Pioneer uses hands-on tactics

DISABLED racing driver Matt Speakman has never looked back.

Matt Speakman

MATT Speakman is a determined and ambitious fighter, never one to give up easily.

It took him three years of dicing with the Confederation of Australian Motor Sport to convince it he was good enough to be granted a licence to race in the GT3 Porsche series from next year.

The series is the feeder class to Australia's ultra-competitive Porsche Carrera Cup, in which he hopes to compete in 2014, 21 years after losing the use of his legs in a motorcycle accident.

"The word 'quit' isn't in my vocabulary because I believe people with disabilities shouldn't have to miss out," Speakman told The Weekend Australian.

Speakman was just 26 when he was struck by a drunk driver while riding his motorbike in 1993.

He sustained a serious spinal-cord injury and was told he would never walk again.

"There was a period when I was laid up for six months in hospital when I got depressed and down on myself," he said.

"But I soon snapped out of it after meeting a young bloke three beds up from me in the same ward who was a quad who had lost the use of his hands. That's when I thought that my own situation wasn't so bad after all."

Despite the injury, Speakman never lost his competitive streak. Among the sports he has embraced and mastered since the accident are scuba diving, ocean racing and skiing. He also found time to compete for Australia at the Vancouver Winter Paralympics.

"But motorsport has always been part of my DNA," he said."I want to prove, not just to myself, that I'm good enough to compete with able-bodied drivers."

Speakman is seeking a financial backer to get behind his GT3 Porsche racing project.

Frustrated at first by the lack of response from people in the sport wary of the capabilities of a disabled driver, Speakman turned to Andy McElrea, a qualified automotive engineer on the Gold Coast, who runs several cars in the domestic and the Asia Porsche Carrera Cup series.

McElrea and his team went to work on designing and building the revolutionary hand controls that Speakman believes will enable him to be competitive.

But before that could happen, Speakman had to convince the Porsche Sport Driving School's chief instructor, Tomas Mezera -- who between March and December is also the driver standards observer for the V8 Supercars series -- that the controls met race-day specifications.

"We came up with a design which we are currently re-engineering and tweaking that fits the GT3 Porsche, which is incredibly exciting," McElrea said.

"Matt is such a competitive, dedicated bastard -- and I mean that in the nicest possible way -- that I'm sure he's going to kick a lot of arse when he finally steps up and starts racing next year."

Speakman will get his chance to test drive a McElrea GT3 Porsche at the Gold Coast circuit on November 26.