THE CASTROL SIX HOUR

A move to Sydney for her husband’s new job as a systems analyst at Macquarie University coincided with the first running of the Castrol Six Hour at Amaroo Park in 1970. Peggy explains: “In those days there was only room in a marriage for one career. The wife was usually in a stay-at-home situation that today’s young women wouldn’t put up with. “A decision to go small-farming would ensure I was at home, first near Frankston outside Melbourne, then in the Dandenongs. When we moved to Sydney we bought land near Wiseman’s Ferry.” This meant Peggy clocked up thousands of kilometres on road bikes between races. She also became well-known outside motorcycling as a pioneer of the Australian cashmere and dairy goat industries. Peggy had become a career woman in her own right. For the 1970 Castrol, she entered her Mach III Kawasaki 500 with fellow racer Rod Tingate as co-rider. “Initially I’d wanted Jeff Curley but he was injured. I thought Rod was reliably fast but I had slight misgivings as he was a four-stroke rider,” she says. “Not many people could ride that early model H1. It had absolutely nothing below 4000rpm, not much at 6000rpm but then it sang up to 9000rpm and higher. It didn’t go around tight corners (of which there were plenty at Amaroo Park) and my technique was to slide the rear under brakes and pick it up on the throttle.” The Kawasaki had clocked up 10,000 miles as daily transport and Peggy thinks this was its saving grace in the race. “It was pinging the whole way,” she says. “Afterwards we found a broken frame lug had cracked a piece out of the crankcase and there were broken and gummed piston rings. If it had been a brand-new and tight engine it would have seized.” The pair’s result was an amazing fourth place in the 500cc class, just one lap behind Ken Blake, who was pitted next to them. But she still feels they could have got on the podium. “When Ken’s handlebars broke and he returned to the pits ashen-faced, it was my pit-crew that had the answer – a very large screwdriver which they bound securely and quickly across the broken bars to get him out ASAP, ” she says. “When I rode in dragging a broken muffler, Blake’s team did nothing to reciprocate our help and we lost some 20 laps. “Bearing in mind that Rod’s lap times were slower than mine, you will appreciate that I was riding consistently faster than Ken Blake.” By now Peggy was a vastly experienced B-grade rider. She had featured in races as far apart as Symmons Plains in Tasmania, Mallala in South Australia, and Surfers Paradise in Queensland. She also became a Bathurst regular, gaining this dubious press accolade after winning both heats of the 1972 Unlimited Non-expert class: “The two events resulted in many red faces when Peggy Hyde came in for a win…” The daunting Bathurst mountain circuit held no fears for Peggy: “I loved the complexity of it. The variety of it. It’s not frightening. You learn it,” she says. What did she make of the constant scrutiny? Peggy replies: “I soon became aware that as a woman in a male-dominated sport your every action was taken as being typical of your gender.” She then points out two examples of prejudice that still stick in her mind: “Once a female television reporter interviewed me before the start of a Six Hour. She asked me a rhetorical question about what I thought about when I was out on the track: My boyfriend, perhaps? “Another time a magazine editor requested my bust, waist and hip measurements plus a photo of me in a bikini. I don’t think this request came from a position of sexism so much as he wanted to prove to his readers it really was a woman defeating men on the race track.”