“It was probably when I was about eight years old that I first remember showing an interest in cars and the like,” says Jim Rowley, a seriously energetic 74 year-old who has spent a lifetime on the edges of the motorsport world around Sydney. Along a near 60-year journey of pushing cars to their limits, Rowley has earned a reputation for being able to find a fix for just about any problem, and for building some very classy race cars – often with more than the usual flair for style.
“As a kid I used to go to my uncle’s place up at Brooklyn,” Jim continues, referring to the small town crouched on the south side of the Hawkesbury River, north of Sydney. “He used to work on boat engines and steam engines, and I started to learn about mechanical things. When I was about 12 I built a billycart with a starter motor on it powered by a car battery so you could drive it like a go-kart.
“I learned my lesson about electric cars then, and have never touched one since because the batteries would go flat and it was a pain to recharge them.
“Later, I used to work at the local service station after school where I’d pump petrol [back when you actually had attendants who did that for customers]. During the school holidays they’d have me in the workshop working on cars and I learned stuff there. I used to build paddock bashers which we’d thrash about the fields behind home in Merrylands. We’d have ‘demonstration roll-overs’ and whatever. It was a wonder that we survived, but as a kid you did what you had to do, got out, shook yourself off and looked for another car if that one was no good anymore.
“I used to muck about with early model Holdens – 48-215 Series 1 and 2. When I was 16, I went to the drag racing at Castlereagh with a mate. I used his licence to start racing. The trouble was when I turned 17 and got my own licence they didn’t want to let me race because they thought I was this other guy!”
Jim sorted out the differences and got on with racing his then 48-215 Series 1 (Jim – a Holden man all his life – insists that these early Holdens are 48-215 Series 1 or 2s, and that terms like FX are figments of people’s imagination, with the letters referring to the description of a Holden model not starting until the FJ), upgrading its performance
