My regular readers will know that I have another life away from two wheels (actually I have several other lives but we won’t go there now). As well as my bikes, speedway is another pursuit of mine and has been for many years. There is something basic and satisfying about the relatively low-tech procedure of getting a car around a 400m clay oval. That’s not to say that sophistication isn’t invading speedway, it is, but speedway has a long way to go to catch up with the other branches of motorsports and I rather hope it doesn’t.
Speedway is a family sport and crowds are liberally dotted with families sitting back enjoying the flying topsoil. It is accessible and easy to understand and what happens on the track does not require a fleet of lawyers to understand or determine the result. These are many of the reasons why I love it. I’ve been the course commentator at my local track at Nowra for over 10 years now and I still love going down the road and calling the races. Unfortunately, our track is a clay track so we don’t run bikes or sidecars so it’s all cars but I still enjoy it anyway. The racers are fun people and they appreciate the effort that I put in to help everyone enjoy their night at the races.
One of the divisions that we regularly run is GP Midgets. A long-established branch of the sport, it has languished somewhat in recent years but it is starting to enjoy a revival mainly to the efforts of two Victorian brothers who build a newer, much more sophisticated chassis and sell it at a very reasonable price. One of the racers using the new Perry chassis is Janelle Saville, herself a 2nd generation racer, her father having just won the NSW Title for this division at Nowra at our last meeting. Janelle is a true budget racer with enthusiasm to burn and an empty wallet.
This pic, taken at Nowra on the 9th is something of a clue to what my article is about today. GP’s are small, open-wheel racing cars, independent suspension all round and limited to an engine size of 1000cc. Unsurprisingly, the division has traditionally run motorcycle powerplants and they still do. The latest wave of competitors are running water-cooled Japanese engines with a preference being for the Yamaha R1 donk.
As already noted, Janelle is a budget racer so, for as long as I have known her she has run a Suzuki GSX1100 engine of the kind originally found in the bike of the same name and then the Katana. Yes, an engine that, even if she had the last one of them made, would still be over 30 years old. I’m reasonably confident that it goes back a bit longer than that. Each time I have seen her race she seems to have suffered from mechanical woes of one sort or another. And, each time we chat, I counsel her that the motor is too old, too worn out, too hard to get decent parts for and too slow. She admits all of this but she and her crew keep the old girl going as best they can because there simply isn’t the budget to replace the motor with a newer one.
To say it came to a head at Nowra on the 9th is putting it mildly. In the first couple of heats, Janelle did well, though the motor was smoking somewhat (see picture above) Those of us who have been around a while will be familiar with the scenario when a motor goes at its very best JUST before it is about to do something catastrophic. Janelle did not appear for Heat 3, nor for the Feature race so I surmised that mechanical failure had again struck the team. Afterwards, in the pits, when I went to congratulate her dad for winning the feature and the NSW title, I went by her pit and interrupted. Janelle was on the barbeque, cooking up some late-night sustenance for the crews before they headed home. “Gearbox” was the one word reply. I sympathised as I always do and wished her well; speedway can be a cruel sport.
Well, it turns out that it was more than just the gearbox that curtailed Janelle’s title at the title. Today on Facebbok she published the pictures of the engine after a mid-week tear-down. Now I don’t know about you, but I can’t ever recall seeing an engine more comprehensively destroyed than this one.
Needless to say, coming this late, I can’t see Janelle getting back on the track before the speedway season ends. It’s a real shame because the division needs all the competitors that it can get and she really deserves some good luck for a change. Anyone in NSW got a cheap R1 motor that can go to a good cause?