What happened this month in MOTOR 18 years ago? We took on a 24-hour ProKart race

Day of Blunder

How many mistakes can a rookie team from the MOTOR palace make in a 24-hour kart race? Plenty and then some, it would seem…

Twenty-four hours in a kart. Not such a bad thing, right? As long as you get the right number of drivers (24 seemed like a nice, round figure), some shelter, loads of sugary, chemically laden kidney killers masquerading as energy drinks and plenty of coffee, how hard could it be?

This feature was first published in MOTOR magazine's November 2003 issue

Everyone else was so damned keen, too. Todd Hallenbeck quickly nodded his ascent, claiming he’d been born in a kart – or was it conceived? Deano Evans didn’t need much prompting, either; I mean, there were going to be at least 20 competitors he could attempt to bend to his will with his, let’s say, passionate driving style.

Marcus Hofmann was in, too – and how. So excited was the young fella that he ran out to the nearest race shop and bought a new skid lid that Schuey would be proud to wear. The thing’s got more wings than the feminine hygiene products aisle at Coles. And of course there was the Big Cheese, He Who Must Be Obeyed, Taylor (M).

Surprisingly (okay, not surprisingly), my idea was poo-pooed by one or two of the office nancy-boys. S’pose you could break a nail if you put your glass of chardonnay down the wrong way.

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After his heroic efforts in Team MOTOR’s triumphant seven percent completion of the Wakefield 500 a few months back, Jesse Taylor decided to go out on a high, leaving us without the services of a man who could devour a brace of Magnums while juggling at least 15 half-baked race strategies, one of which may or may not have seen us stop in the centre of the track, alight and perform a Honduran fertility dance before driving the wrong way back to the pitlane, shouting obscenities in Italian. You gotta cover all the bases…

So I was still one sucke… err, driver down on an ideal crew. Enter former Ford KartStars champ and current Formula Ford ace Adam Graham. A casual chat with his boss, George Turton, sales director of kart manufacturer Arrow, saw the youngster bundled into a Sydney-bound plane from his Melbourne base, without any inkling that he’d been sold into slavery to a bunch of crusties whose talents in a kart would make an eight-year-old rookie snicker.

So we had the bodies. How to keep them happy? There was only one answer: a motorhome. A place to sleep, eat, change, hide from angry rivals and talk bullshit. Coming to our rescue with a cracker of a 30ft Winnebago, complete with shower, six beds, TV and toilet, was Tom Newsom from Around Australia Motorhomes. We had our gin palace!

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The supplementary regulations stipulated that we would be required to make something in the order of 23 pitstops, making some sort of pitlane facility a necessity. As a desperate grab at my rapidly receding youth, I’ve invested heavily in a kart set-up over the last two years. And let me tell you, a finer vehicle to gather cobwebs and dust I’ve yet to come across. It did, however, provide us with a pit shade, tools, folding chairs and an Esky. Or two.

Now, as a crack motoring publication, it’d be reasonable to expect that we spent weeks creating meticulous strategies by consulting the finest racing minds in the country, right? Well, if by that you mean we stood around, scratching our heads, 10 minutes prior to the start with absolutely no idea what we were doing, then we had a strategy, all right.

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Actually, our strategy was decided the minute Adam got off the plane. As young, as fit and as talented as we will never be, it was the not-so-secret desire of all of us that Adam lead off, have a 10-minute break after, say, six or seven hours, go back out for the night stint and allow us to each take a 10-minute pull each at the end. Seemed reasonable enough; I mean, the kid brought two suits with him. Two! Eventually we arrived at a roster system, which gave the five of us at least four hour-long sessions each in the saddle.

It didn’t take long for us to realise how good Adam was going to make us look, as he topped the practice time sheets in Li’l Taxi, our rental kart’s red and blue colour combo instantly reminding us of a 1970s cab. Let me tell you, the looks on the faces of some of the gun owner-drivers as Adam made mincemeat of them in a rental kart was a sight to behold.

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Fully floodlit, the short yet sinuous Kembla Grange Raceway course offered little respite for the weary. A tough switchback complex preceded the 200-metre back straight, before a hard stop at a gravel trap-lined hairpin. With a super-wide exit, the hairpin afforded both the place to look glorious in front of the pit gallery as well as the chance to pick gravel from places the sun doesn’t shine should you screw up.

And screw up we… actually didn’t do it too often. Lest you’re despairing that I’m going to give you a lap-by-lap account of how we blitzed the field in a Schuey-at-Monza-esque manner, be assured that we did nothing of the kind. But it’s true to say that Adam led the first eight laps of the event after the Le Mans-style start, and he wasn’t too keen to allow other karts – lighter, more powerful and more tunable than our hardy beast – past. In fact, one of his shut-the-door manoeuvres brought a tear to Dean’s eye.

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“Now, that’s an expert,” he half-whispered, gazing rapturously into the distance.

How did we cope with the rigours and routines of 24 hours of karting? Some better than others, it must be said. For mine, I actually found the dead-of-night running to be the most enjoyable of all.

There’s a real sense of camaraderie out on the track – well, when you’re being lapped with the regularity of bad jokes on Rove Live, you really get to know people. Rugged up in a two-layer race suit, polypropylene undershirt, thick gloves and socks, I was completely comfortable in the single-figure temperature – save for my arse, which felt… well, I couldn’t actually feel it.

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Doing it hardest was Dean. In his usual style, he rampaged out of the blocks on his first stint, carving karts up like a Sydney cabbie. Later, about 30 laps in to his second run, he was knackered.

“Should we pull him in?” asked Todd, obviously concerned at Dean’s erratic pace.

“Nah. Unless he’s doing 35s, leave him out,” said MT. “Teach him a lesson.”

Just two laps later we literally levered the poor fella out of the kart.

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Marcus was great fun to watch, throwing the kart at every corner and dealing with the consequences as they arose. Sure, he hit more people than everyone else in the event combined and multiplied by three, but everyone leaned over the fence when he took to the track.

Todd and MT were the epitome of controlled enduro driving, keeping up a good pace for the whole duration, and Adam was a bloomin’ robot, just churning out lap after lap in the 30-second bracket for hours on end. And I did say hours; his longest stint was in the order of two and a half hours’ duration.

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By the time Li’l Taxi crossed the line at 1pm on Sunday, the Prokart mechanics had replaced our brake pads twice, refitted a broken pull-start cord after a botched fuel stop, straightened the front axles three times and the rear axle twice, aligned the steering at least three times and refuelled it 23 times. We ran the entire 2455 laps on one set of Dunlop tyres, too.

We’d run into numerous competitors, been tipped off the track a couple of times and had run out of fuel once.

Our final position? Eleventh out of 14 starters, 290 laps behind eventual winner Civic Avengers. And with all motorsport clichés firmly put aside, when Todd crossed that finish line, it felt like a win regardless.

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Footnote: we were saddened to hear that, some weeks after Adam competed with us in the Prokart enduro, his sister Kristy died in a car accident near Lismore, NSW. Our condolences go out to Adam and his family.