In the modern motor racing world of franchises, racing entitlements, category managers and lucrative broadcasting rights, there is no place for the traditional motor racing promoter. The control of the sport has been turned on its head in the last 25 years or so. But there was a time where the likes of promoters such as the late Ivan Stibbard of the Australian Racing Drivers Club (ARDC), who helped make Bathurst great and the subject of this Muscle Man profile, and Allan Horsley of Sydney’s long lost and lamented Oran Park, had a major influence over the sport that we all love.
As Oran Park promoter, Horsley was both dynamic and ground-breaking. He helped create Sports Sedans, making it a formidable national category. He popularised night racing and was prepared to put his hand in his pocket to secure the best drivers and cars to race at the Sydney track – including a young, little known Peter Brock and his crazy Holden-engined Austin A35. He wrestled the Australian Touring Car Championship from the stuffy Warwick Farm and turned it into a jam-packed finale with huge crowds and fantastic racing. Who could forget 1971 and ‘72 with the likes of Allan Moffat, Bob Jane, Norm Beechey and Ian Geoghegan! Along the way he forged friendships with the great names of Australian motor racing – Brock, Moffat and Dick Johnson were close mates.
However, to remember Horsley only as the driving force of Oran Park during the 1970s is to sell his legacy well short. In true poacher turned gamekeeper style, he crossed sides from being a CAMS advisor to being the Confederation’s enemy number one when he managed Mazda’s involvement in Allan Moffat’s successful Group C RX7 campaign in the 1980s. Indeed, he remained at Mazda Australia for the rest of his professional career, keeping the Japanese brand on the periphery of the sport with the iconic RX7 and MX5, creating special high-performance variants of both that are highly collectible today.
Early days
Horsley was born in Tumbarumba in the foothills of the Snowy Mountains. He spent his early years on the family farm where he learned to drive in an A Model Ford ute at the age of six.
“I was always interested in cars,” Horsley recalls today. “In my teens I lived in Albury where I went to high school. I had a wreck of a ’38 Ford V8 coupe that I used to work on. I never raced it but I used parts off it for my race car called ‘Puff.”
Before Puff, Horsley raced a special built by his future brother-in-law, Jeff Hogan, powered by a Triumph Tiger
