told him – from the Australian distributor, Frank Matich. ‘We haven’t run these since the start of last year!’ he said. I think Frank might have been selling us last year’s obsolete tyres and keeping the latest compounds for himself. Anyway they ended up giving me a set that had done one qualifying lap on Scheckter’s car, which was pretty nice of them. The Goodyear guys in the States were fantastic.
“We did get help from people, which was great. Brake pads, for instance: we ran DS11s in Australia. We got to know the March team mechanics pretty well, and they looked at our pads and said ‘What are you running DS11s for?’ That was all you could get in Australia. They said, ‘No, you’ve got to have Mintex’. They were a full works team sponsored by the US army, and they gave us new brake pads every meeting. They had boxes full of them!”
Somewhat surprisingly, Matich driver Walker ran his own show in the States completely separate from the Matich team, despite the fact that they mostly ran at the same rounds. Walker has some interesting observations of Matich in that campaign.
“Frank was psyching himself out of it that year. I think he thought he would do really well but he wasn’t doing any better than any of us. Frank had four engines, three mechanics plus a guy from Repco, and two cars. I think he thought he was going to win, but with people like Scheckter there…”
Walker was never far behind Matich, although at Mid Ohio the younger driver qualified ahead of Matich and stayed ahead in the final. Walker was eighth at both Michigan and Watkins Glen, having qualified 15th and 17th respectively – excellent results given the financial constraints the young South Australian faced.
“I think the experience improved me as a driver,” he says. “You just learn so much, the races were so close together. It did make me think: ‘I can do this’. But I was on a budget. I only had one spare engine, and if they (the bigger teams) were revving them to 8000rpm, I was only going to 7500 because I couldn’t risk blowing one up.”
It got harder after Mid Ohio, where Walker’s new trailer was stolen. Walker had to hire a truck to get the car to Watkins Glen.
“I had a drive of Frank’s car in practice at Watkins Glen, and I decided there that when I got back to Australia I’d buy a Lola. I could see they were just better.
“I spoke to Carl Haas, and it was $10,000 for a rolling chassis. I was talking to a mate back in Adelaide about it and he said, ‘I’ll pay for it, because you might as well get it while you’re over there. Then you can just pay me back when you get home’. So Carl had it flown in from England – he had cars in stock but not in the orange colour I wanted – to LA, and we took it down to a guy who made Can-Am wings and did other racing car work, and he adapted the Holden engine to the Lola. We could have run the Lola in the States, but I was always going to go back home after Watkins Glen anyway.”
He sold the Transit van and repaid the bank. Out of that limited campaign Walker finished 21st in the points for a total prizemoney takings of $5500 – $500 more than the sum he’d taken to California in the first place.
“I went up to the Goodyear guy to get some new tyres and he looks at my old ones and says, ‘Where’d you get these?’ And I told him – from the Australian distributor, Frank Matich. ‘We haven’t run these since the start of last year!’ he said. I think Frank might have been selling us last year’s obsolete tyres and keeping the latest compounds for himself.