I want to bio a guy who was a good friend and also a larger-than-life competitor in Australian motorsports in the 60’s and 70’s. I personally believe that anyone who has the courage and commitment to compete on the track in any motorsport discipline is an extraordinary person, and I’ve known plenty of them. Funnily enough, Warren’s path and mine crossed many times during his lifetime but we didn’t always know that it had happened.
The simple facts are that Warren was born in Sydney on the 25th of February 1941, meaning he was a wartime baby. He passed away after a long battle with cancer on the 26th August 2012 at the age of 71.
Warren grew up in the inner Sydney suburb of Balmain, within a sea-salt smell of Sydney Harbour. His dad, Sidney (Sid), was an ocean-going tug skipper so Warren grew up with not only a close affinity with boats but also with things mechanical. I believe that it was this affinity that later led him to a lifetime of involvement in motorsports. To begin with, though, Warren’s pursuits were human-powered. He was a keen swimmer and would swim and train at the local Balmain pool with the great Dawn Fraser. He was also a keen cyclist and would ride his pushbike from his home at Balmain to the velodrome at Wiley Park to train and compete (a distance of over 15 kms). He was certainly a good enough rider to be asked to tryout for the Olympic cycling team. I have no doubt that his cycling exploits were to later stand him in good stead when he turned to cycles with motors in them.
However, that was to be a later chapter. Once past his teenage and (probably) an apprenticeship to some trade or other, Warren got interested in car racing and, carrying his #119 which was to become his trademark, Warren started competing in what was then known as Touring Cars. Back then the weapon of choice was the ubiquitous “humpy” Holden, the FX and FJ model. Local tuning shops had sprung up all over Sydney and, depending on how deep your pockets were, you could make a Humpy go way harder than the manufacturer intended. Warren’s driving style was lurid to put it mildly and, along with other names like Brian Mayman, for example, Warren put on a show wherever he went. Short circuits racing, hillclimbs, it didn’t matter, Warren would do it.
Here he is giving the suspension a workout at the very dangerous circuit at Katoomba called Catalina Park. He travelled widely and here is a shot of him racing in the quarry at the now-defunct Hume Weir circuit outside Albury.
Evidently Warren’s driving style was an attractive one because he was asked to drive a Studebaker Lark sedan in the Bathurst 500 mile race in 1964. Most of the cars against which he was competing were small cars, powered by 6 or 4 cylinder engines. The Lark was a V8 so it was no surprise that Warren put the car on pole for two consecutive years around the demanding 6.2 km mountain course. But, despite being the fastest car, it was only equipped with drum brakes and they faded to nothing in very short order and, from memory, the car was retired on both occasions.
Warren continued to campaign the humpy, though and he was surely a crowd favourite.
And with exploits like this, it’s hardly surprising.
Quite how he got involved in motorcycle road racing I have not been able to discern but, from the first year of my involvement, Warren was a fixture. Running his own car repair business meant that most of his money went into that priority so Warren did what many impecunious racers did, he built his own bikes. Basing them on proven MotoCross designs, he eventually built up a fleet of bikes that enabled him to compete in the 125cc class, the 250cc class and the Unlimited class. The bikes were very light, had enormous ground clearance and were simple to tune and maintain. The added benefit was that, having three bikes, he could compete in a huge number of races each day and that was the major attraction.
Here he is at Amaroo Park on his 125. And here he is, on his 400. Note the “foot down” MX style. I suspect that he may have done some MX and short circuit racing in between his cars and bikes period.
In the late 1970’s Warren lashed out and bought a “proper” race bike, a TZ350D. Like all his bikes it was immaculately finished and though he was a “little” large to be racing one, he certainly used it to good effect. The photo at the top of the article is one of mine, again from Hume Weir and Warren loved this photo. Not only did he buy multiple copies of it is smaller size but he also bought a very large, poster-sized copy that he proudly posted on the wall of his workshop at Kirawee. He always said that it was the best bike racing photo of him that he’d ever seen.
Here he is on the grid at Oran Park, alongside his good mate and mine, Canberra’s Murray Ogilvie.
The other stars in this pic are #120, Rob Hunter, #59 Ron Boulden and #113 Jeff Irvine
By the late 1970’s, Warren was easing out of racing. A stalwart of the St George Motorcycle Club, he was finding, as many amateur racers found, that the demands of his business and the demands of his racing were incompatible. . I’m not sure whether it was at this meeting or another like it that both he and Murray were involved in a situation that illustrated just how competitive yet how friendly the races were back then. Warren did a crank on his TZ and Murray, who had a spare, lent it to him and it was fitted in time for the 350 A Grade race. There is no justice in racing, Warren went out and beat Murray in the race, waiting at the end of the slow-down lap to thank Murray for his generosity!
But Warren certainly never left road racing, he just found another way to be involved. She became one of NSW’s best travelling marshals. Now for those of us today who are used to seeing race control being exercised by closed-loop radio, the idea of flag marshals having to rely on line-of-sight to the previous and next station in order to know which flag to wave this concept seems archaic, and it is. Back then this was how it was done. Reasoning that the majority of accidents usually happened in the first couple of laps of a race when the fields were closely bunched, organisers would have a couple of experienced “A” Grade road racers on road bikes on call as travelling marshals. They would take off behind the pack and shadow it some distance back for the first couple of laps and then pull off the circuit in a position where they could see as much of the track as possible and watch for any incidents. At the end of the race they would pull back onto the track and shadow the last riders back to the pits, make sure the track was clear of debris and call for pickup if a bike had broken down or crashed. It was also the travelling marshals who had the call as to whether an ambulance was required in a crash situation. It was a very demanding position and the riders chosen took their responsibilities very seriously. Like everything he did, Warren did it brilliantly.
Incidentally, speaking of radio control, it was Canberra Road Racing Club who was one of the first, if not the first, race organiser to use radio to control flag positions. At the first road closure in 1978 Alan Beavan and I, both keen CB radio operators, organised some members of the local CB radio club to be on station at each corner acting as on-site reporters for race organisers and their local flag-wavers. We did that for all the road closures and it worked flawlessly.
And it was at the second road closure where this little wheeze proved its worth and also involved an hilarious situation for Warren Weldon. Two laps into the 350cc “A” Grade race, a bunch of kangaroos burst out of the surrounding forest and dashed across the track in front of the howling pack of bikes, being led, at this stage, by Wayne Gardner. Almost instantly, the CB radio network lit up and the race was able to be stopped without any riders crashing or being injured. Warren swung the borrowed Honda 750 around and started heading for the position. Unfortunately his “U” Turn wasn’t quite copy-book and he fell over, damaging the bike and breaking his collar-bone. Needless to say neither he nor Bennett Honda, who had lent us the bike for the weekend, were impressed.
In retirement Warren continued to be involved in club life and it was devastating news to hear that he had been diagnosed with cancer. He passed away, as noted, in August 2012 and his funeral was a monster affair, as befitting the love and affection that everyone in St George Motorcycle Club and the wider racing fraternity had for him.
And, hardly surprisingly, Warren maintained his passion for things mechanical right to the end. Like several other retired road racers (Dave King, Dave Bailey, Allan Harding, Martin Hone and others), Warren converted his mechanical interest into an interest in light aeroplanes. Brian would take him flying from an airstrip in the Hunter Valley and here’s a photo of him taken there not long before he passed away.
I should also add that Warren’s credits were very strongly tied up with Oran Park. he competed there at the very first meeting in 1967 and, driving his Morris Minor, he won his class. He also competed at the very last meeting at Oran Park, driving a Mitsubishi Evo IX, scoring two 1st places and one 2nd.
But none of this actually tells you what sort of person he was. Well, Warren, or “Flange” as his nickname was, was truly an exceptional person. He was happy, gregarious, friendly, accommodating and, short of the late Eric Debenham, had the loudest laugh in the paddock. Everybody loved him, he didn’t have an enemy in the world and all of us felt like we had lost a brother when, suddenly, he wasn’t there. It is a measure of his reputation that we are still talking about him nearly 10 years since he left us.
RIP Warren, “Flange” Weldon.
I gratefully acknowledge the kind assistance of Warren’s widow, Judy and Brian Harwood, in the preparation of this article.