Steve Normoyle
It was, Andrew Miedecke remembers: “the closest I came to dying, not in a racing car but at the track.” You can read more about that in part two of our Miedecke feature on page 56. But I can tell you here that he’s not kidding, because I was there that day at Lakeside, and I saw it happen right in front of me. More than 30 years later it’s still the scariest thing I’ve ever had to witness.
There must have been something in the air in Queensland that weekend. Earlier that day in the production car race Garry Waldon’s Mazda RX7 vaulted the armco fence and destroyed a section of it along the way.
The fence x delayed proceedings – but then race meeting nearly didn’t happen at all, having already been postponed two weeks after its original April 1 (Fool’s Day!) date due to ooding.
As a budding young journo just starting out, for me the whole thing was a surreal experience. I was there to report on the Formula Ford and Production Car championship rounds for Racing Car News.
To get there (from Sydney), my budget only stretched as far as the 16-hour bus trip to Brisbane, and then the train to Dakabin station. It was raining as I got off the train to walk to the circuit. Heavy rain – not rain like I’d ever seen in Sydney before. This was my rst time in Queensland.
As I walked, clothes waterlogged and bags wet, there were rivers rushing along the sides of the streets. The rivers got deeper the further I walked. There were large frogs (cane toads?) leaping out of the water. By the time I got there, Lakeside had become a lake, and the race meeting had been cancelled.
As everyone was packing up to go home, I ran into Kevin Waldock. I knew Waldock, as he was racing a Commodore VL Turbo in the production car races I was covering.
“How are you getting home?” Waldock asks. As I’d only just arrived, I hadn’t thought about that yet. “I’ll give you a lift,” he says. A lift from Waldock meant ying to Bankstown airport aboard the mining magnate’s private jet… Quite a contrast in modes of travel to and from Brisbane!
Kevin was kind enough to give me a lift back to Brisbane two weeks later (the only cargo in the jet was Waldock’s pilot, myself and the race tyres for Waldock’s VL for the weekend!).
Once I’d nished reporting on ‘my’ races, I could relax and watch the touring car race. I chose my spot on the inside of the circuit, near the spectator bridge. That part of the track is undulating, sweeping and fast. A great place to watch.
It happened right in front of where I was hanging over the fence. If it looks scary on the TV coverage, it was so much worse on the ground. Miedecke’s damaged Sierra ground to halt, and then Glenn Seton’s Sierra hit it hard. Glenn quickly scrambled over the fence on the outside.
Miedecke’s car was stranded, side on, in the middle of the track, and on re. There was a small way past on either side of the wreck – which Miedecke was now hiding behind, desperately waiting for a break in the traffic so he could sprint to safety. I watched as he tried to run, but quickly stopped himself as a car suddenly ashed past through the smoke. He tried again, but another car roared by at close to full racing speed. He was literally trapped out there.
The problem was that the crash scene was just beyond a blind crest – there was not enough time to judge when to run before the next car roared by. I could hear people near me screaming in horror. We all thought the same thing – that Miedecke was going to get hit by a car and we were all powerless to do anything to stop it happening. Thank God he did make it safely to the fence.
On a lighter note… this issue we’re celebrating the HQ Holden Monaro GTS 350, now that the HQ has hit the half century.
One thing that struck me when talking to Monaro a cionados as we were putting our HQ feature together was that with the early-series Monaros, there’s really two camps: those who love the HQ, and the HK-T-G fanciers.
As it happens, we had one of each when I was young. Well, not exactly: my rst car was a HK Monaro 186S, and at the same time my father had a 202 Trimatic HQ Premier. I learnt to drive in that HQ.
But it did always strike me back then just how different these two successive Holden model generations were. It’s as though almost nothing carried over from HG to HQ other than the drivelines. And the HQ seemed a much more modern car in so many ways – even if I wasn’t a fan of the styling (but then taste is a personal thing – there are plenty of people who love the look of the HQ).
What I didn’t like about the HQ was the handling. As a teenage motorist in 1980, I couldn’t understand how it could be that my HK was more fun to drive than the newer HQ. Back then I also didn’t know about George Roberts and how he deliberately set the HQ up with pig understeer, as a ‘safety measure.’ But I can say that the HQ’s understeer nearly brought me to a premature end one day, when I ung dad’s Prem into a bend (at a speed I knew the HK could handle just ne) and the thing ploughed straight on till it slid up and over the median strip. Suddenly the HQ was ailing around on the wrong side of the road – with an old lady in an old Fiat coming the other way. Luckily she had the presence of mind to simply pull over and park her car while the teenager wrestled the HQ under control.