GO SPEED RACER
RULES is rules, but sometimes they get out of control and suck a lot of the fun out of things. And lately in motorsport, it’s the rules protecting the cubic dollars tipped into modern car-racing that suck most deeply. Did you see, for instance, Scott McLaughlin getting fined for taking a poster onto the podium recently? This is what we’re doing now?
This new PC era is also why the pinnacle (so they tell us) of four-wheeled sport, Formula One, now amounts to slot-cars driven by robots. Even in our beloved Supercars, not a single car runs an engine, gearbox or diff (or anything else) that you or I can buy in a new road car. Reality check, anyone? Rules and restrictions are everywhere and just about every category has become corporatised, with sponsorship money calling the shots on both sides of the pit wall.
It wasn’t always like that. Oh no. Step back a few decades and you had Jack Brabham designing his own Formula One car and winning a world championship with it. And he could do it because motorsport was yet to become a money factory; there was still room for people with imagination and genius to make their mark. Can you imagine Lewis Hamilton skinning his knuckles on a car after hours? (Then again, can you imagine Sir Jack with neck tatts?)
Locally, perhaps the greatest expression of ‘the mad scientist goes racing’ came along in the 1970s in the form of
