Red Roars Off

A driver introduction tour of the track at Manfeild, in classic Red Egan style – sitting on a deck chair on the back of his V8 Mitsi racer.... daughter Danielle on his lap.

red roars off ...but rep lives on

Story: Wayne Munro Photos: Euan Cameron & the late Graham Blow

ONE OF NEW ZEALAND TRUCK RACING’S MOST COLOURFUL

characters, Bill (Red) Egan, has died.

He passed away at home in Kumeu in mid-September at the age of 72 – having continued to work in the road transport industry right up till the day before his death, despite serious health issues.

Red, formerly the longtime owner of Auckland-based Kirk’s Towing, had run vehicle testing stations in West Auckland through the later stages of his life.

Bill is survived by wife Reo, grand-daughter Carys and daughter Danielle, who told his funeral service that there are “so many stories about Dad that start with: ‘I first met Red when he towed my car from….’ (such and such a place.”)

But the hard-case, hard-drinking Egan was arguably best known in the industry for his truck racing exploits – following his declared approach: “We’re not here for a long time…..we’re here for a good time.”

His race team wasn’t so much a low-budget operation, he reckoned – it was, plain and simple, a “a no-bucks budget” outfit….“always short of money.”

Uniquely, his first race truck – a V8 Mitsubishi Fuso T-Series – was built as a class project by students at Auckland’s Carrington Polytech, where he was a tutor at the time.

Some of the same motor mechanic students went on to crew on Red’s race team – and helped him continue to develop (and race) the Mitsi.

In the Mitsi’s second year of racing (in 1991), he scored a race victory – and proudly proclaimed it was the world’s first win for a Japanese race truck: “No-one could ever take that away from me.” (It wasn’t a gimme: He had to beat Nissan Diesel racer Rusty Hawker to achieve that honour).

Bill made his truck racing debut in ’89 (at the very start of the sport in NZ), sharing the driving of an International R190 owned by mate Harry Thompson. After building the Mitsi he finished thirdequal in the B-Grade division of the NZ Truck Race Championship in 1991 and later scored race wins in the ex-Denny Hulme Scania

T143.

But it was his off-track “achievements” that brought him much more fame/infamy: At the end of the 1992 season, for instance, the Trevor Woolston-led promoters awarded him a host of “honours” for some memorable Red Egan moments.

The Tattooed Tits Award was for dancing topless (and occasionally only in his Y-fronts and socks!) at the Timaru aftermatch function – inviting everyone (who dared) to autograph his chest.

He also won The Y-Front Collection of the Year Award – for having his wardrobe of old-school Jockeys hanging on a washing line outside his tent in the very public Timaru pits. Formula One this was not!

Timaru club exec Karen Paddon and ex-CVIU cop Brian Locke (who joined in the truck race fun with pretend cop car chases to entertain the big crowds) also recall Red’s old-school undies.

Paddon, who says Red “made this world a better place” and that she’ll never forget him, adds: “I will also never forget going through your overnight bag looking for your race licence – and having to sort through all your knickers before I found it.”

Lockie also remembers the undies on the clothesline. In fact, he says: “I still have shudders from the memory….”

And multiple NZ truck race champ Ron Salter reckons, laughing, that Bill “clearly didn’t have any Janola!”

That year, Red also won The White Door Award – for his dancing with a door (at the Timaru after-party).

Maybe he saved his best for Timaru’s Levels Raceway: After news of his death was posted on Facebook, one commenter recalled how Red had once used the short-track option during a race – turning off the main straight and cutting short a third of the track or more.

But best mate/team-mate Les Plenzler reckons it wasn’t just a Timaru trick: “Oh he was taking those shortcuts on every track… when he could. It obviously confused the announcers a bit because, all of a sudden, he’s in front! Ahead of the fast boys!”

Red’s style of doing things was to the fore when, in ’92, he sent out sponsorship proposals – targeting a lot of Mitsi dealers and workshops – with what he brazenly termed “a new system of me relieving you of some money so I can race my Mitsubishi race truck.”

For “a small donation/small sponsorship/straightout con” of just $250 they’d get their name on the team t-shirt, an invitation for two to “our annual workshop party of the year, where you meet all the truck racers (free grog and batteries included).”

Contributors would also get “the opportunity to come and see us at the race meetings and have a tube or two”…and get a ride in the Mitsi on a track day.

Some takers, he confessed, would get “bugger-all.”

Response options on the Egan-designed application form included: “Piss Off Noddy – ya trying to con me….” And in specifying the level of support: “$1 to cover postage and printing” and “Zilch, because times are tough (really means, I’m too mean).”

He also inquired whether anyone might have secondhand “bits and pieces,” that might be helpful to the race team. Again, he offered a get-out tick box option: “Bugger off and leave me alone!”

Signatories were asked to “agree to abide by the rules (none) and use the official password when approaching the team at meetings (‘Gidday’) and not to ask for Waikato beer.”

Slightly more seriously, he explained: “We don’t kid ourselves that we can foot it with The Big Boys – but remember that there’d be no race without a lot of losers. And while everyone would like to back a winner – there is only one of them!”

“The Big Boys attract sponsorship like magnets and the little

Clockwise, from above left: For Bill, truck racing was mostly about fun – and he happily joined in crowd-pleasing chases and “arrests” with friendly CVIU cop Brian Locke (right) and fellow racers Shane Chapman (left) and Calven Bonney.....Bill as the truck racing fraternity will remember him.... Red at the wheel of Les Plenzler’s Scania T143, leading the field.

fellas struggle like hell. “So this little fella’s team has got off its backside and made a personal approach to you for not a lot of money.

“And we hope that by getting enough of the small amounts we can change from a No Bucks Budget to a small but formidable racing team.”

A while later he announced: “It worked! We got some candles for the birthday cake,” he added….joking. In fact, he said, his strictly-non-corporate sponsorship attempt – which backed up some limited support he already had from a Mitsi truck dealer, a tyre company and an oil company – resulted in “a few thousand. Enough to do the turbo.”

By 1996, Red had teamed up with Plenzler in a team that saw the Mitsi taken over by Les and former Egan student, apprentice and crewman Matthew Boyd-Bell….

While Red drove the Scania that 1967 F1 world champ Hulme had driven to equal-first (with Avon Hyde) in the ’90 NZ Championship.

Plenzler is Polish – just like the leader of the Catholic Church at that time – so Red immediately nicknamed him The Pope….and the team became the Irish/Polish Underwater Truck Racing Team.

Plenzler believed in Egan’s abilities as a truck racer and bought the Scania partly because he felt his mate deserved a better truck than the Mitsi, to properly show off his talent.

The plan, says Les, was for Red to be the Scania’s No. 1 driver that season – with Plenzler driving it more regularly thereafter. Or if Bill went really well, “why not keep him on. I knew I would not be driving as fast as Bill can.”

They had modest aims: “We never had ambitions to be No. 1….but we did have ambitions to go a little bit faster…”

Mostly though, “we were all there to have good fun.”

As he said at the time, Les liked the Egan team because “it has character. I reckon that’s how it should be, you know. We may not have the big balls, but we at least laugh a bit.”

When Red’s death was announced on the NZ Super Truck Racing Facebook page, it prompted many tributes – the announcement accompanied by a photo montage of Red’s racing…and, more revealingly, some of his after-race activities: There’s Red in his Y-front Jockeys, Red topless, and Red (almost) bottomless…in a G-string!

In the tributes, NZ Truck & Driver publisher and former truck racing promoter Trevor Woolston says Egan was “one of the true legends of truck racing. Never won too many races – but had a ball anyway.”

Gun Aussie racer Rob Russell says “he was a real character with a heart of gold. You meet a lot of nice people in life and he was one of them.”

Aussie race team member Wayne Newton says Red was “always up to mischief...like the time he conned Tony Perich, of Oran Park fame, into paying to bring his ‘NZ Championship’ truck over to Oz to race in the Trans-Tasman Series.......and turned up with a white blowup plastic sheep strapped to the turntable. Priceless!”

Salter reckons that Bill secured the backing for that Aussie adventure from Perich and a Sydney Mitsi dealer, based on a proposal in which “he Photoshopped a late model cab onto the old Mitsi!”

And he adds: “He raced on a shoestring….had no shame asking for old tyres. He was a great guy to give your hand-me-downs.”

Salter says simply of Bill: “He was one colourful character.”

To former truck racer Gordon Chapman, Red was “the heart and soul of truck racing.”

And Aussie racer John (Bomber) Bomberle remembers him as “a loveable rogue who helped us out many times while racing in NZ.”

Truck racing crewman Alan Jones remembers “a great character” of the truck racing fraternity – “his open-face helmet, with a smoke in his mouth before a race….a lover of the rum and humour.”

Unsurprisingly, tributes to Red make it obvious that he brought

Bill proudly reckoned he and the Mitsi scored the world’s first win for a Japanese race truck.

a similar style to everything he did. One transport operator told the funeral service that in a world of “testing station people who are just naturally MEAN,” Billy was “bloody beauty.”

Bill’s daughter Danielle, who was six weeks old when she went to her first truck race meeting, says her Dad “was always a straight-shooter and he called a spade a fucking spade!”

He was the chairman of the Towing Association for many years, she says, and his “bush lawyer” knowledge of the towing business was such that “even the cops would ring him and ask him his advice on the law.”

He fought (and won) court cases brought by wealthy car owners who reckoned their cars had been illegally towed.

When Kirk’s Towing featured on the tv show Target as the most expensive towtruck company in Auckland, Red “got great joy in correcting the show’s mistakes – and then cashed in on it” by signwriting the truck featured on the show as the “Car parking reeducation unit…. As seen on Target.”

Danielle says her Dad “was also an accomplished engineer and built most, if not all of the trucks that we had.”

When Kirk’s held the contract to tow illegally parked cars from Auckland’s Viaduct restaurant and bar precinct, Red was renowned for looking after his mates – with Kirk’s business cards in the windscreen (or a phone call to Bill) granting a vehicle immunity from towing.

Ron and Natalie Salter had such an arrangement for leaving a car parked on the wharf when they spent weekends on Waiheke Island. So, says Ron, when Red saw Natalie’s BMW arrive at Kirk’s impound yard, he ordered the towie to take it back immediately: “But it was over time,” argued the driver.

“You don’t know Mrs Salter – take it back,” said Red.

On the other hand, Danielle remembers her Dad “regularly having disputes with angry people who’d had their cars impounded. And Dad being in a cast because (as a result) he got run over by a Volvo. I remember laughing at him ‘cos he could have chosen to get run over by something better than a Volvo!

“If he thought someone was going to come and try to get their cars out of the yard, he’d suspend them at night, just in case – lift up one end on a towtruck boom and the other attached to the crane truck….suspended about eight foot in the air!”

There are other stories – of impounded car owners arriving at the Kirk’s yard angry…only for the Egan sense of humour see them ending up drinking with him!

Danielle saw two sides of her Dad when she joined him in a Kirk’s truck running on a permit – getting stopped by a CVIU officer “Dad was warring with at the time.”

The permit was “debated,” as she puts it: “Of course, my Dad never backed down and me being aged about sevenish, I remember watching on, just wanting to get on with it and hopefully get my MacDonalds or Georgie Pie.”

Then a ute crashed right by them after the driver had an epileptic fit – and Red jumped into action, donned a Police hi-vis vest and helped direct traffic.

“Dad was always one to help when needed: Warring with the CVIU officer one minute and then working side by side the next – when it came to the crunch.”

Ex-cop and good mate Brian Locke – who operated a radar at truck race meetings to enforce a 160km/h maximum speed – reckons that when Bill was racing the Mitsi, he was “the only truck racer who asked me to ping him for speeding – I guess to prove that he could go that fast!

Lockie’s sendoff: “Go with a cloud of black smoke mate – and a roaring Mitsi V8…and rest in peace mate.”

Les Plenzler says Bill lives on in the memory of lots of truck racing fans and racers “because he was funny.”

And he adds, if you asked Bill “why he did these things, he’d say: ‘Because people love a clown!’ ” T&D