STORMIN’ NORMAN

Stormin’ Norm Beechey holds a special place in the record books: first championship winner in a V8-powered car, first championship winner with the Ford Mustang, the first Holden championship winner and the first driver to win titles for both Ford and Holden.

He was the first superstar of Australian touring cars. Stormin’ Norm Beechey’s crowd-pleasing sideways style in a variety of machinery in a brief but spectacular career won a lot of fans in the formative years of the Australian Touring Car Championship. Not that the modest and reclusive champion will acknowledge his legendary status.

“People say that, but I never considered myself to be a flamboyant driver,” said Beechey in a rare interview.

“It was just that the types of cars I was racing were prone to sliding if you were on the limit and I never considered it as showmanship.

“I probably wasn’t as technical a driver as, say, Ian ‘Pete’ Geoghegan, who was by far the superior driver, and I didn’t mind unsettling a car.

“I’d say I have a rougher technique of driving than some of the neater drivers.

“When you were on the limit in the cars I drove, you were sideways with wheels in the air – that’s just how they behaved with my physical style of driving. I’ll admit that my technique was relatively rough.”

Two championships for two different manufacturers, one in an imported muscle car and the other in a homegrown car, proved his style may have been rough but it was also effective.

Beechey was an integral part of the Neptune Racing Team, one of the first professional racing outfits that ran various cars through its different guises.

In 1964, for example, Neptune Racing Team fielded Beechey in a Holden EH Special S4, Peter Manton in a Morris Cooper S and Jim McKeown in a Ford Cortina Lotus MkI in the championship.

Beechey lost that single-race decider to Geoghegan’s Cortina following a tight tussle in the final championship for the production-based sedan Appendix J rulebook.

The introduction of Improved Production paved the way for American muscle cars such as the Ford Mustang. And Neptune Racing Team fielded one of the imported cars for Beechey in the single-race championship decider at Sandown in 1965, winning in what’s considered one of the first major circuitracing wins for the ‘pony car’ anywhere in the world and the first for V8 power in the series.

Beechey wasn’t one to rest on his laurels. He raced all types of cars in many different disciplines, which only increased his appeal with crowds.

From the Mustang he switched to a Chevrolet Chevy II Nova and Camaro SS for subsequent championship campaigns. Though he would challenge with record-breaking fastest laps, poor reliability and the dominance of the Mustang hampered his results.

Meanwhile, Geoghegan would go on to dominate with the Mustang, scoring four consecutive titles from 1966 to 1969, the latter the first multi-round championship.

“Ian Geoghegan was, in my opinion,the most outstanding driver of my era,” said Beechey of his rivals.

“We had some very close races and I never received so much as a scratch on my cars from him.

“Bob Jane was my next biggest rival. He was a lot tougher competitor than ‘Big Pete’. Allan Moffat was also a very tough competitor. He was desperately competitive in his era.

“Bob and Moffat both had such good [US-built] cars that they were hard to beat in our home-grown machines.”

Beechey moved to home-grown machinery with a Holden HK Monaro GTS327 for 1969. It was with the HT Monaro GTS350 that he would claim his second championship and first for Holden in 1970, defeating the Mustang brigade and the new Porsche 911 of McKeown.

“The HK Monaro 327 was a shit of a car… narrowgutted and you couldn’t get any decent tyres under it anywhere,” said Beechey.

“We thought we could win the championship with the HT 350 because CAMS opened the regulations up to allow us to compete with the Trans-Am Mustangs.

“A very small group put together the Monaro. We all got stuck into it over Christmas and made a racer out of it in two months, I’d say.

“We knew we had a fair chance of doing something with it. It was competitive right from the outset.”

The Neptune Racing Team had been rebranded as the Shell Racing Team with sponsorship from the oil brand during the formative years of sponsorship in motorsport.

Far from being a full-time professional like those that were emerging at the time, Beechey was still running various dealerships and his own Speed Shop operation. Although on top of his game, racing still had to play second fiddle to business.

“We beat some pretty tough opposition [in 1970],” said Beechey.

“We actually gave motor racing the first priority that year and our business suffered.

“I was busy… I had a Chrysler dealership and I was selling new Valiants. But I was also a fully-blown Dodge dealer, so we were selling big Dodge trucks.

“I had the three Speed Shops. We had 100 people working for us. We were bloody busy. But in 1970 we gave the racing priority and we just couldn’t do it again the following year. We did that and we won it.

“Then I probably had the necessity of concentrating on my business that I’d neglected for the year.

“In 1970 I took time off from my business but I still couldn’t devote as much time to racing as the newly-emerging professional driver like Moffat.

“I remember arriving at Lakeside to do some practising on the Thursday (a day earlier than normal).

“We drove out to the track and I see Moffat cruising around, and I asked the guy who had the key to the gate, ‘When did Moffat arrive?’

“He said, ‘Oh, on Tuesday’. So he’d been up there practising Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. We just didn’t have the time to do that.”

Beechey was also racing Chrysler factorysupported Series Production Valiant Pacers and Chargers in Shell colours and had briefly signed with Ford, though he walked away from motorsport at the end of 1972.

“My kind of race car (Improved Production) was being pushed into racing with sports sedans,” said Beechey.

“The big emphasis had changed to Series Production because that’s the way the manufacturers, the promoters and CAMS had decided to go.

“I could see that the time had arrived when more and more drivers were doing it professionally and I didn’t want to spend all my time racing.

“After all, I only ever considered myself a weekend amateur. I had several businesses to run and I never considered being a fulltime driver.

“I was extremely happy with my decision to retire. Putting all my efforts into business was very rewarding.

1970 Title Win

Scan to watch Norm Beechey take out the 1970 Australian Touring Car Championship in his Holden HT Monaro GTS350 at Lakeside Raceway.

“I just decided that it was all over and there was nothing to be gained by talking about it. It seemed natural to me.

“I stopped doing it and I didn’t want to be involved any more.

“When I was taking Shell’s signing fees, I had the best deal in Australian motor racing, financially. But I felt like a prize bull with a hole through my nose and a rope on it because if Shell wanted me to do something or General Motors wanted me to go and do something, I had to do all that.

“So when I got rid of all that, I could do what I wanted to do myself. I could spend the time making money.

“I was good at that and getting rid of the motor racing gave me so much more time to concentrate on my businesses.”

His premature retirement and reclusiveness only adds to the mystique of Stormin’ Norm Beechey.