MOTORSPORT: Everything old is back in vogue

As the Father’s Day weekend roars up ahead there’s something old and something old that’s new again – for motorsport fans in Sydney and Brisbane at least, or those who can get there.

A perfect Father’s Day present for a dad in Sydney, or within easy reach of it, will be a day – or both days of the weekend – at the 11th Muscle Car Masters at Sydney Motorsport Park.

Brisbane is hosting the rebirth in Australia of rallycross, which was popular in the 1970s and is enjoying a new boom overseas, with the first round of the Extreme Rallycross Championship at Lakeside Park, where venue operator John Tetley has incorporated a new course for what is a combination of rallying and circuit racing.

The action there starts at 10.30am Friday – with V8 Supercar driver Will Davison to sample the sole Super Lite car yet imported – and continues Saturday.

While it won’t have the five 300hp four-wheel-drive Super Lites that Extreme promoter David Ridden had hoped for, there are turbocharged 4WD and naturally-aspirated 2WD classes.

Alister McRae, the Australian-based member of the great Scottish rally family, will race the sole Ford Fiesta Super Lite among the 4WD turbos and has endorsed Ridden’s claim that Extreme Rallycross will be “not just a motorsport event, but an entertainment event”.

“Like any new sport it will take time to develop and build, but it has a great future – the foundations are there,” McRae said.

Six more rounds are scheduled in the first season – at Melbourne’s Calder Park, Sydney Motorsport Park, Adelaide’s Wayville Showground and another at Lakeside – with Ridden hopeful more Super Lites will arrive.

Even before trying supercross, which includes jumps and wate splashes, Davison has expressed interest in competing if the right opportunity presents itself and his Erebus bosses agree to it.

McRae said the Super Lite – which he tested at Sydney Motorsport Park in May and three weeks ago at Lakeside – was like driving a Super 2000 rally car.

“It is a space-frame chassis, it is 4WD, sequential gearbox, and it has a 2.4-litre naturally-aspirated engine rather than two litres, so it is similar to drive [to an S2000],” he said.

Meanwhile, the well-established Muscle Car Masters in Sydney is rightly billed as “Australia’s biggest and best retro touring car festival”.

Among the smorgasbord of V8s this time will be a giant-killer from almost a quarter of a century ago – the first Nissan GTR to win the Bathurst 1000 in 1991.

Jim Richards, who drove that 'Godzilla' in blue, white and red with Mark Skaife before repeating the dose, more controversially, the next year in a similar Winfield-liveried GTR, will be among the legendary drivers at the Muscle Car Masters, but the car will be raced by its new owner, Carey McMahon.

Fred Gibson, whose team prepared the all-conquering twin-turobcharged AWD Godzillas, also is down to appear at the weekend, along with Allan Grice, John Bowe, Kevin Bartlett, Colin Bond, John French, Barry and Glenn Seton, Tony Longhurst and Charlie O’Brien.

Categories on the program are the Touring Car Masters (in which TV commentator and former racer Neil Crompton will drive Bowe’s Ford Mustang), Heritage Touring Cars (Group Cs, from the 1970s and early ’80s, and Group As, from the mid-’80s to the early ’90s), TransAms, Historic Touring Cars (Group N), production sports cars and HQ Holdens.

It will be not only a trip down memory lane but horsepower heaven.