I’VE BEEN LUCKY. I’VE BEEN IN THE RIGHT SPOTS AT THE RIGHT
TIME AND KNEW WHAT CARS I WAS LOOKING FOR
F
ORMER speedway racer Bob Blacklaw pinches himself
whenever he enters the shed out back of his home in Sydney’s
lower northern suburbs. Although it’s taken him 30 years to
acquire and restore the three iconic open-wheelers that dominate
the floor space, it still strikes him as being slightly surreal.
These are race cars he once idolised: the ex-Bob Tattersall
Cascio Offy Kurtis Kraft midget car; the all-conquering Mooneyes
Corvette Super Modified imported and raced by Bill Warner; and the
game-changing Johnny Anderson sprintcar, the first sprintcar ever
imported into the country.
“I’ve been lucky,” Bob says. “I’ve been in the right spots at the right
time and knew what cars I was looking for. This Mooneyes car – I
was in love with it when I was young; I used to follow it everywhere
it raced. I still can’t quite believe that all these years later, here it is,
sitting in my shed.”
Bob’s love of old-time speedway is deeply ingrained. The shed is a
veritable shrine to the dirt oval, and so is his house. In his living room
he’s got two old speedway bikes parked in front of a wall-to-wall trophy
case stacked with awards and memorabilia from his racing days.
On the floor lies a custom-made rug commemorating the two NSW
Sprintcar Championships he won back in the 80s.
“I went to Windsor RSL Speedway in 1962. That was my first
speedway meeting, and I guess I just fell in love,” he says. “Eventually
I started racing myself. The era of speedway that I lived through was
the best.”
Since hanging up the helmet, Bob has slowly established himself as
one of our foremost vintage speedway restorers – and we do mean
slowly. His latest and greatest resto effort – the recently unveiledJohnny Anderson sprintcar – was found over 30 years ago while on a
racing trip to Darwin, and sat in the shed for at least 10 years without
so much as a spanner being laid on it.
“That’s been a 20-year build,” Bob explains. “Mainly because it
wasn’t a full-time project; I did it when I had spare time or when I
could get the parts. But basically the Anderson car is the first one I’ve
done from scratch myself. I’ve had more time to play with cars lately,
whereas during my earlier restorations I was working six days a week
and racing on weekends, so I had to farm some things out.”
The oldest car in Bob’s stable is the black #5 Cascio Offy, which
he found on the same Darwin trip that yielded the Anderson sprintcar.
Built in 1948 by the famed Kurtis Kraft shop in Glendale, California,
the four-pot Offenhauser-powered midget was brought to Australia
in 1961 by American star Bob Tattersall, and subsequently passed
through many local drivers’ hands before ending up in the Top End in
sad shape – some joker had fitted it with a Datsun engine!
“The car had a hard life in Darwin and was very much in need of
tender loving care,” recalls Bob, who bought it sans motor and located
a replacement original Offenhauser in New Zealand. “I did some of the
restoration with a bloke called Steve McEvoy and then the car went
to Curly Carroll in Queensland. Curly sadly passed away and so the
car came back here and I did a bit more on it, but I had no spare time.
Eventually I got to know a guy in Melbourne called Wayne Pearce, so
I sent it to him and he finished it.”
In the meantime, Bob completed work on the orange #26 Mooneyes
Corvette, which had originally been imported to Australia from San
Jose by local Super Modified racer Bill Warner in 1963. Super Mods
were the precursor to modern sprintcars, and this one was more