Handy victory as paraplegic racer Matt Speakman earns licence to thrill

MATT Speakman is proof that being disabled and confined to a wheelchair is no handicap to racing sports cars.

Matt Speakman

MATT Speakman is proof that being disabled and confined to a wheelchair is no handicap to racing sports cars.

Speakman, paralysed below the waist for the past 20 years from a motorcycle accident, showed he was as quick as his able-bodied rivals behind the wheel of a $200,000 Porsche GT3 Carrera Cup car in full race trim at the Queensland Raceway at Ipswich this week.

The 45-year-old has finally won his three-year battle with motor sport officialdom for the right to be granted a special driver's licence.

The Queenslander, from Monterey Keys on the Gold Coast, drove the Porsche from the McElrea Racing Team garage under the direction of V8 Supercars driving standards observer Tomas Mezera, using a unique hand-control kit developed at the team's Gold Coast workshop.

The device allows Speakman - who will race full-time in the GT3 Cup Challenge, the feeder series to the Porsche Carrera Cup in South Australia next April - to push the car to speeds approaching 240km/h.

"The test drive with the hand-control kit went very, very well," an excited Speakman said. "The hand levers worked a treat - they tick all the boxes."

Speakman fought a three-year battle with the Confederation of Motor Sports to prove he could drive as quickly as any able-bodied person.

"I wanted to show I can be just as competitive in this sort of a race car, and that being confined to a wheelchair is not an added handicap," he said.

"I set my sights on lap times of anything under 60 seconds on this Ipswich track. But the quickest I got was in the low 62s, which was not too shabby.

"I've come away very confident I can be competitive racing Porsches from day one in 2013."

Speakman is the only driver in Australia competing in circuit racing with a major disability, and one of less than a handful in the world. "I previously campaigned and won a state title racing a Toyota Celica, which topped out at speeds of around 200km/h," he said. "But the Porsche goes much, much faster."

Andy McElrea, a Gold Coast-based mechanical engineer and Porsche team owner, described Speakman's first hitout at Queensland Raceway as "quite exceptional".

"Matt was outstanding and very impressive for someone who had never driven the car before," McElrea said. "What he showed me and my engineers back in pit lane on the computer data would in some cases take many able-bodied drivers sometimes weeks, months or even years to master.

"I'm betting he'll be even quicker next time we have him out on the track after we make some very minor and cosmetic modifications to the ergonomics of the hand controls.

"That piece of engineering was totally designed by my blokes in-house.

"What we did to accommodate Matt was to attach a trigger device to the clutch system, which is fitted with a six-speed manual sequential race gearbox.

"The braking system is a straight push lever with a custom drop link connected to a standard Porsche brake pedal.

"We also mounted on the brake lever two buttons which manually control the gear shifts. The car's throttle is activated by a ring mounted behind the steering wheel."