Stormin’ Norman set the race pace

NORMAN Beechey changed the face of Australian motorsport. He stopped racing at 81 - but don’t expect him to drive slowly.

WAP16 John Connolly motoring column L-R Norm Beechey, retired Australian race car driver, who was given the nickname "Stormin Norman" by his fans; John Connolly, wife Margaret Beechey Picture: Supplied

AS you know, Norm Beechey and I never drop names, but we were having a quiet chat at The Second Annual Weekend Australian and Sporting Car Club of South Australia Memorial Lecture and Chicken Roll and Salad Dinner last week.

And the normally modest Norm said to me in a moment of reflection: “You know I think I was a better driver than I thought I was.”

Actually, Stormin’ Norman Beechey changed the face of Australian motorsport. He was a showman. He thought cars were better going sideways than in a straight line. He was an in-your-face driver. He campaigned big American muscle cars and he campaigned one of the world’s smallest cars. He drove the first Australian car to win a touring car championship. How good was he?

As the title of a video says, Before Brock there was Beechey. In 2010, when The Daily Telegraph named him one the top 10 drivers in Australian touring car racing history, it said: “Beechey’s sideways showmanship brought a new style and new audiences to racing in the 1960s and 70s, and his marketing savvy — Beechey ran a local Holden Monaro against mostly imported US machinery — pointed the way for the eventual success of V8 Supercars competition.”

“His premature retirement only helped cement Beechey’s legend as one of the greats in Australian racing,” Tim Blair wrote in the Telegraph.

Since it began in 1960, the Australian Touring Car Championship had been dominated by foreign cars. Jaguar had won four times, Mustang five times and a Cortina GT once. The drivers were just as legendary — Jane, Geoghegan, McKeown, Hamilton, Johnson and Gibson — but in 1969 not only were there foreign cars, there was also a “foreign” driver, Canadian-born Alan Moffatt.

Moffat, who had raced in the US, turned up for the first race of the series at Calder in a US factory prepared Coca-Cola red Trans Am Mustang. Real professionalism had arrived.

For 1970 Norm and his team built, at the back of Beechey’s Datsun dealership in Brunswick, what Australian Muscle Car editor Mark Oastler calls the greatest Holden muscle racer ever built, the bright yellow HT GTS 350. As Norm told Sport Car World: “It’s a 100 per cent racing car, the equal of any Trans Am Mustang or Camaro and we’ve achieved it all here in Australia in one season, with a budget only a fraction of the size the Yanks had to play with. It’s a magnificent effort, my greatest motor racing achievement. The Holden project was immense. It’s the sort of thing nobody will do in Australia again.”

Moffat’s car was no slouch, and the red Mustang went on to win 101 races from 151 starts. Both Jim McKeown’s and Brian Foley’s Porsches were super quick. Bob Jane and Ian Geoghegan were favourites in their Mustangs.

But Beechey won the series with three firsts and a second. He had built a car that took on the best cars in the world and beat them.

Norm stopped racing last year aged 81. In a few months he adds a very hot C7 Corvette to his collection. Don’t expect him to drive slowly.

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