LEGEND: JIM KERR
JIM KERR LIVED AN INCREDIBLE LIFE OF CUSTOMLINES, TOP FUELLERS AND RESTORED FORDS
Remembering the Cusso King, one of the most prominent figures in early Aussie drag racing
SITTING under the stuffed head of a cape buffalo in a house full of the mementos of a life well lived, 80-year-old Jim Kerr regaled us with tales of hot rodding and drag racing exploits that began in the early 1960s. Now, a few months after Jim’s passing after a long battle with leukaemia, those stories paint a vivid picture of the formative years of the sport in Australia – from street-racing Customlines around the fringes of Sydney to near-200mph laps in a blown Hemi dragster.
Life for Jim had become quieter when we sat down with him back in 2018 to talk about those earlier times, but his advancing years saw no retreat into TV antiques shows and sleeping in comfy chairs. He was busy with a pair of restored ’34 Fords (a coupe and a roadster) and a Thunderbird, with a rare-model Mustang awaiting its time to be tweaked back into shape and a stack of replacement parts for sidevalve Fords that needed machining. Not to mention his engine-building work for fellow enthusiasts.
Jim’s life as a petrolhead really began when he was 19 in 1960. He’d seen a ’48 Mercury in a car yard in the Sydney suburb of Petersham, but a mate beat him to buying it. In frustration, he bought a ’46 Chev instead. But when he drove it up Parramatta Road that night, the bearings quit, so he soon traded it in on a Ford Customline – and became a Cusso man for life.
It wasn’t long before he was hanging out at the now-legendary fast-food joint and hot-car mecca Beefies on Parramatta Road. “That’s where I met a lot of the people I’m still friends with now, people like Flemmo [John Fleming] and the Shifters Hot Rod Club,” Jim recalled. “That’s where drag racing in NSW started.”
The Shifters was one of the first hot rod clubs in Sydney. “I came along a year after it was started,” Jim explained. “I went to Riverside Dragway in 1964 with Flemmo in the Customline. He’d been down in 1963 with his ’34 coupe, which makes him the longest-running drag racer in Australia. He’s still running now.”
Although he didn’t own any by the end of his life, Jim’s love affair with Customlines was a long and enduring one. “I had quite a few over the years, including a Mainline that I bought from Broadway Motors at Parramatta,” he said. “It was trouble-free until the first race meeting at Castlereagh in March 1965. There was a guy who came up from Melbourne and he blew a diff on the way up. I gave him my diff so he could race and I never saw him again. I had to get my car home from the race track without a diff in it.”
The best known of Jim’s Cussos, and the one that defined his early racing, was called ‘The Jindivik’ – named in honour of the Australian-designed guided missiles of the 1950s and 60s. Jim explained how he came to own it: “I was going to buy TV personality Brian Henderson’s ’62 Thunderbird and make a drag car out of it. Before I did, my mate Ron Rankin and I went up to a race meeting at Catalina [motor circuit at Katoomba] in January 1965, and they were advertising this Customline for sale. It was Tom Anderson’s race car, but he wanted to build an open-wheeler. He arranged the finance for me, because I had no money and
he wanted £650. I resprayed it blue with a vacuum-cleaner spray gun.”
At the time Jim bought it, the car held the lap record for 4998cc cars at both Orange (Gnoo Blas circuit) and Warwick Farm (records that still stand because both tracks were closed shortly after) and the fastest speed over the flying eighth-mile down Bathurst’s Conrod Straight at 136mph.
The Jindivik was considered a pretty tough Cusso for its day, running a 305 Y-block with triple two-barrel carbs, a three-speed column shift and a 4.09 Mainline diff. It had four bars over the rear window to prevent the glass from popping out, and the steel wheel centres were welded all the way around so you didn’t lose a wheel going around the corners.
“I bought that Customline just to hang out at Beefies, because Castlereagh wasn’t going then,” Jim said. “In those days we’d go down to Beefies in my mate’s Tank Fairlane and if there was any racing on down at Heathcote we’d come back home, pick up The Jindivik and off we’d go for some serious competition. The Cusso had the legs on all of them.”
After the Castlereagh drag strip opened in March 1965, The Jindivik scored 18 straight class wins in AA/MS and A/MS between September ’65 and November 1966, with the best being – according to Jim’s meticulously written notebook of the day – an anomalously quick 14.38, when most times were in the 15- or 16-second zones.
The Cusso also had the honour of running at the first race meetings of Castlereagh, Surfers Paradise Raceway and Calder Park, along with the first Nationals at Riverside, Melbourne.
That first Castlereagh meeting was a troubled weekend for Jim. It was the first time he had tried to trailer a car, and the steering of his mate’s Tank Fairlane was all over the place because they didn’t have the balance right. When they arrived, Jim added benzene to the fuel, but so did crewman Ronnie, resulting in a mixture that was way too rich.
Then in May 1965, Jim scattered a clutch on the Castlereagh startline in one of the best-known transmission failures in the sport at that time. Jim told us the method for mitigating such problems was welding steel manhole covers onto the transmission tunnels, since scattershields were an unknown commodity in those days.
Jim and The Jindivik fronted up to the first Nationals at Riverside In October ’65.
“In those days the eliminator rounds were run differently to today, and you ran everyone in the category until the final, and I beat everyone up to there. After I lost the final against Roger Abrahams’ Mustang, I was back in the pits and my crew guy says: ‘Look at this.’ They were lifting this huge toolbox out of the boot of the Mustang; it took two guys to lift it. It was there to put weight on the driver’s side of the car to get traction. My guy wanted me to protest, but I said no, so he told meeting director Max De Jersey. Max came over later and said Abrahams would get the Sedan Eliminator trophy but he offered me £20 to come back for a match race the next meeting. I towed down for it, but Abrahams never showed.”
By the beginning of 1967, The Jindivik was becoming a bit tired – with a lifetime of competition crammed into its 10 years of existence, the Cusso’s performance edge was slipping away. Jim decided to give
THE SIDEVALVE’S FUEL INJECTION WAS BUILT AROUND A SCOTT MANIFOLD, USING A FLOW PUMP FROM A HEART-LUNG MACHINE
racing away and became a tow truck driver for a time. “The Jindivik had had a hard life,” Jim said. “It had been a circuit racer and then done a lot of laps on the quarter-mile, almost all with solid rear suspension, so, sadly, we took it to Concord tip.”
However, a few of The Jindivik’s parts survived. In fact, the car’s shock absorbers are still doing laps today in Jim’s son John’s Mercury Comet (see this month’s Drag Challenge column, p. 112).
Jim ran his tow trucks out of the yard at the back of American Auto Parts in Homebush, where he spent a lot of time with racers Bruce Phillips and Joe Gatt, who worked in the same yard. That led to his next venture.
“Gordon Davidson had built this dragster for Benny Gatt, but he didn’t like it and his brother Joe took it over,” Jim recalled. “I bought a 351 Cleveland at Sydney Motor Auctions out of a brand new Falcon GTHO wreck for less than $100 on the Friday and took it over to Tony Andrew’s service station at Bexley, and he sold it for me the next day for $500. With $300 of that money, I bought the dragster off Joey in 1972. He’d called it ‘The Sundowner’, but I changed the name to ‘Vulture’, because I was a towie, and towies were supposed to be vultures.
“I had helped Joe buy the sidevalve motor from a guy in the Shifters, but he never did get it running properly, so I ended up buying it all from him. I didn’t like the idea of straddling the flathead diff in there, so I put in a 4.33 Oldsmobile unit behind an A-model gearbox with second and top gears. The fuel injection was built around a Scott manifold by Bruce Phillips at P&R Performance, using a flow pump from a heart-lung machine. As far as we know, it was, and possibly still is, the quickest naturally aspirated flathead in the country, and possibly the world.”
The little injected sidevalve-powered rail picked up a number of wins and final-round placings over the next two years, with a best of 11.02 before Jim decided to take things to the next level. He heard that fellow Sydney racer Morrie Carlton was selling his blown Hemi dragster, complete with trailer, for $3000. He jumped at it.
In October 1975, Jim’s first meeting in the 354-cube Hemi rail saw him run 8.93@170mph, and the car eventually became the quickest of Jim’s career, going 7.99@198mph at Surfers before the crank finally gave out in July 1976. That gave him the opportunity to try 392 cubes.
“The trouble was that the 392 was too powerful for that little car,” Jim said. “The clutch didn’t lock up until near the traps. When I took it easy, the car went quicker than when I pushed it hard. The 354 revved its heart out and the 392 just had too much bottom-end power and didn’t rev as hard.”
The 392 ran a best of 8.1 seconds, and Jim then started building a rear-engined car to chase a 200mph terminal speed. But in 1981 he suffered a nasty heart attack and was advised to give racing a break. Shortly afterwards, Castlereagh closed, so racing came to an end for Jim and wife Jean.
Besides his own cars, Jim also served as driver for some other very significant vehicles, including John Fleming’s ‘Declared Black’ Junior Fueller and Bob Honeybrook’s 426 Hemi-powered Top Fueller.
Jim always had a hankering for ’34 Fords. He’d bought a ’34 rod from John Fleming in 1966; it sat in the garage for years until he sold it in the late 70s. “I’ve kicked myself ever since,” he said. But in the mid-1980s he went to an auction to buy a station wagon and came home with a ’34 coupe that had been owned by the auctioneer. And in ’85, he bought a ’34 roadster from Rod Hadfield. Both of them were restored to original trim and Jim took up the historic Ford circuit, winning concours events aplenty.
As a result of his ’34 obsession, Jim began manufacturing his own heads, water pumps and manifolds, as the original castings were full of lead and couldn’t be welded. These became in great demand among early-ford fans, and Jim sold plenty to other parts of the world. He had also become something of an authority on sidevalve motors, and built quite a few for the enthusiast crowd.
One of Jim’s proudest moments in recent years was being given an Australian Nostalgia Fuel Association Pioneer Award in 2016 and having his name added to the Wall of Fame at Sydney Dragway.
Jim passed away on 12 September 2020. His skills with sidevalve engines have been recognised by enthusiasts worldwide, and his contribution to Australian drag racing’s early days was vital.
THE HEMI RAIL BECAME THE QUICKEST OF JIM’S CAREER, GOING 7.99@198MPH BEFORE THE CRANK FINALLY GAVE OUT IN JULY 1976