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The B&W shot above is yours truly because our esteemed editor said he wanted to personalise these ramblings - I have to admit it was taken a few years ago, cos I don’t have anything more recent that I’d figure was worth publishing. I'm the one on the left. The young lady is - oh, never mind, I’ve never even explained her to my wife!

Certification Required

One of the great characters of drag racing has been E.J. Potter, the "Michigan Madman", but some might call the V8 bike as much of an evolutionary dead end as Neanderthal Man, but there's one category of vehicle which never quite makes it, either as a bike, or as a car, and that's the V8 trike.

Such a vehicle enjoyed the briefest of appearances on the Australian drag racing scene, in October 1970, until the racing authorities got a chance to take one look and said no. Even when they were prepared to permit the two wheeled versions to rip down the strip, slipping and sliding in clouds of smoke, the three-wheeled version was asking too much for some reason.

The unique Chevy-powered trike of Ted Neilson was the precursor to a jet-powered dingy.

The builder was Sydney bike racer Ted Neilson. His little wonder was a 120 in. mild steel frame, with 302 Chev engine, Powerglide auto and Mk I Zephyr rear end, which tootled along happily to 12 second times, constrained largely by its two-barrel carby, and all seemed happy enough. But the authorities said "Nope", and that was the end of that.

However, Neilson, emboldened by his foray into the nether world of exhibition drag racing - it's very doubtful he could have ever hoped to have encouraged an outbreak of such vehicles sufficient to create a bracket - went looking for something to give him an equal thrill. He figured he'd found it when he came across a couple of jet engines from a Canberra bomber going to waste in a shed at an air force base.

The exchange of a surprisingly small sum of money put him in charge of these potently powerful wind machines, and soon he had them at home, wondering where he went from there.

In a development very similar to that experienced by Potter when he began tinkering with jet engines, Neilson constructed a frame of sorts to mount one, but lacking Potter's large oak tree to which he could secure it, he had to come up with an answer to the nagging problem of starting this thing without it disappearing down the road.

Using all the skills of the devil-may-care hot rodding origins of drag racing, Neilson nudged his structure up against the side of his garage, figuring that would stop it motoring off under its own power. The great wind machine was started, creating an impressive din in his suburban backyard, but when the throttle was wound up the garage proved unequal to the task set before it, and was pushed rapidly sideways, through a neighbour's fence until the whole thing came to an unearthly mess as fuel, battery and other controls tore away and the whole screaming, moving mass ground to a halt in a pile of timber, tiles and palings.

Not to be discouraged, however, and like all good drag racers, Neilson had the back-up of a spare engine, and figuring this drag racing lark was all a bit vague anyway, decided he'd mount the other engine to his boat.

Now, if Neilson's boat had been a 40 footer, with a nice big cabin up front to counterbalance the heavyweight jet engine it might have been a workable idea, but Neilson's outfit was not much above the length of the average canoe, and with the jet fitted to the back it adopted a decidedly nose-up attitude.

When all was hooked up the pending "SS Titanic II" was launched in Sydney's North Harbour. Once the turbines were in motion it soon began to move forward and once a little throttle was added it really got in motion. Neilson decided this was mighty fun as he roared across the surface of the famous harbour, frightening last night's prawns out of the seagulls and putting the yachties off their tacking duels.

If the noise didn't draw attention, certainly the gigantic rooster tail did. With the nose way up the jet was pointing down into the harbour at an alarming angle, displacing a huge column of water behind the boat.

Curiously the water police took exception to the display of bravado and decided to step in and quench the seed of optimism swelling inside Neilson's breast. They had considerable trouble in catching him actually, as he was easily able to outrun anything else on the harbour that day, or any other day I suspect.

And this is where the story becomes a little vague. Despite our attempts to pin this one down we still find three different endings to this tale. One was that he was caught by the aqua-cops when the boat finally ran out of fuel, the second is that he was caught when the stresses became too much for the poor little punt, and it sank, the third is that the H2O rocket did run out of fuel, but was swamped by its own wake as it ground to halt and then sank..

Either way, it was the end of Ted Neilson's boating days, the fish have since returned to the harbour, the fairy penguin colony is no longer threatened by the jet menace, the sale of starting devices for jet engines was banned for some considerable time, and a law was passed requiring the presence of a certified air force person any time a jet engine was started.

Neilson could never work it out. He figured he'd been certified long before.

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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.