As a teenager, Paul Feeney was all but a fixture around Lee Roebuck’s bike shop in their home town of Goulburn and it was there he met Ray Spence, who was building a new sidecar outfit while looking for a fearless young passenger.
Even though he’d long been keen to go racing, Paul was reluctant to take up Ray’s offer. The fact that Ray was hobbling around on crutches may have been the cause of his hesitation, but Ray convinced him that this was the ideal opportunity to familiarise himself with all the track layouts. With most of his apprentice electrician’s wages allocated to the drip-feed on his Kawasaki H2 750, Paul figured a free ride in the chair was preferable to no ride at all.
No superstars, the pairing ran consistently in the top five around Australia while campaigning as far afield as Jakarta; though 1980 was a watershed year for the team with a podium in the Unlimited Sidecar Feature at the Bathurst Easter Carnival. “Back then we didn’t walk the track at all” says Paul. “We had no concept of how steep Mountain Straight is. To stand at Skyline and look at it now, I wonder what the hell could we have been thinking. All the tracks were concrete canyons, but Mount Panorama was so much faster.”
Bathurst was followed by victory in the Unlimited Sidecar event at Oran Park in May. Then, only weeks later, coming on to the fast left hander at the end of the back straight at Sandown, the sidecar
