On the buses
I n motor racing today they’re known as ‘corporate suites’. Plush, fully appointed air-conditioned lounges situated in rows atop the circuit’s pit building complex, offering VIP guests an excellent vantage point of the action both in the pits and on the track.
Back in the day, however, few Australian race circuits had pit buildings, let alone corporate suites on top of them. Anyone wanting to host corporate hospitality therefore had to make their own arrangements.
The ‘corporate suite’ of the 1960s and ’70s often took the form of a large tent. One of the most memorable of these was the Holden Dealer Team’s giant dome-shaped marquee. It’s so vast that it appears as an unmistakable presence in the background of many mid-1970s pics of Hell Corner at Bathurst.
And then there were the old double-decker buses. Out-of-service London-style doubledecker buses could be easily stripped out and recon gured into excellent corporate hospitality facilities: they were cheap to buy, and the upper deck could be used as a viewing platform. In the early days at Oran Park, they even used one of these buses as the control tower until an actual brick building could be erected!
A bus was better than a tent in that it didn’t blow away in high winds, and it (mostly) didn’t leak when it rained. And because it was on wheels, packing it up afterwards was simply a matter of driving it away.
Chester eld, Marlboro, Autolite/Motorcraft,