Rev Head

DEDICATION

I dedicate this book to all the folks in the motoring industry

who have welcomed an amateur hack like me with open arms to

their wonderful world of motoring mayhem.

CONTENTS

DEDICATION

START YOUR ENGINES!

CHAPTER 1   INSPIRED BY LEGENDS

CHAPTER 2   BILLYCART BEGINNINGS

CHAPTER 3   THE CAR THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING

CHAPTER 4   FIRST SETS OF WHEELS

CHAPTER 5   CARS I HAVE CRASHED

CHAPTER 6   FIREWORKS AND DRAG CARS

CHAPTER 7   CARS I HAVE OWNED (OR WOULD LIKE TO)

CHAPTER 8   SWEDISH INTERLUDE

CHAPTER 9   BATHURST AND BUGGIES

CHAPTER 10 CARS ON FILM

CHAPTER 11 TOP GEAR

CHAPTER 12 DRIVING ALL SORTS

CHAPTER 13 NOT JUST FOUR WHEELS

CHAPTER 14 WHAT I LEARNED ALONG THE WAY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALSO BY SHANE JACOBSON

COPYRIGHT

Not all my adventures on four wheels have ended well. Not all of them have ended on four wheels.

Caltography

An early trophy. It was obvious to me that Bathurst and F1 glory would follow if I could just master the right pose with my sunglasses.

Into the lions’ den: filming in England for Top Gear Australia. It was meant to merely look dangerous, but we seriously miscalculated. The park warden said it was very nearly very nasty.

Top Gear Australia

Squeezed into a helmet, and then into a race-prepared Toyota 86 GT, for my first attempt at Bathurst.

Kids, sunshine, the spray of a garden hose, and one of my favourite cars in the driveway. Very happy indeed.

My turn to be co-driver, during an early rally. All the risk, none of the control, and in a car we’d built ourselves. What could possibly go wrong?

START YOUR ENGINES!

I’ve always called myself a motoring enthusiast rather than a rev head, but my publisher thought Motoring Enthusiast was going to make a mighty dull book title. It was hard to disagree, but her suggestion came with its own problems. I explained that Rev Head seemed a bit too simple, a bit too one-dimensional. Perhaps even just a little undignified.

I wanted a book title that explained my life-long passion for everything on wheels, and the amazing adventures I’ve been lucky enough to have in between performing in theatres and making films and television shows. How, after years of acting in obscurity, my unlikely stardom as a toilet technician in the film Kenny suddenly made it possible for me to race at Bathurst, compete in the Australian Rally Championship, take a road trip with Paul Hogan, and co-host the Australian version of Top Gear.

‘It’s an obsession!’ I told her. ‘To me the streets have always been a moving automobile art gallery, filled with wonders. I’ve always believed that the opportunity to hit the road in any direction, and in any type of vehicle, is about as good a gift as life can give you.

‘It’s more than that, though. It’s a love of motor sport in all its forms, an overwhelming desire to drive every type of vehicle I can, a fascination with big engines, particularly V8s, and particularly when they are . . .’

‘Revving?’

‘Yes, revving. Revving so hard you can feel it in your body, in your soul . . .’

‘And in your head.’

‘I suppose so, yes.’

‘So let’s go back to calling it Rev Head.’

‘OK.’

Wearing my most serious face while waiting for the start of a special stage in the Australian Rally Championship. Here’s co-driver Darren Masters (right) putting all his faith in my abilities. Brave man.

motorsportphotography.com

Proud as punch, with early rally Escort and fellow Rover and lifelong mate Steve Lawton.

1

INSPIRED BY LEGENDS

So here am I, an actor with one film under my belt, driving the legendary Sandown race track at something close to 200 kilometres per hour. There’s a voice in my right ear. It has a heavy Canadian accent and is familiar . . . has been for decades. It’s Allan Moffat, multiple Bathurst winner and touring-car icon, and he’s saying, ‘Well done, Shane. Yes, you got that corner close to right. Bit faster here, ease off the brake a touch earlier this time, well done! Now flat out from here . . .’

This wasn’t for a film, but it was because of one. Kenny had become a runaway success. I now had a fully recognisable face – even if it was one that could make a lemon squint – and had fielded a call from the Australian Grand Prix organisers. They weren’t inviting me to partner Mark Webber in his new Renault-powered Red Bull for the 2007 GP, but as the great English philosopher Michael Jagger once stated, You Can’t Always Get What You Want.

Anyway, they did want me to drive in something, even if it was only the so-called celebrity race. I knew it was a complete sideshow, the circus act or juggling before the main event, but that was fine by me. I had limited circuit-racing experience, yet here was a chance to compete on a real Grand Prix circuit in front of a real Grand Prix audience.

Perhaps even better still, I got a week of tuition in the finer points of circuit racing the week before. During that week I learned a hell of a lot, including one very important lesson that came to me on that first day with Moffat in my ear. It is something that will always stick in my tiny little mind, and we’ll come to it shortly.

RATTLETRAP RALLIES

My racing life, like so many other things, started with the scouting movement. We Rovers (older scouts) had a car we entered in amateur rallies. We had no major sponsor, or minor sponsor for that matter, so we filled the financial gap with some fundraising, and a few of the crew even threw their hands in their own pockets. The biggest asset we had was all the free labour. There were 26 of us to work on it for free, and there was also the resourcefulness of begging parts, or borrowing them or, just occasionally, borrowing with intent to return, as I liked to say.

Our car was a two-litre Ford Escort, and the scouting movement had a regular thing called Mudbash, which I used to MC. It involved a range of different car-related challenges conducted on, you guessed it, mud. There were time trials and obstacle courses and it all ended with a tug-of-war. The tug-of-war was a knockout event, and in the end you had the two strongest cars – and they tended to be tractors converted into cars, or cars converted into tractors. A two-litre Escort was never really going to be competitive in most of the events.

Fortunately though I got to drive for the Snowy Morcom Rovers (which was the name of our crew) at a rally near Geelong. There were about 40 other cars competing; some were buggies, some had a bit of sponsorship, and ours was powered solely by the blood, sweat, tears and laughter of a whole lot of mates working together.

The Rover Crew. That’s me sitting on the ground, contemplating my handful of straw.

The circuit was unconventional. Near the start it had a huge water puddle – you’d call it a lake if you were a cartographer – which favoured one type of vehicle, while the rest was a pretty conventional five-kilometre rally circuit, which favoured another type. Our solution was to bolt two front tractor wheels to each side of the car at the rear (that’s where the power went) so we could get through the puddle, then rely on the Escort’s other properties such as pretty good handling, to get us through the rest. This was not engineering. It was guesswork. We knew the Escort handled all right before we worked our ‘magic’ but had no idea what the thing was going to do with tractor wheels at the back. But hey, it was amateur rallying. We weren’t playing for sheep stations.

When I was sitting on the starting line for our timed trial I was holding the clutch in and mashing the accelerator pedal rhythmically. My heart rate was matching the revs: I was so nervous I could have sworn we were playing for sheep stations. Still, we had the thing tuned beautifully, and the one thing we did know about those double wheels at the back was that they gave a level of traction that was simply amazing.

The traction was so amazing, alas, that when I finally dropped the clutch I bolted forward for an inch then spluttered to a halt. The crowd laughed. They thought I’d stalled, but I hadn’t. It was much worse than that. Under full power, the tractor-wheeled Escort had completely chewed first gear.

Under the rules we had 45 minutes to re-front up for our time trial. So we pushed it back into the pits and tipped the whole car on its side. That’s something you can do with a car if you are in a hurry and not too fastidious about the aesthetics. It allowed us to pour in some petrol to flush the gearbox oil, and the remnants of the shredded first gear, out of the casing. We bolted the box back up with some new oil in it – or maybe it was old oil, it was a pretty lean operation we were running by necessity – and voila! We dropped the car back on its four wheels.

In about 44 minutes and 55 seconds we had an Escort that was a going concern again, although it was now one with only three forward gears, and probably even less chance of getting off the line without drama.

The flag dropped. Well to be truthful, I don’t remember a flag. More likely a guy yelled ‘Go!’ then scratched his groin. I took off, using a technique I’d learned on two-stroke motorbikes. I knew if you kept popping the clutch while revving the pants off it, a temperamental motorcycle would lurch forward in little increments and eventually get enough momentum to take off without stalling.

Maybe the same would be true with three-speed Escorts. I revved the pants off it and did the clutch-pumping thing and got off the line in second gear. From there it was straight into the drink, at which point the Escort announced via some very strange noises that if I couldn’t find a lower gear, it was stopping in protest.

I didn’t have a lower gear but I kept pumping and revving and cajoling and swearing and the thing somehow slid and shimmied and bunny-hopped through the muddy bottom of the lake, thanks in part to the tractor tyres at the rear and me keeping the engine up around maximum revs.

Another mad mudbashing moment in a Rovers’ car held together with gaffer tape, woggles and ludicrous amounts of youthful optimism.

There’s standard mud and there’s deluxe mud. This is definitely the second type. Fortunately, our Escort loved it.

I was now on the normal rally circuit but I had to keep it above 4000 rpm or it would slow down almost to a stall. That wasn’t easy on a circuit with tight corners and no first gear. I had to keep the thing pinging and arrive at every corner twice as quickly as I should have, with these massive rear wheels making it doubly unpredictable. I tried to Scando flick (thus called because the Scandinavians pretty much invented the art of being sideways to turn a corner well before you even arrived at the corner) it through each change of direction, revving like mad, and hoping with even more madness that I could get around without hitting anything.

On that circuit you disappeared on about the third corner and the crowd, modest though it was, had to wait for you to reappear. My mates thought they had a two-minute wait if things went well, but were pretty resigned to things not going well. The most likely result was they would have to go out and find me.

They could hear the engine revving the whole time, expecting it to stop at any moment, but it didn’t. I reappeared sideways and not entirely in control.

Somehow, I had stopped it stalling, and when the times were collated our Snowy Morcom Rovers’ Escort was in first place. That was the first time I thought I was pretty good at driving a car . . . but before you think I’m boasting, I’d like to refer you to the many other stories in this book that point to a counter-argument.

That’s the thing about Australian blokes. If there is a room full of us, and you ask if there is anyone present who is good at golf, we’ll be very humble. Nobody wants to boast about being good at golf.

But ask a room full of blokes if they’re good drivers and they’ll all put up their hands. Every bloke thinks maybe, just maybe, he could win Bathurst if the conditions were right. At that point, I was no exception.

NEUTRAL HANDLING

We had a different gearbox problem with our rally Escort at a test day we were having. I know . . . a test day, how good are we sounding now? Some of the guys had just put in a new gearbox (by which I mean a new gearbox to us, but a very old one to the planet). I arrived at the first corner at the usual speed – or my usual speed, which was at the very limit of my talent, plus 22.5 per cent value added.

Then, feeling like one of those fearless Scandinavians who seemed to win the World Rally Championship every year during the 1980s, I put the car into a slide between two trees and pulled it down a gear. Except I couldn’t get the gear. No matter what I did, I was stuck in neutral and the slowing-down effect of the gear change wasn’t happening. I ended up going into one of the trees I should have been going between.

There was quite a bit of damage to the car but it was nowhere near as much as the crew wanted to do to me. They had only just finished rebuilding the car, only to have some chump (AKA Shane) undo all their heroic work. Trouble was, they hadn’t bothered to tell me that the begged, borrowed or borrowed-with-intent-to-return gearbox they had just fitted didn’t have synchro. It was never going to go into that lower gear unless I’d double-declutched. I just didn’t