THE ANDERSON SPRINTCAR HAS
BEEN A 20-YEAR BUILD. I DID
IT WHEN I HAD SPARE TIME OR
WHEN I COULD GET THE PARTS
streamlined and better built than any before it. Its success led the local
scene towards lighter cars with cross torsion-bar rears and Chevy
V8 engines as standard. In fact, no other car did as much to advance
open-wheel dirt racing Down Under until Californian Johnny Anderson
arrived with his sprintcar in 1972.
Bob got what was left of the original Mooneyes chassis for $800,
and was later stunned to get a phone call from a friend of a friend
who’d found the original steel body sitting in a stable at Canterbury
Racecourse! Bob picked that up for $20 and the restoration was
finished in time for him to cut a few demo laps during the final night of
racing at Sydney Showground in 1996.
“I think when the Mooneyes car first came here Bill Warner ran it
with a 327ci Chevy, which would have been a fairly late-model thing in
those days,” Bob says. “Now it’s got a 283ci Chev bored out to around
302ci or something like that.
“I did a fair bit of the restoration work on Mooneyes and also had help
from some good mates – Clive Weiss did the panelwork, Alan and Paul
Felsch put the motor together, and Alan Birkett did the exhaust pipes.”
All of those same mates would later pitch in to help rebuild the Johnny
Anderson sprintcar.
First raced in Australia at Liverpool Speedway in early ’72, this car
put the wind up the V8 open-wheeler world like nothing before or
since. Fans flocked to see the radical new track-burner, while fellow
competitors cried foul – their Super Mods couldn’t match it with this
nimble, lightweight, clutchless contraption.
Protests were lodged against it, sanctions were placed on it, drivers
had punch-ups over it, but in the end everyone had to either upgrade
their gear or be left eating dust.
“When the Anderson car came here it sort of made everything – I
wouldn’t say obsolete overnight – but people had to work a lot harder,”
Bob says. “It had virtually no weight in it, it handled better, and it was
just way ahead.
“It turned up with no clutch and that caused a lot of drama. People
were against it. Guys had invested a lot of money in their Super
Modifieds and I guess they could see the writing on the wall that this
car would make their cars obsolete.”
After Johnny Anderson’s successful tour was done, future 10-time
Australian champion Garry Rush bought the car, shrugged off the
backlash, and started making regular trips to victory lane. Pretty soon
everyone else had either bought or built a sprintcar, or at the very least
thrown the clutch out of their Super Mods. The golden sprintcar era of
the 1970s was ushered in.
How the car wound up in Darwin a decade later, Bob doesn’t know,
but it was suffering from neglect when he tracked it down in 1984.
Sitting unsheltered and unloved outside a suburban home with the
grass getting taller around it, he offered the owner $300 for it, which
was the amount of cash he had in his pocket, and the deal was done.
“I got the bottom half of the chassis, like the main rails, the front axle
with a spring, the fibreglass tail, the aluminium fuel tank, the engine
plates,” he explains. “Basically the bottom half of the car was there and
I had to recreate the top half.
“When I was finished racing in Darwin the car got tied onto the sideAC
B