The Wild West

The small town of Windsor sits on the banks of the Hawkesbury River west of Sydney. Shortly after the war a half-mile speedway was built on land next to the local RSL club. Rough as guts and littered with river pebbles, this track resembled the kind of ‘bull ring’ you’d find back in those days in the American mid-west. 

The cars also fitted this Wild West image. In the sixties Windsor launched a new category known as Stock Rods. These could be built for only a hundred bucks or so, and this style of racing attracted a lot of the young hot rodders from the western suburbs. On a typical winter’s Sunday afternoon there’d be more than 40 Ford Customlines, Chrysler Royals, Ford Pilots, Mercurys, Dodges and De Sotos in the pits, plus some Holden humpies and oddities like an Austin A40 and a Vanguard.

The cars were supposed to be stock standard, but it was noted in one programme that Kenny Edwards’ turquoise Customline featured “a miniature Bunnerong power house… with the eight stacks protruding through the bonnet.”

The stacks were stub exhaust pipes. Mufflers were not required.

A local Stock Rod tradition was the keg of beer on the railway tracks. Alcohol wasn’t allowed in the pits but if the keg was placed over the fence next to the train line, that was OK. Ken Barlow, later to race a Mustang on the dirt, was one of the early Windsor Stock Rod stars. Future speedway sedan stars Gordon Smee and Rick Hunter also started their careers here. 

ARTHUR PARK In 1965 former motorcycle speedway champion Frank Arthur opened his own super-speedway on the Beaudesert Road at Calamvale, just outside Brisbane. It was a new concept in Australian motorsport. The one-mile oval track was wide enough for cars to start eight wide and included various radius corners plus uphill and downhill sections. It was known as Frank’s ‘black track’ because of the huge amounts of sump oil needed to keep down the dust. Arthur’s aim was to create a new style of racing for a cross between speedway and road-racing sedans. His plan was to eventually pave the track. A field of forty Monaros and Falcons would have been well worth watching here, especially sliding through at 120mph on the steep downhill section. A few Arthur Park Specials were built, including a lightweight Holden FC, but what seemed like a good idea at the time soon fizzled out. A cyclone washed away the dirt surface on the weekend of the first meeting and from then on racing took place only occasionally.