I hope you will forgive me if the subject of my article today is speedway and specifically speedway cars. My first contact with speedway was in the 1960s when Channel 7 used to air edited highlights of the previous week’s speedway meetings from Westmead Speedway and the Sydney Showground. My interest then subsided for some years until it was rekindled by my late friend, Alan Harding who took me (somewhat against my will) to a meeting at Tralee Speedway in Canberra. The speedcars were spectacular on tar and I was hooked.
Since then I have been a keen follower of the sport as well as being involved as a commentator and journalist. So it was a real thrill to me to be at Goulburn Speedway last weekend and to see the debut of the GrizzlyEVO JB01 Grand Prix Midget.
First a bit of history that should provide the necessary background. GP Midgets as a category started in the early 1960s with the early cars endeavouring to mimic the styling of the Grand Prix road racing cars of the day. They were rear-engined and usually powered by a motorcycle engine. Here is the Bart Wilkinson car from that era. It was one of the first and was a very innovative design with two motorcycle engines linked together and fed by four individual Amal carburettors.
This car still exists and runs and is seen every year at whatever track runs the Bart Wilkinson Memorial race. As you can see, apart from some minor details, it could easily be a Formula Junior car of the same period.
As you will hear in the accompanying videos, GPs sort of lost their way in the intervening years. In a (probably misguided) attempt to appear more modern, later generations of cars went away from the low-line Formula One style and adapted the formula to a design that mimicked sprintcars, a move that was successful at first but which didn’t achieve the market penetration that the clubs really wanted. And so, in the early part of the 21st Century we found that the category had atrophied with support in most of the states dwindling considerably with only Victoria and, to a lesser extent NSW, keeping the faith.
Number counts at meetings had dropped away severely and even when a goodly number of cars were entered, mechanical attrition during the night often saw only a handful of cars being available for the feature race and even fewer of them finishing the main event. Chassis were old and increasingly fragile and finding spares to keep nearly 40 year old GSX1100 air cooled engines running was getting harder and harder.
As a “budget” formula it was becoming increasingly less budget. Things started to pick up, however, when the better heeled entrants replaced their old air-cooled engines with modern GSX-R1100 or Yamaha R1 motors. Suddenly the cars were way faster and mechanically more reliable. OK, it was more expensive to build and run one but not as much as you’d think.
However, new engines with heaps more power brought a new problem. The extra power began to overtax fragile frames and components and the level of mechanical reliability that should have come was not as evident as we’d hoped.
So, the next step was to overhaul the running gear. In Victoria, especially, new frames were being built that could withstand the extra power, would handle better and allow the fitment of newer, higher tech components. The older machines trickled down the food chain and the size of fields began to grow.
And so we arrive at 2024. Fields are bigger and reliability has improved. New chassis enable competitors to drive a much more modern car and more cars are finishing the heat races and the feature races. All good, except that the GPs themselves are still looking very old and out of date.
And so, onto the scene last weekend arrived the much-anticipated new wave of GP Midget racing, the GrizzlyEVO JB01. As you can see from the picture above (courtesy of my good mate, Anthony Snedden) The JB01 is a totally different concept. It draws its inspiration from the original GPs but is, in every way, a modern, forward-looking car. The accompanying videos show, in detail why the car was built, what makes it different and why its proponents believe it will revolutionise the category. I do recommend that you watch them, they explain far better than I can where it has come from and where it is going.
Speedway has a history (a bad one) of freezing out anything that is new and innovative, just read up on the George Tatnell “wedge” midget car if you want an example. My initial fear was that the JB01 was going to be a victim of the same fate but the “establishment” seems to be supporting and welcoming its arrival and, to me, that’s great news.
The videos were made before the car’s debut at Goulburn and I can report that the builders’ hopes were well and truly justified. A fourth place finish in one of the heat races was followed by a strong 6th place in the feature race, starting from the back of the pack. It’s only upwards from here.
Thanks for reading, I promise my next article will be about vehicles that have less wheels than this one does!