The forgotten HDT man

Henk Woelders, like his Bathurst ’69 codriver Peter Macrow, could be described as the forgotten man of HDT history. Woelders, whose family owned Gold Coast GM-H dealer Lockhart Motors, was a budding open-wheel star who shifted to Melbourne to work in the dealership of the man who would become his racing patron, Bill Patterson. With Patterson a driving force behind HDT’s creation, Woelders was well placed when Harry Firth was looking for gun drivers. He says the original plan was for him to drive with Spencer Martin on the Mountain, until Martin was injured in a road crash in the lead-up to the October classic. “In those days, I was bit adventurous in how I drove on the road and it didn’t feel much quicker than that. I was bit disappointed because I was to be paired up with Spencer Martin. He was a Gold Star champion and one of the best drivers in Australia. Being a young kid, I was busting to see what times I could do [in comparison]. We were going okay but then we dropped back a bit. We drove the cars from Harry’s workshop in Queens Street to Bathurst and then drove them home again!” Woelders did the opening stint in #42D and says he was lucky to get through the rst lap, due to an incident he believed could have easily ended in tragedy. “On the very rst lap of that race there was an almighty crash on top of the mountain. I have photos somewhere of our car weaving

its way through the crashed cars. There was a Datsun 1600 sitting in the middle of the road. A GT passed him on the left and we had to pass him on the right. I clipped the Datsun’s bumper bar, on his right-hand rear. I looked in my rear view mirror and the little Datsun was going ‘headlights, taillights, headlights, taillights’ and he actually went over the edge and several hundred feet down. I thought I had killed someone. I pulled into the pits and Harry had to belt the guard off the tyre. I said to him, ‘I knocked a Datsun off the mountain... I hope he’s alright!’ I then kept going and fortunately the driver was alright. His name was Bruce Darke.” Despite losing time early, Woelders and Macrow nished sixth overall. Henk says this led to an offer from Harry for a closer association in 1970, one Woelders turned down. “My main focus was on openwheeler racing. Harry said to me that I could join his team if he could run my Formula 2 car under the team’s name and colours. But I wasn’t in a position to do that as Bill Patterson had put a bit of money into it and the following year Bill bought me a complete car.” In any case, there were fewer opportunities at Bathurst in the years that followed with the guns often driving solo. Woelders singleseater focus saw him net the 1971 Australian Formula 2 championship.