Hume Weird

Our Sacred Sites section this issue recalls the colourful history of a string of club-level race tracks that sprang up around the north-eastern region of Victoria in the 1950s and early 1960s. Most of them used an oil bonded dirt surface rather than actual bitumen (which few of the small local car clubs could afford) and they were usually not much more than a kilometre in length.

These country tracks were a bit rough and ready, but importantly they provided an inexpensive way for car club members to go motor racing.

Not that the ‘big time’ tracks of that region – Winton and Hume Weir – were all that ash on the facilities front, as Ron Gillard (our featured Muscle Man this issue), recalls from his rst visit to Hume Weir:

“It was a funny place – not many fences, lots of trees and things to hit. On my rst lap there, when I turned into Scrub Corner at the end of the straight, I went

straight off and into the scrub. It was a very tight hairpin and the XU-1 Sports Sedan (top)

I was driving didn’t have enough lock to get round it! You’d have to give it a boot-full and get it sideways just to get around the corner – I reckon a Supercar today would need to do a three-point turn!

“You’d come out of Scrub Corner, then you’d go up a short straight and veer to the left. If you didn’t veer to the left and instead went straight ahead, you would go straight up the gutter, and into the hessian-walled toilet – seriously!

“I was in there once while there was a practice session on, and I’m thinking, ‘gee, the cars sound close!.’ So I pulled the hessian back and looked outside – and there’s the track right there, with only the gutter and a barbed-wire fence between the cars and the hessian toilet wall!

“One time when I was racing there I saw a brown snake slithering across the track. It was right in front of me – I tried to get him but I missed him… As I went past, I glanced back in the mirror to see the snake disappearing off the track and into the hessian dunny!”