READERS WRITES

Pleasant memories

First off a big thumbs up for the article on the Kiwi Home Front Can-am in the latest edition of Classic Car magazine. I haven’t seen part one, but part two brought back many pleasant memories of a season spent travelling New Zealand’s racing tracks of the time. After doing well at Ruapuna, Timaru, and Teretonga, the decision was made to do the three North Island circuits and see if we could give them a bit of a shake-up up there. By the way, I’m Dave Waldron, and [I] ran the Supercharged U2 in the sports car championship that year. I got a couple of nice photos in your magazine, which is always a buzz. In fact the photo in colour taken at Timaru being chased by Jamie Aslabie was taken by me with my trusty Pentax, as it was Garry Williams — a co-builder of the car — who was driving that day, probably around 1970.

The 3.0-litre class of the championship went down to the wire at Bay Park, where I had to do better than third to beat Glen Mcintyre’s Wilmac Fiat. It was evens after the first race, but Glen blew his clutch in the second race so handed me the NZRDC [New Zealand Racing Drivers Club] 3.0-litre championship. It was a great year for sports cars, and I sold the car the following year and went saloon car racing in the Oscar series in the South Island, in a 2000cc turbo Escort.

Gerard Richards said at the end of the article that he would like to know what happened to some of the cars that participated in the sports car series that year.

Well the U2 was sold to Graham Chamberlain from Christchurch, and he ran it for a couple of years I think, still with the supercharged 1500 engine in it, then on-sold it to Kevin Hill who ran it for a couple of seasons, then he went over to Formula Ford.

It sat idle for a time when my brother Graham Waldron bought it back in pieces and had it stored away at his wrecking yard for a number of years. When Graham died I was the only one that knew where it was and how to put it back together again, so I bought it back off the estate. The only problem was that we were at the point of moving back to Australia in a couple of months’ time, so it got thrown in the container with all the household goods, much to my wife’s disgust.

Back in Australia I purchased a Repco repair centre, where I slowly started to put it back together again. It only got finally finished when I retired. I advertised it in New Zealand, but I think the freight put a lot of people off.

The car now belongs to John Lackey in Sydney, who has done a bit of classic racing in an old MG. I felt [that] he was the right person to buy the car, as he wanted to keep it original and was interested in its history.

So it’s starting its second racing career now in Australia, and I hope to keep in touch with John to see how it goes. He is in the process of getting a CAMS [Confederation of Australian Motor Sport] log book for it, which entails a lot of historical research and documentation, which I managed to supply, so I think it’s not far off being eligible to race over here.

I’ve included a few photos for your edification, but if Gerard wants to get in touch I have many more he may be interested in. He may want to ring for a chat, and if so pass on my details to him. Dave Waldron, Queensland, Australia Gerard’s story has certainly brought back memories for so many readers, Dave. Thank you for sharing your story. AFW