Paul Newby
In this caper interviewing retired racing drivers is all in a day’s work. Nine times out of 10 the driver is easy to deal with but there is always someone who is, let us say, challenging... Expatriate Australian Trans Am racer Horst Kwech, who sadly died in December at the age of 82, was one of those drivers. Not that Kwech was difficult to deal with. On the contrary, I can’t think of a more engaging guy over a long distant call. It was just hard to pin him down for an interview. Let me explain.
As a lifelong Al sti I became aware of Horst Kwech when he wrote the forward for the definitive tome on the Alfa Romeo GTA racers,
Alleggerita. His exploits in the giant killing GTAs really helped establish Alfa Romeo as the enthusiast’s marque in the States. Not long after I read John Medley’s authoritative Bathurst,
Cradle of Australian Motor Racing and Kwech’s name was mentioned again. Was it the same guy? Did that American GTA racer really drive at Bathurst in the late 1950s? In those preinternet days it wasn’t always easy to decipher such information.
Then I read Allan Moffat’s Scrapbook that mentions his dices in his Lotus Cortina against Kweck’s (sic) Alfa GTA. I wasn’t even aware of the connection with the DeKon Chevrolet Monza that Kwech and Lee Dykstra developed and Moffat raced. At an Alfa Club meeting where Moffat was a guest speaker I peppered him with questions about Kwech to his chagrin, though he took it in good humour and still signed my book.
It wasn’t until I discovered The Nostalgia
Forum in 2003 that I began to understand
Kwech’s career stateside. Apart from the Alfas, there were Trans-Am Mustangs, a F5000 Lola, Ford Capris, the aforementioned Monzas and even single seater Can Am racers. AMC’s very own Brett Jurmann had some knowledge but veteran journalists like Ray Bell and the late Barry Lake knew very little. One thing was certain, none of them had ever interviewed Kwech.
Things went quiet for a number of years until ‘CanAmBob’ on the AlfaBB Forum decided to create a Wikipedia page for Kwech in late 2009. CanAmBob, otherwise known as Bob Lee was a collector who owned the GTA that Kwech had raced in the 1966 Trans-Am. Finally here was someone who knew Kwech! So began a two year process of emailing Bob and trying to email Horst. My first response from Kwech came in September 2010 whereby he fobbed me off saying there was plenty of information about him on the net. Tellingly most of it was contradictory.
Another year went by and by this time
I was writing for AMC with an outstanding commission for an article on Kwech. Bob Lee was ever helpful trying to make things happen – I developed an interview plan and sent him a list of questions, trying to convince Kwech to speak to me. But nothing. Then editor Luke West hit upon the idea to do a feature on Aussies in Trans-Am and the need to interview Kwech became imperative. Lee suggested that he ask Kwech my questions, transcribe the answers and email me the results. But that was never going to work.
It really looked like the AMC feature would proceed without any first person quotes from Kwech.
Then finally in late
February 2012, only weeks from deadline, Kwech agreed for me to call him at his Lake Forest
(Chicago) home.
So early on
Sunday 27th February 2012, I spent
100 minutes interviewing Kwech about pretty much everything. I was circumspect not to mention the Mustang wreck at Michigan in 1969 (Kwech’s Mustang slid off the track into a parked car in the spectator area, killing its occupant) but everything else was on the record. Including his uneasy rivalry with Allan Moffat.
The original brief was to cover Kwech’s muscle car Tran-Am period, which amounted to only two seasons in 1968-69, but there was so much more to his career that it became a mini muscle man feature for AMC #61. The material was later used for Aussies in US F5000 (#98) and Aussies in single seater Can-Am (#96) feature articles.
It was a major coup for me to speak to Horst Kwech and a real highlight personally. Through dogged perseverance and sheer determination I had interviewed one of my heroes, the only Australian journalist to do so, resulting in you the reader learning about an unknown Australian motor racing legend.