Dennis Shipp has a thousand stories to tell and one worth repeating is when he was approached to build a Rowley Park production stockcar for John Farnham to race.
This happened around 1969, soon after Farnham rocketed to fame with his first Top 10 hit, ‘Sadie (the Cleaning Lady)’.
Shippy was helping fellow racer Graham Daddow build a new Valiant Pacer when Daddow asked him if he’d be interested in building another one for Farnham to race.
The request came through Farnham’s manager, the Adelaide accountant Darryl Sambell, who had discovered Johnny – as he was called at the time – singing at a concert in country Victoria. Sambell was a pretty big operator at the time. He also managed the Masters Apprentices and Zoot.
Shippy did an estimate for building a car – he thinks it was probably based on a current model Valiant Pacer – but was told later that Farnham’s insurance agent didn’t like the idea of Australia’s hottest young singing star risking his valuable neck on a dirt track. Whatever the reason, the project never got off the ground.
Sambell was a Rowley Park fan. He later sponsored the Valiant of Eric Stack. It had a sign on the side saying: ‘Cooled by Darryl Sambell.’
Exactly how keen Farnham was to race is open to debate. Shippy suspects that Sambell was more into it than Johnny ever was.
Farnham’s connection with muscle cars began with the covers of his first EP and LP records, where he’s seen posing next to a brand-new Monaro GTS (the car wasn’t his, it was supplied by GM-H).
In the late 2000s Farnham came out of retirement (yet again) to appear at the Saturday night concert at Homebush at the Telstra Sydney 500. Before the race he paid a visit to the Holden Racing Team’s workshops.
“I’m not truly a petrol head, but I do like cars,” he explained on the Foxsports website. He didn’t mention how close he came to racing a production stock car more than 40 years ago.
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