Historic Qld Race Meeting Warwick 2019

Historic Queensland Race Meeting, Warwick 13th-14th July 2019.

By John Barram.

This is the big annual event for Historic Racing in Queensland with entrants from as far as Tasmania and South Australia. This year it featured Groups C and A Heritage Touring Cars and I particularly liked seeing some of the Ford Sierra and BMW cars from that era.

For Lotus representation, Michael Byrnes was up from Melbourne with his usually giant killing S4 Lotus Seven. However he was having problems with the clutch all weekend which limited his pace somewhat although he still managed a third in his class.

Peter Boel had come over from New Zealand to race his Lotus 23B Flintstone in Group O for sports cars 1962-69. Pete spent a lot of the weekend coming from the back of the grid for a variety of reasons, but in the race that mattered he won the class to take out the Lionel Ayers Trophy in memory of that great sports car racer from earlier years. Lionel’s son Bruce was there to present the trophy to Pete.

The Formula Ford group had over 20 entrants making for some competitive racing. Greg Bray with his Lotus 61 took out third place in the Fa class.

I was running my Lotus Seven by invitation against Group L and M racing and Sports cars, all of the cars being from the early sixties. There were five of us with very similar lap times and we enjoyed the nose to tail racing over the weekend.

As usual there are some drop dead gorgeous cars at this event. If you are into race cars, Chris Farrell had his 1982, F2 Spirit Honda 201 which had been the car of Thierry Boutsen. With a naturally aspirated 2 litre Honda V6 engine it looked and sounded fabulous. The Lightweight E-Type replica looked like it was carved from a block of alloy. Perfection. The meeting celebrated 60 years of Minis among other automotive anniversaries and the minis turned up in droves. The two big Healeys sitting in the winter sunshine were a picture to behold. Trevor Bassett (past Lotus driver) had his beautiful Ferrari Daytona which looks nearly as good just sitting in the pits as it does with its nose in the air coming down the straight.

One of the sponsors of the meeting was Rare Spares who supplied a $100 Gift Certificate. The president of the Historic Racing Car club was to choose the “nicest” car at the meeting to receive the certificate and, amongst all the above and many more cars, he chose my Lotus Seven!