By my early teens, I was well and truly hooked on the sport. My buddy David Shepherd and I use to catch a train from Granville to Penrith then hitch a ride or walk to the track (Castlereagh Dragway)... and when we had to walk back, it was a super late night getting home!

I started work as a first year Motor Body Builder at J.R.Mudge & Co at Lidcombe, where I met Darrell Groth and Barry Andrews, other guys who also had the same sickness as me. Barry and I teamed up to run an FJ we bought from Jim Roley at Merrylands in Sydney, called Thumper. We ran that for a while and my elder brother David bought Barry's share out and David and I race together a few times. In the meantime, I had conned Darrell to go racing, and between us we bought the Competition Dragster that Chuck May had originally built from John Walker, current Hot Rodder here in Sydney.

Had a great time with this car, Darrell ended up moving on so I kept racing her on my $17 a week apprentice wage. Had a few runner ups here at Sydney and one very memorable race at Surfers Paradise against the hot shot of the time, Kevin Pinkstone (ex Parramatta Spares Junior Fuel). Kev said to me before the final 'No need to hurry son, lets save our equipment'. Cool I said, but because we had a huge flat spot in the carby and not a spare anything to fix it, I told Bob Penberthy and Gary Sivwright that I would give it a foot full to see if we could get over the flat spot. Holy hell.... I had about 6 cars on Kevin on the line and NO flat spot... it just trucked on down there. Kev had an injected small block state of the art digger, and we had the old t-bucket bodied short wheel base single Q-Jet carb on a cast manifold.... Well, he picks me up about a hundred feet from the traps. Ran our personal best ever (can't remember what it was though) and Kevin still hasn't spoken to me to this day.