scored 249mph at half-track. The best ET has
been a 4.87 over the quarter, the bigger gains
coming from re-timing of the cams.
The financial burden of drag racing has been
a major hurdle for the Sainty team, so their cars
have always been home-built. Only items they
couldn’t make – tyres, wheels, wings, gauges
- were bought. Everything else – from axles,
hubs, chassis, clutches, fuel timing systems,
and, of course, that famous donk – has been
made in-house.
Stan formally retired and sold his workshop
in 2016. He moved all the machinery and
equipment to Terry and wife Belinda’s
engineering business at Riverstone, where he
could continue the development of his engine.
The future became brighter with an offer of a
US-built car from fellow racer Santo Rapisarda.
It was lighter, with magnesium panels and all
the latest touches throughout the chassis. Then
came the bad news. Stan had been losing
weight gradually, suffering with back pain and
generally feeling unwell. A check-up by the
family doctor produced a diagnosis of diabetes.
“Get your diet fixed and take these pills and
you’ll be okay,” he was told, but the problems
didn’t go away. A second opinion a few months
later returned a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer
and just a few months to live.
Everyone was stunned. The calmest of all
seemed to be Stan. At 71, despite so-called
retirement, he seemed unstoppable. He told his
daughter Julie: “I’m not afraid to die. I just have
so many things that I want to do.”
The announcement of Stan’s illness and the
diagnosis on Facebook produced 131,764
viewers and 537 comments, every one of them
replied to. Stan just couldn’t comprehend it. “He
thought he was just Stan,” Marg says.
His major immediate goal was making the East
Coast Thunder Nationals in Sydney. It was to
be the debut for the new car and all those newideas. His beloved engine, he was sure, was
about to live up to its promise. He failed to make
that date with destiny by just under two weeks.
And yet there they were in the pits: son Terry,
brother Norm, wife Marg, daughter Julie, and
all the team, most of whom have been with the
family since the boat racing days. They were
still under a black cloud from the previous day’s
funeral, but were determined to give it everything
they had to get the car down the track, for Stan.
“Stan desperately wanted to be here for this
meeting,” Marg said in Sydney. “He fought to the
end, to the bitter end. I would have preferred to
not be here right now, not after yesterday, but
this is what Stan wanted.”
And what Stan wanted, Stan got. When asked
what was behind Stan’s obsession with making
his engine work, without exception everyone
answered: “Determination.”
Tuner Dwayne Riley, a relative newcomer to
the team, says he had never met anyone as01: Stan and his brother Norm were a tight
team until the end. Norm has been legally
blind since he was 18 but has an incredible
propensity for numbers. “He’s pretty much a
human calculator,” Terry says of his uncleFOR THE SAINTYS, SO THEIR CARS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN HOME-BUILT
04: The third iteration of the billet three-
valve motor now runs on an American rail.
“The new US car is lighter than our cars and
probably better,” says Terry, whose PB ET is
a 4.87@297mph, run in Perth 10 years ago.
“I think there’s a PB in it. It’s just a matter of
everything lining up on that particular run”02: The Saintys’ first home-built Top Fuel
dragster was based on a 300mm toy model
that Terry owned! Piloted by Terry, the car
debuted at Eastern Creek in 1992 and ended
up running a best of 5.2sec over the quarter
03: Stan developed his three-valve – two
inlets and one exhaust – arrangement
through trial and error while working on
motors for himself as well as top team
owners Graeme Cowin and Santo Rapisarda