Page 14 - Beep Beep September 2021

WRM #31 lined up to start...
My Great Bathurst Experience with David Bruce
In the July edition of BB I invited any RCC member who had driven around Bathurst at a racing speed to let me know because most of us have to tootle round at a mere 60kph. How sad! David Bruce kindly sent in this exciting account of his drive on the famous circuit.
Editor
In 2007 the Festival of Sports Cars known as ‘FoSC’ advised they were promoting a Historic Race Meeting and regularity trial at the famous Mt Panorama circuit at Bathurst to be run at Easter 2008. This event was to be for historic sports cars only.
We had ordered a new motorhome
which was to arrive in time for
Easter. I decided to enter the meeting as a regularity competitor.
In a regularity trial each competitor
does a number of practice laps to establish a lap time, then they nominate a time they think they
would take to do the event; in this
case each event was three laps with a rolling start. The driver closest to his nominated time wins so in theory the slowest driver could be the winner.
While waiting for the motorhome to arrive I prepared the WRM, my 1959 historic sports racing car, for the event. The main job was to fit the highest diff. ratio I had to allow for the long Conrod Straight. The WRM only had a Ford Prefect engine; all of 1172cc.
My wife, Joan, and I planned to leave on the Monday before Easter allowing three days to get to Bathurst on Wednesday afternoon. We finally picked up our new Sunliner motorhome on the Saturday, spent Sunday loading food, clothes, tools and every spare part I thought I might need.
It was a bit daunting driving the motorhome for the first time with the trailer attached but all went well.
When we arrived at the circuit it was being used by Mercedes Benz Australia for invited guests to sample the new Mercedes Benz AMG 6.3 L sedans. There were about 25 of these new cars all being driven hard. They had a team of mechanics changing tyres and brake discs and pads.
David Bruce driving at Bathurst: 2008
WRM #31 rounding Hell Corner...
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Wesetupagoodcampsiteattheendofthe pits adjacent to Hells Corner beside our friends Dick and Fran Vermeulen from Cooroy; also in a Sunliner.
On Thursday we completed the necessary paper work and went through scrutineering. That afternoon car carriers arrived and took all but 10 of the Benzes away.
On Friday the organisers of our meeting had arranged with Mercedes Benz to use the 10 cars as pace cars. The plan was for drivers who had not raced at Mt Panorama before to follow the pace car in groups around the circuit for about ten laps. Each pace car had an observer checking how the drivers following were handling the track.
Imagine the excitement I felt as I took my racing car on to the most famous racing circuit in Australia. The weather on Friday was overcast with a light sprinkle of rain which meant I was very careful with my driving; the last thing I needed was to have a spin and hit something.
Saturday and Sunday were given over to racing and regularity events.
We entered the track at the bottom of Conrod Straight and rounded Murrays corner to the