Early days

Horsley was born in Tumbarumba in the foothills of the Snowy Mountains. He spent his early years on the family farm where he learned to drive in an A Model Ford ute at the age of six.

“I was always interested in cars,” Horsley recalls today. “In my teens I lived in Albury where I went to high school. I had a wreck of a ’38 Ford V8 coupe that I used to work on. I never raced it but I used parts off it for my race car called ‘Puff.’”

Before Puff, Horsley raced a special built by his future brother-in-law, Jeff Hogan, powered by a Triumph Tiger T100 500cc engine mounted in the rear, similar to contemporary F3 Coopers.

“I raced that three of four times at Tarrawingee,” he remembers. “I was 16 at the time.” Hogan also owned the famous Ford V8 powered Edelbrock Special for a time, which Horsley raced brie y on the North Eastern regional dirt circuits of Bright, Barjarg and Corowa. However, between these two race cars came the mighty Puff Special.

This ungainly looking special was powered by a Continental W760 seven-cylinder radial engine that was used in military tanks and produced in the region of 240hp. Let Horsley take up the story:

“A mate called Terry Kelly built the Ryleford special in the early 1960s. It was very successful and formed the basis for Puff which was built in 1961-62. I raced it at Hume Weir and Terry raced it at Winton. It only ran twice as it had an awful problem with oil leaks as the gaskets dried up. It had a million of them and you couldn’t buy them then. You can get them now, funnily enough.”

By this time Horsley was the Secretary/ Manager of Hume Weir, the tight club circuit on the NSW/Victorian border, which was operated by the Albury District Car Club. The position was part time and voluntary (Horsley worked

Left: Horsley’s driving career wasn’t memorable but his car was - the Puff Special, with its seven cylinder radial ex-tank engine. Allan Moffat at Hume Weir (above) where in the mid-’60s Horsley first met Moffat, asleep at the front gate of the track one morning! as a boilermaker/draughtsman in Albury and was studying engineering by correspondence). Though he loved competing he knew his future lay in the commercial side of running circuits.

In his time at Hume Weir in the mid-1960s he oversaw the growth of the sport and the emergence of drivers who would soon become household names.

“I rst met Allan Moffat at the gateway of Hume Weir. It was 6:30am in the morning and he was sleeping in his Lotus Cortina!”

Moffat was there for the ’65 Victorian Short Circuit Championship, which he duly won.

Horsley also met a young Peter Brock around this time.

“I was mates with Peter. I knew his family, particularly his father and mother very well. I had seen him race his newly built Austin A30 at Winton and Hume Weir.”

This was late 1967, and Horsley would play a signi cant role in the development of Brock into the legendary racer that he became.