Dorward, Ian (Blue) Gordon Interview

Good afternoon. Today is Friday 15th October 2021. I am Lyn Sturm and I’ve been given the privilege of interviewing Blue Dorward of Hastings. Now it’s over to you, Blue.

[Blue is talking about his life as documented in his first book ‘Early Shades of Blue’]

I’m Blue Dorward. I was born in Hastings in 1949. I came [was brought] up in a rural community. Both of my parents were born in Hastings as well. My mother was born in 1924 and my father about the same era.

I attended a country school called Pukehamoamoa School, where I was persecuted by the headmaster during my time there, and I was deemed to be disruptive rather than anybody working out why I was doing what I was doing. So my mother, working on behalf of the Social Welfare Department, put me into a preparatory boarding school over in Marton called Huntly School, and that was no better. I couldn’t handle the fixed regime so I got the wooden spoon there – they had the wooden spoon rather than the cane or the strap, so I got the wooden spoon several times … often several times in a week. And they kept me on there for a further year because they thought they were going to break me in or something, but that didn’t happen.

So I then went on to Lindisfarne College and I got much the same treatment. I was given a very hard time by fellow students and staff. I had to take time off school because I’d been severely beaten, and I couldn’t wait to leave. And the school and my mother hatched a plan that they thought I’d fail at, and the plan was that if I sat School Cert [Certificate] in my Fifth Form year and passed, I could leave school. They believed that I wouldn’t pass. So anyway, I actually did some work … quite a bit of work in fact, school work that is … and I managed to pass with ten marks to spare.

So I left school and went and worked at a Holden dealership as an apprentice. And I sort of broke free of the shackles of boarding school life, and I had tight jeans and long hair and all that sort of stuff. The Service Manager wasn’t impressed with my attire, so him [he] and I had a big argument and in the end I resigned. From there my mother put me on a farm near Masterton, and the boss there was a very strict disciplinarian and he had me working from daylight till dark. I never got a chance to go to town hardly, I just worked. And in hindsight that taught me good work ethics.

Then after I decided I’d had enough of that after eighteen months, I went to Olrig Station on the Kereru Road. I worked there for six months; and I fell out with the boss so once again I had to leave. And then later on that particular year I went baling hay for a baling contractor, and he discovered that I had mechanical abilities. What was happening was that I was working on machinery out in the paddocks during the day, and I was working in the workshop at night, so I had hardly any sleep let alone time off. So late in the hay season I resigned, and I was just at a loose end.

Then a very good farming mate of mine, Jamie – he had just inherited his father’s sheep station and it was heavily in debt. Anyway, Jamie was looking at ways to reduce that debt and he offered me the job of doing the spraying for him while he concentrated on the main farming issues. So I did contract spraying for years. It was on Jamie’s place that I rolled a tractor down a cliff and ended up upside down in a kanuka tree, with me lying below it getting burnt from petrol, battery acid and Agent Orange type spray. Anyway, I did manage to extract myself, and I was blind for two weeks; I couldn’t see a thing and I thought I was going to be blind for life, but after two weeks it slowly came right. I got no support out of the hospital at all because they just considered me to be a drunken bum and I’d just done another drunken prank – which wasn’t the case, of course. So I became a spraying contractor, and I was very successful at that; did that for many years, and then we diversed [diversified] into hay baling.

Then I became really ill with this Agent Orange type chemical, so I sold the business. And a few friends said, “Why don’t you set up a workshop?” Which I did, out on the farm in Taihape Road. That workshop was quite successful; we built a new building and had a hoist and a pit, and at its peak we had four staff just trying to keep up with all the work. During that time I was racing in speedway, which I did for four years. And in the end I was kicked out of speedway for not driving within the code and [of] conduct of the sport, so I had to give speedway away, although I did build a stock car. But the powers to be in the Hawke’s Bay Speedway Club wouldn’t let me race that either, so I gave it away entirely and I did a bit of four wheel driving.

Then I was having difficulty with my marriage; and I’d also met a guy called Peter Janson who was staying with some friends of his nearby – Peter’s a [an] entrepreneur from Melbourne – and we fixed a loan car for him one night; we rebuilt the smashed sump and fixed the hole in the radiator and all that sort of stuff. And Peter offered me a job with his race team, and I said, “I can’t do it at the moment; I’ve got a business and I’ve got a wife and I’ve got kids.” Anyway, I sold the business ‘cause our marriage was heading towards the rocks, and I went and worked as an employee in a workshop in Ngatea. That worked well for about a year, but then the marriage went on the rocks. So I rang Peter, said, “You know that job you offered me eighteen months ago? I’m coming over”, and he said, “Yes”, much to my surprise. So I ended up in Australia, and that covers the first part of the book.

We’re now getting into Part 2, ‘Racy Shades of Blue’.

I jumped on an aircraft from Auckland and flew into Melbourne, virtually blind, not knowing this gentleman, Peter Janson; but fortunately he had someone to pick me up at the airport. And when I got up to his apartment on the roof of the Windsor Hotel I couldn’t believe my eyes … it is [was] just like, nothing I’d ever seen. There was [were] all these stuffed animals everywhere; there was Peter in his red smoking jacket with a cigar in the corner of his mouth [chuckle] and a big glass of J&B Scotch Whisky, and he greeted me like an old friend. I just couldn’t believe all the people there, all the women and men; and going by the way they were dressed some of them were pretty important sorts.

So anyway I stuck to it, and Peter, as I say, was very good to take me on. I then was taken to the race car shop down the road, and their race car manager just thought I was some lackey, and just told me I couldn’t work on the race car, I had to rebuild the Cannon trailer. I said, “Yeah, I’ll do that.” Didn’t bother me, I was quite happy to. Anyway, after I finished the trailer he did let me work on the car. And it was just really overwhelming, [you] know, working by day and partying every night. [Chuckle] It was just out of control … whisky, woman [women] and not much song. [Chuckle] It was unreal.

Anyway, we then ventured to Sandown 500 racetrack, and this was just a whole new world for me. But I did manage to prove my worth over the weekend; I was involved in the pit stops, changing a wheel, but we failed to finish due to the fact that Larry Perkins tried to take on the Dunlop Bridge and wrote the car off. So after that we had to work day and night to get the car ready for three weeks’ time, to go to Bathurst. We got to Bathurst all right, and everything went well and we actually finished second in that race, which was a good effort for us.

So who sponsored?

Cadbury Schweppes and J&B Whisky. Yeah, so that was Bathurst. We all celebrated hard on the Sunday night of course; came home the following day feeling very ill.

Peter decided to keep me employed, and he told me I had to drive his old London double-decker buses. Now these buses were a relic of the past – they had no warrant of fitness or registration or anything to make them legal. I ended up driving these buses on all sorts of business tours around the streets of Melbourne having to avoid all the low bridges, ‘cause Melbourne streets are not designed to take a double-decker bus. So that was good, although I did discover that the Richmond Street bridge we could just crawl under with our big yellow bus; but it had plastic domes on the roof, and I found if I went under at a certain speed these plastic domes would collapse with a loud bang and scare all the passengers up top, [chuckle] which was quite funny from my point of view. [Chuckle] But the worst trips were the end of school celebrations for kids – they were just shocking. They really were; acts that their parents wouldn’t be impressed with. I was stopped a couple of times by a cop, but fortunately the cop was more concerned with the contents of the bus rather than me or the bus itself.

There was another time … we had one yellow bus called The Walpamur Bus which was sponsored by Walpamur Paints, and we had to do certain tours around shopping centres in Melbourne. There was a quadrangle with shops around three sides of it, and I had to drive round in an anti-clockwise direction because of the overhead power wires. Anyway, I’m driving along and carrying kids and all that and doing our thing, and someone pulled out in front of me and I automatically swerved; I broke the power lines out of the top of a shop and they fell down over a car and burnt all the paint. And as I stopped I could see a woman rushing out of the shop, so I leapt out of the bus and raced around and tackled her to the ground. And that didn’t go down too well until I explained why … because if she’d touched the car to get to a child inside she would’ve been electrocuted. So I packed up the bus after that and left before the police and fire brigade and everyone else arrived, ‘cause I didn’t want to be involved.

So that was that year, and then in beginning of 1981, Peter called me up to his office with his offsider, Rob Kelway, who was his business manager. We used to call Rob ‘Crankshaft’, because he was pretty rough [chuckle] and straight to the point. Anyway, they called me up and I thought, ‘What have I done wrong here? Have I gone and slept with one of Peter’s girlfriends without knowing?’ But that wasn’t the case; they offered me a job as the Team Manager to do the Australian Touring Car Championship that year … they’d found some money from somewhere. So I couldn’t believe it; here was I, a year before I was virtually zero, and now here am I, the top man. Couldn’t believe my good luck.

Anyway, we did the Australian Touring Car Championship; caused our share of mischief along the way, and then mid-year – I think Peter must’ve been running short of money – he told me that we had a second car to run but we couldn’t have any more staff. There was only myself and the other mechanic, Graham; so we decided we had to put up with this. Anyway, the guy – we called him Disco Duck – we went to the next meeting after he started with us with his car, at Adelaide Raceway. His manager, who was also green to motor racing, came along and on the Saturday night we went to one of Disco Duck’s discos; he had them all up and down the east coast of Australia. So we were in there drinking all this free alcohol – ‘cause we were told it was free – chatting up all the young Adelaide girls, as you do, and this guy Terry was trying to match us. And then he decided that he couldn’t match us, but he’d try to get us to go to bed so we’d be fighting fit the following morning, being the Sunday morning, the morning of the race. So anyway, he became violently ill and he left the scene, and Graham and I went out there at sparrow[‘s] the next morning as we always do; finely prepared the cars. This guy Terry arrived at midday looking like death gone wrong; he couldn’t believe that Graham and I had already done six hours’ work.

So we raced those two cars for the rest of the season, and it all went quite well. We also ran them at Sandown and Bathurst. There was a big argument at Sandown – Larry Perkins, our 2IC driver to Peter – he wanted to run this really thin – thinner than sewing machine type oil – in the engine, and we said it wouldn’t work; the engine will destroy itself. Anyway, the engine was leaking oil everywhere, just unreal. So on the Saturday night, Graham and I – when everyone had gone home – we very quietly drained out this liquid stuff and put in our normal race oil. The car ran well the following day except that Larry crashed it; and then someone spilt the beans, and Graham and I just about got sacked after that race meeting. So we said, “Well, it’s on your head”, so we ran this thin oil for the Bathurst race that year, being 1981, and the car only lasted forty-two laps of the hundred and sixty lap race. Anyway, we went back to the old bus driving again to earn some money after Bathurst.

Peter decided to do the endurance race at Adelaide with one car which was his; and somehow during the race the brakes fell apart on one wheel and he had no brake pedal. And he was going past the pits at high speed, giving me the finger sign. Well fair enough; I didn’t know what was wrong ‘cause we didn’t have radios in cars in that era. Anyway, he still finished second to Peter Brock, which was a brilliant effort with no brakes. Afterwards we found out that a brake pad had broken up and fallen out.

Then it was Christmas, and just after Christmas Graham and I are preparing the car … oh, go back a step. The Soundwaves car with Clive … Disco Duck, in it had been written off towards the end of the Bathurst race in a six or eight car pileup, so that was why we only ran one car at that meeting in Adelaide; we ran out of brakes. So early next year Graham and I are just working on the race car doing what we can without any money, and Crankshaft, or Rob – he brought in an old Holden and parked in the middle of the big bus depot we had. The race car was in a small adjoining room; anyway, Peter came down. Peter had been evicted out of the Windsor Hotel by that stage, and he was living in the bus depot in the office block, so a big step downhill. [Chuckle] But anyway, he told me that he wanted that car moved there and then. I said, “Look, we’ll shift it tonight – there’s no buses coming in, it’s fine; Graham and I are busy.” He came back about two o’clock; and Peter isn’t a very good drunk, he’s very belligerent and quite violent. Anyway, he started to pick on me and grabbed me cuff [scruff] of my neck and … abusing me for not shifting the car. So I dragged him outside and we ended up having the biggest scrap out, and I flattened him in the end.

Fisticuffs …

Fisticuffs? Yeah. And then in the middle of our scrap Larry Perkins decided to poke in his nose, so I gave him a good whack in the nose and sat him down on his bum. He left. Anyway, I get up and leave Peter in the gutter, and I told him he could shove his job up his bum. Don’t want to be involved in that rubbish. Anyway, the following morning he came round to my flat, very apologetic; offered me more money, and more Cherry Ripes and anything else that I wanted. I said, “No, Peter, you’ve overstepped the mark and I’m not coming back.”

So then I thought, ‘Well what am I going to do?’ I knew a guy called Les who was the race manager of a race team called Red Car Racing, owned by Alan Brown, so I went and approached Les out at his race shop. And he said, “Well, I’ve got a job here for you if you want it. How about building a new car?” And a new car then was just a bare body shell, so to cut a long story short I ended up building the complete car; meanwhile we ran the other car at the Australian Touring Car Championship for Alan Brown.

And then … oh, about mid-year or so was the race meeting over in Perth at Wanneroo. And I’d been working day and night without sleep, and I’d gone home on the Sunday morning, I grabbed about four hours’ sleep, had a shower and change of clothes, and I came back out to go and drive the truck forty hours to Perth. The boss, Alan Brown, appeared to see how we were going, and he said, “You look shocking; you’re not driving.” So he told his 2IC to jump in the truck, and I ended up flying over. I couldn’t believe my good luck! And we completed a car over there and Alan Grice drove it and won – won the first race for that new car. It was an incredible effort. I was quite proud of myself.

So you should be.

We drove back to the race meeting at Adelaide and we did quite well there; and then we had to prepare for Sandown. By that stage we were running two cars. Alan Grice and Alan Brown were in the new car, the one that I’d built; they raced that quite successfully at Sandown. And then just prior to the Bathurst race three weeks later … we were living on junk food at night for something to eat, and I went down to this local takeaway shop and I ordered a whole lot of hamburgers and fish and chips and all that … all quality health food for racing mechanics. While I was waiting I had a dim sum out of their steamer, and I didn’t think anything of it and went back and had a feed, and carried on working most of the night as we all do. We left Friday afternoon to go to Bathurst, and we stopped overnight just to relax a bit, then we get to Bathurst on the Saturday morning to set up camp – it takes two days to set up our camp. I wasn’t feeling at all well … really ill, so Brownie took me in to the Bathurst Hospital, and some Indian doctor said, “Oh, we’ve seen too many of your sort out at this Bathurst race, you’ve just been drinking too much; go away.” Anyway, by the afternoon I was more dead than alive, so they took me back and some other doctor saw me, and he said, “You’ve possibly got salmonella.” And man, I was ill! The last time I smiled for about a week was when they all came in to see me – they didn’t realise that I had salmonella confirmed. All the team came in to see how I was, and one of the drivers, Ron, was standing on the left hand side of the bed, and next thing I let rip with the worst case of dysentery or diarrhoea ever, and the smell was extremely obnoxious. The others all fought to get out of the room, and Ron thought that the window was open, which it was but what he didn’t realise was that there was a mesh screen there, and he stuck his head through it. [Chuckle] I couldn’t help but laugh – here he is choking with the smell, and he couldn’t shift his head back or forward. That was brilliant! But they confirmed I had salmonella and I had to go into a sterile room.

Alan Brown tried to get Channel 7 to put in a special TV link for me so I could watch the practice and the racing. And that didn’t work, so he offered to set up a quarantine room out at the track for me, and that didn’t work, it wasn’t allowed. So in the end I listened to the radio commentary which was carried out by several local radio stations. And Alan Grice did the first one hundred mile an hour average lap speed in that car which I was pretty impressed with myself; and anyway, they finished second. After that Alan Brown thought he couldn’t do any better, so he sold the team to another race team called Roadways Racing; I just simply transferred over to that team. That was pretty good; STP was our main sponsor, and the car was all striped white, blue and red. And the perk of the job were [was] these STP scantily clad models appearing every circuit … was just bliss for us boys. [Chuckle]

Anyway, at the end of the year I decided I was going to go to England and learn about this new motor racing class that was coming to Australia. That was already being used over in Europe and England; it was called Group A. The idea was, I [was] going to go to England for a year to work for a top team then come back to Australia with all that experience, and I’d then get a job with a top Group A team in Australia. I jumped on a plane and ended up over in England, and I met up with Peter Janson – he was staying at the Forum Hotel as he did every Christmas and New Year … go there for a few weeks to renew his contacts. And I was there, a squatter; I used to sleep between the couch and the wall just in case any of the staff came in. We scrounged a key for the adjoining room, ‘cause there was a door between the two rooms. And when it came to bedtime I’d quietly unlock and open the door and see if there was anybody in the room. If there was no sign of any guest in that room I’d go and hang a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door and sleep in the bed. [Chuckle] It was absolute bliss sleeping in this big double bed. Then of course next morning I’d have to carefully make the bed so they didn’t know anyone had been in it.

Anyway, there was supposed to be a job organised for me from Australia, and as we found out, that didn’t happen. But Peter stepped into the void and he spoke to the team manager of a company called Tom Walkinshaw Racing, who [which] was the top touring car team in Britain and Europe. Peter just told them a whole pile of bullshit as to how good I was, so I went out there and I got a job with them, TWR. I ended up building the fourth or the spare car for them. We had all sorts of antics doing the European Touring Car Championship – like, we caused £6,000 worth of damage to the wine cellar in this top hotel in … oh, I forget the name of the city now. Anyway, bad luck. So that’s the sort of thing we’d get up to, and oh – we just got into all sorts of mischief there.

There was another race meeting – we were drinking – we were playing pool on the bottom of the swimming pool – we got the pool balls off the pool table and dropped them in the swimming pool [chuckle] and played underwater pool. And then we decided we’d take the pool table in, but as we were trying to get it out through the door it got jammed, and we made so much noise that the hotel owner came along and he wasn’t impressed when he worked out that if we’d had our way we would’ve had his pool table in the swimming pool. [Chuckle] Yeah. I, on the Sunday night, broke the hotel drinking record; I drank four two-litre steins of their local beer, so the following morning they gave me the stein … hotel owner; he said, “This record’ll never be broken again.”

On the Thursday before the race we found a local go-kart track; and you can imagine all us racing guys, we were all very competitive. Anyway, we go and hire these karts and race around in them – and I got it a bit wrong and I went through a tyre barrier and into a steel wall, and I ended up cracking two ribs. The go-kart was bent in two, so we hastily beat a depart [retreat] from there before we had to pay for our damage. And on the Sunday morning before the race – or midday – as I mentioned earlier but reiterate, I was changing a wheel during the race which we do in about fifteen seconds. And the boss said to me, “Do you want someone else to do it?” I said, “No, I’ll do it. I’ve been doing it all year, so I’ll do it.” So I went up to the medical centre and I saw the doctor up there and I said, “Can I have a painkiller?” And he said, “What for?” And I said, “I’ve got cracked ribs, I think.” And he went poking me, and next thing bang! He broke the ribs. He said, “Oh, well if they weren’t broken before they are now”, in his broken English. So he gave me a painkiller which didn’t last long, but I did manage to carry out my job.

There was another race track where we misbehaved so much during the week that when we got into Austria to the Österreichring Circuit I collapsed for three days, I’d drunk and womanised that much. There was [were] a few other incidents.

I was sent out to Australia by Tom Walkinshaw in late August of that year, 1984, to go and help build a Jaguar for John Goss who owned a Jaguar race car to the then Australian rules of Group C, and I get out there and the car’s a virtual shell. Anyway, Grant, who became a good friend of mine as you do when you work side by side day and night on a common project, him [he] and I built the car, but we never had time to really sort it out. Anyway, we get the car to Bathurst and it was super quick while it was running; Saturday night we had our team meeting as to what we were going to do the following day, and Tom wanted a standing start. All the starts in Europe are rolling starts, so Tom wasn’t familiar with doing a standing start so my recommendation, and that of John Goss, the owner of the car who was also a top race driver … we said, “Just take off the line very slowly and then just put your foot in it and go then as fast as you can.” John reminded him of that the following morning on the starting grid, but Tom ignored our advice; he just dropped the clutch at high revs and broke a shaft in the gearbox. Now this Camaro came up behind him at, we estimated a hundred mile an hour, and hit straight in the back of the car … wrote off both cars. Fortunately nobody was hurt.

So at the end of that year when Jaguar cars were having their annual motor sport meeting to go over the past and then to plan for the following year, I got the blame for the debacle at Bathurst; it was all my fault. This was so as Tom could keep his name clean. But I was told this by a guy called Ron Wallace who was the motor sport representative for Jaguar cars.

So [at the] beginning of the following year really, in ’85, Tom told me that he wanted to go back to Bathurst and he wanted to race the three cars he’d raced in Europe the year before, and that I was in sole charge; I had to sort everything out and I couldn’t use any of the current staff. So I had to rebuild three cars, employ staff, ship them all out to Australia – it was a huge, huge logistical exercise, and then of course the staff would come over for the race week. Anyway, we progressed during the week; we kept arguing with the scrutineers which I enjoyed. [Chuckle] So on the Sunday morning we had all three cars on the grid. Tom on qualifying on the Saturday before the race – he just about crashed the car, as had John Goss, doing their solo one lap screamer, but fortunately the cars came back intact.

So Tom just took off; you couldn’t see him, he was that far ahead. John soon caught up to him; the second car broke down through driver error, and then late in the race the car driven by John Goss and Armin Hahne broke its seat, so John had to drive the last stint with no seat in effect … just hanging on to whatever he could and still keeping up fast times. Tom in that time burst an oil cooler; so they had to change an oil cooler. That dropped them back from first to eighth place; then at the end of the race John Goss won and Tom came in third. So I went back to England after that.

Oh, then we took two cars out to New Zealand for the race series out in New Zealand – Wellington street race and the Pukekohe race. On the test day before the Wellington race we used Pukekohe, because we could set the cars up for Pukekohe at that test stage to save time on the race weekend. Anyway, Armin’s just out bedding in the last set of brake pads, and he has a big crash on top of the mountain and he writes off the left front corner of the car. Fortunately, my cousin’s husband up in Auckland is a good panel beater, so I rang him and said, “Mate, I’ve got a job for you”; so we took the car to his workshop. And we couldn’t buy parts for it in New Zealand, although we did have [a] bonnet and front guards and front panels – that was all the spares we had. All the rest of the car had to be straightened out. We got it all straightened out in two days of sleepless nights, then we went down to Wellington and both cars failed to finish. One car broke its diff [differential] and the other car blew a tyre. Now the reason the tyre blew was that Armin had flat-spotted a tyre and he wanted to come into the pits – he’s calling me up on the radio, he said “I can’t steer this thing, it’s shaking”, and all this. So I arranged a pit stop, and then a senior manager overruled me and wouldn’t let him come in, and a lap later Armin blew that tyre and crashed. And Armin was driving with Denny Hulme, which was a great buzz to me ‘cause Denny was a bit of a hero of mine. Anyway, Tom fried Denny; and we couldn’t fix the second car ‘cause we’d run out of parts – fixed it already, so we ran at Pukekohe and got a second with Win Percy and Armin Hahne. This was in February ’86, and then I had nothing to do because the three Jaguar cars had been mothballed; they weren’t going to race again.

Then Andy, the senior manager, said, “I’ve got just the job for you – I want you to build a body kit for the Holden Commodore to turn it into a Group A car for the road, so the same model can be raced.” So I ended up doing all the aerodynamics on that car, having had no experience before; I was just using what I believed was common sense, and what looked right. We did a wind tunnel test and the car actually worked aerodynamically, so I then went to Australia to set up the new factory. And that was a huge task; I had to employ staff. I’d lost my English girlfriend ‘cause she didn’t want to come out to Australia, and I was just focused on the mission in hand … didn’t really think about it.

So then in December all the moulds arrived … all the master moulds for all the fibreglass body kit. I thought it was Christmas until I opened the boxes, and then I discovered that the body kit had been altered and as it turned out, Holden had softened the lines in the kit to make it more saleable so the car wasn’t quite as aerodynamic as it should’ve been. Anyway, we had to build five hundred of these cars to make them eligible to be used as a race car, and it was just a huge nightmare.

Each car had twenty-two panels on it; we had to get made over eleven thousand panels and there was no one in Melbourne capable of doing even a quarter of that job. We had several suppliers; we had one company offered to do the painting and they had to supply us with a hundred and thirty painted panels a day – just huge, huge logistics.

Anyway, in April ’87 the powers to [that] be decided they were going to get the FIA to do an audit. The FIA is the Federation of International Motor Sport [Federation Internationale de l’Automobile] and they have to do a count of the cars. If you produce five hundred road cars, the cars are then eligible to be raced and they have to count them. We’d only built something like two hundred and twenty cars, and I said to them, “How are we going to get away with this? This is far short of five hundred cars.” Anyway, some bright spark up higher in the chain than me got the dealers to hold ghost cars on their books; in other words, they just pretended that they had the cars in stock, and we just kept swapping round cars and panels in our factory when the FIA inspectors were there. We thought we had them bluffed, but unbeknown to us, on the way back to Paris to the head office they stopped off in Perth and went and saw the dealer there, expecting to see ten cars. Of course there was no ten cars, they were ghost cars; so that failed. We tried again in July, three months after that, and we managed to get it through.

Because we didn’t have a race team of our own I went down and helped Larry Perkins with his team to build two cars which we ran at Sandown and Bathurst that year. Then the following year I went back to Holden Special Vehicles, HSV, and I was continuing to finish off the last of the cars and then do other builds, such as the SV88 which was the Holden Special Vehicle’s special vehicle of the year. That was painted in a GM [General Motors] colour named ‘Dorward Blue’. Not many people have got a paint colour named after them. Yeah, that was because at that time I was in their good books, which slowly went downhill after that.

Anyway, Tom came out here and he said, “There’s too much friction going on here – I want you to shift out and to set up the Holden race team from scratch.” So I ended up doing that; we had one car, the car that Tom had brought out the year before for Bathurst, that broke down because of rear suspension failures. So I fixed that car … found out what the problem was, [it] was the rear suspension … sorted it out, and I then put it back together and it was all ready to be used as a test car. Anyway, we went out to Calder [Park] race track one day with the car. Andy, the senior manager, was there, and Eddie, another manager, and I and Win, the driver; we did a test at Calder. And then two days later, Andy wanted to do a test over in Adelaide, so … “Yeah, yeah, that’s fine, we can do that.” But Andy said, “No, I don’t want you driving the truck”, you know, “you’ve burnt yourself out.” [I] said, “Okay”, so we borrowed a truck driver off [from] Holden Cars. We had this big pantech which is 4.2 metres high … big truck. We had the race car in the back, and we told this guy we were going over to Adelaide; [he] said, “Yep, I can find my way through all the streets.” And I said, “Be careful ‘cause the truck’s over height.” This was six o’clock in the morning when he left, and about two or so hours later, just as we were ready to go to the airport to fly to Adelaide, the race truck comes back with the front quarter of the roof peeled back. The guy had gone below [under] a low bridge and done a huge amount of damage, but fortunately the car wasn’t damaged. So we weren’t going to Adelaide, so we off loaded the car, cleaned it down. I knew the people out at Redcar ‘cause I’d worked in their race team, and I persuaded them to let me come out there with the trailer to do the repairs, which I did over three months; and then we had a further test day at Calder and then one in December of that year at Phillip Island. And we blew an engine in the morning, and they said, “Oh, it’s all over.” I said, “No, it’s not.” I said, “I’ll ring the guy back at Holden Special Vehicles; he can bring the spare engine, and while he’s bringing it here – it’s about two hours away – we can be pulling the other one out and get it ready.” And that’s what happened; we continued the test day in the afternoon.

Anyway, I sort of went back to work at the race team, setting things up and doing a few odd jobs I had to do, and I got a phone call from Win Percy. He said, “Tom has finally made an appointment for the overall team manager”, and I said, “That’s fine; I don’t want to be the team manager, I want to be the chief engineer.” He said, “Well that’s good, you can be the engineer, I’ll be the lead driver.” And I said, “Well that’ll work well ‘cause you and I’ve worked together in the past – we know each other and we just get on with it.” We talked for about half an hour like mates. Anyway, Win came out early the following year and it was all a bit strange; he was a little bit reserved for Win. Finally, after he’d been there about three weeks he called me in the office and said, “You’re fired”, and he wouldn’t tell me why. I just couldn’t believe it; I had just given the company seven years of loyal service. I then broke down … I went into a state of deep depression for about a year. I didn’t get too much treatment either, so I was in a really dark space when I left that team. If I’d [in] hindsight I should’ve gone down and seen Larry and got a job with him, but I didn’t.

‘Bout six months later a friend of mine, Graeme Hunt, who owns a big Ford dealership, and my mate Graham that [whom] I mentioned before, they enticed me down to their little race shop where I went every so often, which is good – that sort of helped pick up my spirits. And then towards the end of that year which would be 1990 by then, some other friends, Sue and Tony, [who] ran a boutique oil company … in other words, they supplied oils to clients where the big oil companies didn’t want to really get involved … they had this idea that used industrial oils generally were not damaged, they were just contaminated with metals, dirt and water [and] so forth, and they were wondering if a system could be produced to go and reclaim that oil so it could be put back to use for the company that owned the oil. So I spent months researching, and this was totally foreign ground to me. I was in the field of what they call fluid dynamics, but I soon got on top of it and I even spent a month over in the States. I travelled on a special pass of Delta Airlines which meant I could fly anywhere any time, all for a cost of $350; so I used to get on a Delta flight morning, noon and evening for a meal – it was a cheap meal. [Chuckle]

Anyway, I did all my research and went back to Australia and I worked out what I was doing. My children came over again

How many children have you got?

I’ve got two children … boy and a girl.

How old are they now?

Tracey’s about forty-three, forty-four; Ron’s forty-two. Yeah, I’m still close to them. Yeah.

So I developed this machine for reclaiming oil. It was all bound in a box body on the back of a truck. And it worked, and we were starting to make it very successful but it was real pioneering stuff. I was fighting the oil companies ‘cause they didn’t want oil reclaimed, they wanted to sell new of course. But we soon proved to the oil companies that what we were doing was not smoke [cloak] and dagger stuff, it was actually valid. And customers wanted it that way because our price was about half the price of new oil. So that was going well, and we had a five-year development plan simply because this was venturing into new ground, so our business plan was unique. The following year about mid-way through the year, things came to a head at a board meeting and the five-year plan was thrown out the window. One person particularly, Sue, wanted to make a profit straight away. Anyway, that had to happen, so we did. Our office girl, Rhonda, and Peter, my worker and I, we worked and worked our butts off, and we actually turned the company into a profit per month.

Two months later I come [came] into the office from out on a job and Rhonda hands me a business card which has got on it, ‘Oil Clean’, and ‘Ralph [?], Managing Director’. And I said, “What’s going on here?” And we soon worked out that the company had been sold under me, so I lost all that work; and the reason for that was that the accountant of our shareholder group of five – he was supposed to look after all the accounting issues and the legal issues – he never got contracts drawn up so I had no leg to stand on. That pushed me into a really deep depression; I didn’t get out of bed for a month … I was really, really bad, and my then girlfriend, Maria, she and her mother looked after me twenty-four/seven. Anyway I came right, and then I went and got a job with President Ford (Graeme Hunt) and it was really good just working at club racing level.

Then I got onto a bit of a mania phase; I’d been doing solar studies to help get my brain to work again ‘cause my brain was shot, and I got a bee in my bonnet that I was going to go back to New Zealand to go and do solar work. I should’ve stayed with Graeme Hunt after he’d been so good to me. Anyway, I packed up all our goods. Maria made me get married to her so she’d [could] come to New Zealand. And that’s it for the second book.

When I returned to New Zealand I worked for the solar company in New Zealand for ‘bout four years, during which time I broke an elbow by rolling a quad. So I went from a [an] installer to a sales engineer for the company. And then I had a mania phase like I did in Australia to come back to New Zealand, and I wanted to own an engineering business. Anyway, we found this derelict one right up in the far north in a place called Kaeo, near Kerikeri, and I just bought it. There was [were] no books, there was [were] no records – I shouldn’t’ve done it, but I did. Anyway, we turned that business around.

And then Maria, who wasn’t well, was starting to get off the planet, and so was I – I started getting depressed; the pressure of running this business was just getting out of hand. So I drove into work at seven o’clock one morning, and the next thing I can clearly remember is turning up here at our farm a day and a half afterwards. I don’t know how I got here … don’t remember the journey. So I stayed there for a while until I regrouped.

I then went and worked for a well-drilling company as a maintenance engineer on their vehicles, and the guy bought a Mustang race car which I rebuilt for him, so it was all pretty good. Then he became very violent, and I’d just had enough, so I left. But just before I left I was living in some shearers’ quarters which I didn’t want to stay the winter in, so I found this place in Miller Street [Hastings] which suited my needs; it’s got a workshop on it and a flat, so that’s how I’m getting in here.

Then after falling out with Greg [?] I went and worked for Deacon Trucks, but after about three years or so the pressure and the stress got to me again, and I just went back into my black hole, as I call it. My then girlfriend was a great support to me … she helped pull me out of it, and we decided we’d set up the business here working on classic cars namely Volkswagens, Jaguars and now BMWs, so that’s where we are today.

And how many staff have you got?

We’ve got one staff; yeah, that’s all we’ve got. He’s a subcontractor, he virtually works for himself. I’m pretty well semi-retired. I call myself the gofer now, [chuckle] I’m the boy. I’ve enjoyed living here, it’s pretty good. It’s close to town, walk to New World; or go up there and have a play with the toys.

And your children now?

Tracey’s in Hastings; she’s just bought a flat, her first home. She had to pay an extraordinary amount of money for it but you can’t do anything about it, that’s the current market. And my son’s in Munich in Germany. He works for a large accounting firm helping large corporates minimise their tax … very much a figure man.

Not into cars?

No, not into cars. He’s seen me at work, I think.

[Chuckle] And what about Tracey, is she into cars?

A little bit, yeah, yeah. But she will not own a classic car though, I don’t think.

That was obviously Dad’s thing …

Yeah. That was my thing, yeah, I’ve got one; I’ve got a 1985 Jaguar XJS V12, much the same as the cars that we raced in Europe and at Bathurst.

Well Blue, thank you so much for spending this time with me this afternoon; I’ve enjoyed the journey. You’ve had a very interesting life and it’s obvious that you’ve enjoyed most of your life, and you’ve helped so many other people along the way as well so I wish you all the very best for the future. Thank you Blue.

Thank you very much. Yep, I do believe that I have had a life that’s different to most, but it’s been enjoyable most of the way.

And you’re very clever to be able to have written a book by yourself.

Yeah, I’ve done it entirely on my own bat. Stephanie was quite impressed.

Yes – well all the best.