“When I was young, I was a hoon,” Darrylyn Charles (nee Huitt) admits today. “I had a 179 EH Holden and I used to do all the naughty things in it. The police would come around and say to my parents, ‘we’re going to be scraping her off the road one day!’ Thank God it never happened... But I really pushed my luck back then; that was my introduction to speed.”
Her introduction to racing came about by almost by chance. A friend had been called out of town, but his car had been booked in for a service at Pat Crea’s Volkspares at Preston, in Melbourne’s north. As a favour, Huitt agreed to drop the car off at Volkspares.
“I drove it over there and I said ‘can someone give me a lift home?’ Pat [Crea] volunteered, but he said, ‘you can drive. So, I did my usual thing of driving quickly, and he says ‘have you ever thought of doing some motor racing?’ He could have lit a fire under me! I’d always thought about it but there was never any opportunity – I thought ‘this is fantastic!’”
As it happened, Crea was building a VW Beetle Sports Sedan. He offered to give Huitt a trial run in it at Calder. She quickly got the hang of it.
Huitt’s first run in the VW was at the Calder drags in 1969 (it wasn’t quite her first race; prior to that, she’d had a run at the Fisherman’s Bend drags in a borrowed FJ Holden ute).
“Pat just said, ‘go for it, so I did. It went pretty well, a 14.2 seconds pass, I think. I won two passes but was beaten in the final.
