LIVING LEGENDS – BIG REV KEV

Living Legends – Big Rev Kev

In the second instalment of Living Legends, Foges chats to Formula 5000 and touring car legend Kevin Bartlett.

In the first of a two-part interview, Bartlett details his motorsport beginnings (which in fact weren’t in his mother’s Morris Minor Convertible), the relationship he built up with noted team owner Alec Mildren, how KB had an opportunity to test a Brabham Formula 1 car and an opportunity to qualify for the Indy 500 that just failed to come off.

The following is a sample of the chat:

As unlikely as a drop-top Morris Minor sounds, you finished second in class in the inaugural ATCC at Gnoo Blas in 1960.

I think there were only two cars in the class! [There were actually six starters in the under 1000 cc class.] Strangely, if you look back, with a lot of people that did race back then – even Formula 1 blokes – started in Morris Minors or Austin A30s. It’s quite amazing how many big names in the 1960s did start in them. They were plentiful and you could buy them second-hand pretty cheap.

So you join Alec Mildren Racing. It’s your big break. Mildren was a famous Sydney car dealer, former Gold Star champion and a great patron of open-wheel racing back then.

He loved it. He was a guy when he was racing that you admired what he did and how he did it. He was a very determined character. I first bumped into Alec when I raced my Morrie at Phillip Island in 1958. We were practising before the meeting and I got to meet him and his (legendary) mechanic Glenn Abbey. We got on well from that time. So they knew me and later on they had Ralph Sach driving for them, but he was getting on in age and Alec was looking for someone younger. I was still a kid, but not like today when kids are racing professionally at 16 or 17. In my day, you didn’t get into the top level until you were 24-25. Alec invited me to have at test in his car and I must have impressed him because he wanted to sign me up.

Your decision to return coincided with Formula 5000 taking off in Australasia and you were made for F5000 racers, weren’t you?

It was a good category. There were times when I could’ve done better, but quite honestly, trying to be a mechanic and work on your old car like the old days was still embedded in me. I had some good runs. When I could afford it, I had people like Peter Molloy to build an engine for me and she worked good. But then I used to think I could do that and it didn’t always work out. Lack of foresight took over with a lot of reliability problems – and those problems have been fixed these days. The problems I had just don’t occur anymore. The big teams like VDS would come out for the Tasman series and you’d look in the back of their rent-a-truck and there were four engines sitting in there, two gearboxes and all the spares under the sun. You’d go “Oh, wow!” They had the foresight and the money to do it, whereas we were struggling around.

Pick up issue Auto Action 1789 to read the rest of Foges’ interview with the Kevin Bartlett.

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