David Mist wasn’t a motor racing photographer but he took some interesting shots on assignments allocated to him by the advertising agency USP Benson…
The client on this occasion was Shell, the ‘talent’ the Scuderia Veloce racing team owned and operated by David McKay and perhaps the Warwick Farm circuit itself. Mist’s gigs incuded the ’63 and ’67 AGP weekends, ‘the 1965 Shell Racing Series Scuderia Veloce Racing Team’ and a meeting at Catalina Park, Katoomba. Click here for a link to an article which includes background on SV; https://primotipo.com/2017/01/04/scuds/
Its David McKay on the grid, above, with driver Greg Cusack and Greg’s Elfin Catalina Ford FJ circa 1964. It won the 1964 Australian Formula 2 Championship, at Lowood, Queensland, chassis ‘6310’ is now owned by the National Motor Racing Museum.
Cusack came through the world of rallying and burst onto the racing scene with speed in a Lotus 23, an Elfin Mallala sportscar, the Catalina above and then into a Brabham BT6 Ford. During this time he progressively built a significant automotive retailing business, a Ford dealership in Canberra. Perhaps this dual focus of business and racing mitigated against ultimate motor racing success but he rose right through the ranks to race McKay’s Brabham BT23A Repco Tasman 2.5 Formula car.
Interestingly this very chassis, Jack’s 1967 Tasman weapon- ‘BT23A-1’ has recently been acquired by the National Automobile Museum, which is good and bad! Good in that it stays in Australia, bad in that it now becomes a static museum exhibit rather than occasionally raced as it has been by Peter Simms for the last 30 years.
The Tasman meetings attracted enormous crowds, here the crush is around Graham Hill’s Lotus in 1967.
Sticking with Graham, here he is no doubt leaning against his courtesy car for the weekend. Its a big Datsun/Nissan Cedric, I wonder what GH thought of it? I wrote an article about the Prince/Nissan R380 racer a short while ago which tangentially talks about the rise and rise of the Japanese manufacturers in Australia in the sixties. Click here to read it;
https://primotipo.com/2017/12/08/prince-datsun-make-that-nissan-r380/
The popularity of touring car racing in Australia began in the fifties and has exploded exponentially since. Sadly. Sadly in that the ascension has been at the expense of the purer forms of the sport- single seaters and sports-racing cars. Still, the market has spoken and we enthusiasts of the Real McKoy have to suck it up and remember the glory days of the fifties to seventies, and even then other than at Tasman time, grids could be pretty shitful in quantity if not in quality.
One of the touring car greats as a racer, personality and crowd pleaser was Norm Beechey, winner of the 1965 and 1970 ATCC in Ford Mustang and Holden Monaro 350 respectively, here aboard his Chev Impala in 1963.
He was a member of the SV squad at the time, winning the NSW Touring Car Championship in this car on the ultra tight, Catalina Park circuit. McKay is alongside the car together, I think with Claude Morton, Norm’s mechanic. David is in driving gear so he’s not quite retired. I’m guessing this as the 1963 Australian GP weekend in February, McKay finished a splendid 4th in his Brabham BT4 Climax in that race behind Brabham, Surtees and McLaren.
The spinner below is Gavin Youl in a Brabham BT2 Ford, the passing Nota BMC is Les Howard’s chassis owned by John Medley for 45 or so years!
Photo Credits…
All shots by David Mist
Finito…
primotipo... 