Hitting the big time
August 8, 1971 will be remembered as the day that Oran Park came of age. Though it had held a national round of the Australian Drivers’ Championship the year before, hosting the final round of the ATCC was a huge fillip for Horsley and his dedicated team. As recounted in AMC #125, an absolute bumper crowd of 32,000 filled every last patch of earth of the circuit’s spectator areas to witness the big guns of Australian motor racing: Norm Beechey, Ian Geoghegan, Bob Jane and Allan Moffat battle it out for the crown. It was a runaway hit, setting up Oran Park as an ATCC regular venue for 37 consecutive years right up until its untimely demise.
One event from the 1971 ATCC meeting that has become folklore is the incident in which a punter hopped into a Valiant and proceeded to do a lap during the closing stages of the ATCC finale (also recounted in AMC #125.)
Horsley, who was in the pits at the time, gives his recollection of events that day:
“He just drove through the officials at pit exit. It could have been disastrous. The funny part was that none of the drivers even noticed. I walked out toward pit entrance and put my hand out and he came in! Ran around and pulled him out of through the open window! He was a mental hospital case and taken away by police. The Valiant was being driven by the MD of Chrysler, at the time it hadn’t been released.”
Horsley had a very fertile imagination and was always looking at different ways to promote Oran Park. Multiple World 500c Motorcycle Champion Giacomo Agostini raced his MV Agusta at the circuit in 1971 (and lost!) There were novelty bicycle races and even the first ever truck race where the top drivers like the Geoghegan brothers and John Leffler raced Grace Bros delivery trucks around the track! This led to more serious truck racing sometime later.
“They were mostly coal trucks from Camden,” he remembers. “We were approached by the police. They said you have to do something as they were having their own elimination trials on the (Appin) Road down to Wollongong. It would be better for them to be at the track...”
In the early 1970s Oran Park was a hive of activity. There were new grandstands, a ‘hacienda style’ control tower (below), a separate drag strip and banked speedway complex that was started but never finished, and the Grand Prix circuit, so named because that was what it was built for. Let Horsley explain:
“The GP circuit was built to host the 1974
Australian Grand Prix. At the time the race was rotated between the States and with Warwick Farm’s demise there was nowhere else. The track needed to have a minimum distance (it was increased from 1.9km to 2.6km.) CAMS didn’t want to give us anything and that was one of their reasons. So we went and built a longer track!”
The new track featured a gure-eight crossover with a distinctive tyre shaped arch yover bridge.
(In his book on Oran Park, Nev Beyer claims that much of the welding of the construction of the yover bridge – which was originally an army ‘Baily’ bridge Oran Park bought from the army by tender for just $400! – was done by Horsley. This is not true, according to Horsley.)
The $30,000 Toby Lee Series switched to the mega popular Sports Sedans for 1973, although initially it would be a Porsche 911 bene t with none other than John Goss winning the rst round in one! Allan Moffat bought out his Trans Am Mustang for a round but it was the V8 engined Torana XU-1s of John Harvey in Bob Jane’s entry and Colin Bond in the HDT entry that got the better of the varied elds with the former winning the series through consistent results. With huge prizemoney at stake, drivers like Gold Star Champion John McCormack were incentivised to build sport sedans – and his Formula 5000-derived Charger blew everyone else into the weeds to win all ve rounds of the 1974 series.
McCormack’s dominance adversely affected the competitor numbers and as a result crowds dropped off. The last Toby Lee series was held in 1975, but for F5000 cars, not Sports Sedans. Grace Bros boss Tiepermann in uenced the switch to F5000 but maintaining healthy competitive elds was a challenge. Indeed, Horsley was often at odds with series winner Max Stewart over F5000 starting money. While he loved the spectacle of the F5000s, they were expensive to run, unreliable and prone to crashing, and certainly were no more of a drawcard than the Sports Sedans. By then, the sedan categories – and Group
C touring cars in particular – were in the ascendency; Oran Park again hosted the Grand Prix as part of the Rothman Series, in 1977, but increasingly the really big Oran Park annual events were the ATCC rounds and the endurance race later in the year (in some years there were two enduros, with the addition of the non-championship Rothmans 500).
Horsley was one of the founding members of the Australian Promoters Association representing Oran Park. Indeed, he was the promoter’s representative on CAMS committees’ right up until the Supercar era. “It was pretty combative,” he recalls. “But we got on reasonably well though Bob Jane always wanted to pull out of CAMS and eventually did. We made all the rules up (until the V8 Supercars) for the following year(s) and we went to Bathurst and Mike Raymond, who was a mate, and CAMS President John Large called a press conference at Bathurst and announced a new set of rules which was Holden and Ford – and that was the end of multi-car participation in touring cars.”
Horsley left Oran Park in 1981. “I was planning on going into real estate and then I got a phone call from Mazda, though actually it was Moffat asking for me to run the team, which I jumped at.”