Mallala raceway: 20 years since Supercars left Adelaide track
It’s been 20 years since Mallala Motorsport Park last staged a round of the Supercars series. Hometown hero Russell Ingall used his local knowledge to claim the farewell victory in 1998, and the decorated driver recalls the famous venue’s glory years.
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RUSSELL Ingall, as a youngster, cut so many laps around the old Mallala raceway he can still almost feel every lump and bump.
“And there was a few — there must have been 40 different types of bitumen laid down there over the years,” The Enforcer grins.
“When you look at today’s permanent circuits, the ones that have had a few dollars spent on them, they all look a bit ‘Hollywood’. But Mallala, she was a pretty rugged old joint.
“What they called the pit area was a couple of tin sheds, and there were no tyre walls along some of the fences.
“But back then, no-one whinged about it. It was a bit of bitumen — so that’s our racetrack, let’s go racing.
“We were either brave, or really stupid.”
On the eve of the newest event joining the Supercars calendar next weekend, at a sparkling facility at Tailem Bend, 2018 marks the 20th anniversary since the rustic former home of South Australian motorsport faced its own chequered flag as a top-flight racing circuit.
Mallala Motorsport Park staged its final event as a round of the Supercars championship in May of the 1998 season.
The track — which today celebrates its 57th birthday — had been part of Australian motorsport’s top category for 10 years, dating back to 1989. But a concerted effort to ignite the profile of Supercars and its rivalries during the late 1990s led to championship’s expansion in 1999.
Mallala was joined on the sidelines by Queensland’s Lakeside International Raceway, and the Sensational Adelaide 500 was born.
And in a fitting finale for Mallala, it was Adelaide boy Ingall who trumped a field boasting Dick Johnson, Mark Skaife and Larry Perkins, along with that year’s drivers champion Craig Lowndes, to claim a farewell victory.
“I grew up there, my father owned a service station in Port Adelaide, so I was always around cars. It was cars, engines and tyring to go fast, that was the deal,” Ingall says.
“So to win that last one in front of friends, family and the rest of it, there was a lot of emotion there.
“When you’re in your own home town on a track that you belted around in a car for years, that makes it pretty cool, too.”
Mallala Motorsport Park was officially opened by then premier Sir Thomas Playford on August 19, 1961.
The circuit, carved into a decommissioned RAAF airfield, was prepared in time to host the 1961 Australian Grand Prix barely two months after its unveiling — and across six decades it has become the weekend backyard for generations of SA childhoods.
Australian motorsport’s greatest names, from Bob Jane, Peter Brock and Johnson to modern stars Lowndes, Skaife and Ingall have tussled at the historic venue.
In its 57 years Mallala has flip-flopped as a premier motorsport venue, first falling out of vogue when Adelaide International Raceway came online in the 1970s before returning to favour in the ’80s under the ownership of former SA racer Clem Smith.
By 1989 it was staging rounds of the Australian Touring Car Championship, along with countless other club events, test days and national series.
Ingall was racing in the Australian Formula Ford championship in that year, and it was a single event at Mallala that he says helped propel him to the international stage.
Ingall was locked in a championship battle with Mark Larkham, who is now the technical commentator on Fox Sport’s Supercars coverage, when the pair clashed in a first-corner incident.
Larkham went on to claim the 1989 title but Ingall says the fallout from the Mallala round lit a fire inside him that pushed him to the following year’s Formula Ford crown, which led to a six-year stint in the cauldron of European racing.
“That 1989 Formula Ford race is probably even more pivotal than my win in ‘98 because that’s the one that put me on the map,” he says.
“1989 was my first full-time season and I was looking to go overseas so I knew I had to make it work. The race at Mallala ended up being pretty controversial because I tipped Larkham out at the start of the race — turned him around.
“He ended up winning the championship and I came second, but then I won it the year after. Looking back on it now, that was a huge moment in my career.”
For Ingall, whose teenage years were spent racing at Mallala as well as in karts at Bolivar and across the country, the venue has held an unmistakeable charm.
“My early days of watching motorsport was going out there, as a lot of fans did, and following the touring cars,” Ingall says.
“You could stand right up next to the old wire fence there, and you could almost touch the cars as they went past.
“As a driver, it was a challenging track, too, with the bumps and dips going into that long sweeping straight. A lot of people didn’t like it. But you look at somewhere like the Melbourne Grand Prix track, it’s like a billiard table. That’s all well and good, but it’s got no character to it.
“I’ve always believed, the harder the playing field, that’s what brings out the driver, and that’s what Mallala had.”
Today, Mallala remains an active complex, staging club sprints, karts and motorcycle meetings as well as regular drift events, Shannons Nationals and its traditional Easter Historics.
And while the race track’s time has passed as a venue for series on the scale of Supercars, South Australia will add a second event to the calendar from Friday when Tailem Bend joins the schedule.
Ingall, now a commentator with Fox Sports, is yet to visit the site but was eagerly awaiting seeing the development first-hand.
“It seems amazing. You never know about track design until the Supercars get on it, because motorbikes or Porsche Cup cars are a lot different.
“And because the street race (Adelaide 500) is such a phenomenon, it’s hard to tell what a second race on a permanent circuit will do.
“I think Tailem Bend will attract a lot of enthusiasts. It’s good to have one event skewed towards the corporate side, and another that’s for your hardcore race fans who just want to go out and watch the racing.”