Drag Racing Online

Greetings from the bottom half of the Earth, where women are women, men are men and kangaroos don't hop down the street. The esteemed Burk has asked me to put finger to keyboard to provide updates on Antipodean (anti = opposite, pode = feet, in the opposite direction to where your feet are, get it?) drag racing, and having absolutely no spine to say no, nor the sense to point him at anyone else I guess I'm stuck with it.

In all honesty I don't quite know where to begin. I mean, how do I write? In spite of the fact the I speak funny I rarely say "G'day" or any of the more archetypical Aussie greetings, but I'm suddenly concerned that I'll end up with some sort of local jargon that will leave you, the intrepid reader, with question marks dancing before your eyes.

Several years back — well, about a decade or so — when I was scribbling for JB in his halcyon days at Super Stock — an employee of mine had to phone a contact in the US (somewhere in the south east, as I recall) and when signalling his concurrence over some matter said, "Yeah, no worries."

He received an instant response of "Ohhh garly, say that agin'." When he repeated this commonplace Oz phrase he was asked to hold on while whoever it was rounded up the office staff and got them all on a community line and he was asked once more to repeat what he'd said. He'd mutely signaled me to pick up a hand-piece on a nearby phone so I could listen in. I got to hear a roomful of "Aw gosh" and "Heck" and the like.

Now I don't want to incite a whole internet load of "Aw shucks" comments, so please be tolerant.

However, while we do have our cultural differences — we spell tire as tyre, and color as colour and so on — the good thing is we do have much in common. We all do speak a version of English, understand and use dollars and cents (even though ours are a trifle less valuable than yours) and I, like most of the other aging scribes here, had my socks blown off by the sight and sound of a nitro fuelled hemi V8 when I was a teenager and I'm still trying to get over it.

I've been writing on and photographing drag racing in Australia since 1966 as part of the therapy, and getting nowhere. I edited several magazines (one street rodding, one drag racing, before founding my own magazine, Dragster Australia, in 1979, which still, just, supports me today). I've owned street rods, been president of street rod clubs and right now I'm deep in the throes of trying to get a drag strip off the ground in the city of Sydney.

I think I need a new shrink, this old one just ain't working.

Now that I've established my credentials . . . ah, I think I'm running out of room. This has been a devilishly cunning way to fill a column without having the least idea what to write or where to begin, don't you think? When next I have another of these brain explosions I'll try to get more into the meat and potatoes of some Antipodean (there's that word again) drag racing. If anyone has anything particularly worthwhile to say or ask about things here, drop me an email at dragster_oz@hotmail.com and I'll see if I can answer you.

In the meantime I'm just grooving over the fact of having my name up there alongside the likes of Burk, Chris Martin, Dave Wallace, Jeff Leonard, John Raffa and Dave Densmore and the rest.

I've even impressed myself.