All-nighters. They’re inevitably expected when you work on customers’ race cars, and they’re often unavoidable when stuff goes wrong before or during a competition event.

First published in the April 2024 issue of Street Machine

The last one that involved me and my wife Jan happened at the Pukekohe Park Raceway circuit on the North Island of New Zealand, when the historic Brabham race car broke a cam follower, dropped a valve and mangled a Cosworth piston. It wasn’t a quick fix, and we were expected to line up the next day for racing, but we had shipped over a spare engine with the car, so all we had to do was swap it in.

The pits at Pukekohe were mostly used for horses, as the place also catered for chaff-burner contests, so the floor was dirt and there wasn’t much lighting. Graham, the owner and driver, had to be elsewhere for the night; otherwise he would have stayed to help. Jan and I got stuck in, mostly working on our knees, because the Brabham is very low and it’s easier that way. The five-speed Hewland transmission came out after removing the half-shafts and gear linkage, and then we lifted the dead engine out by hand, as there wasn’t a block and tackle handy. As I’d already removed the cylinder head to check the piston damage, the rest of the engine wasn’t all that heavy. The spare 105E-based Ford mill had been shipped inside a cage I’d built, so we got that out, carried it to the car and fitted the AAP clutch. We were then ready to drop it into the engine bay.

All of this had chewed up plenty of time, and even after we managed to bolt the engine in place there were multiple dry sump oil lines to fit, difficult multi-pipe manifolding and Weber carbs to go on, and coolant piping and gauge fittings, plus the transmission itself. We couldn’t make mistakes with any of this, as our driver was going to be racing at upwards of 250km/h, and we didn’t want to have to fix a missing corner if he tangled with an Armco fence.

We got it all sorted and hit the little starter motor to spin the engine and build oil pressure, but there was none. That wasn’t uncommon with this dry sump system, as the big oil tank is up front behind the alloy radiator, with long oil and coolant pipes running back to the rear-mounted engine. Winding the mill over and over with the starter didn’t do any good, so I removed the oil feed to the external pump and pressurised the tank by putting my mouth over the filler cap and blowing like hell. That usually works, but by then the small onboard battery had died. We decided to charge it at our motel and come back early the next morning.

We were soon back in the dirt-floored stable, trying again with a fully charged battery and not much sleep. After five long minutes of cranking, the oil gauge needle said we had pressure, so it was all systems go for a start. That good little engine fired up immediately, and we ran it up to racing temperature, checked everything twice and decided we were okay to go.

Graham didn’t like the circuit, because the old back straight is as rough as buggery for a light race car, and there’s a really tight first-gear S-bend in front of the pits. We didn’t do any good that day, but at Hampton Downs, a new circuit on the North Island, the Brabham ran superbly and cleaned up in the main feature race ahead of 30 or so international Formula Junior drivers in their really fast cars.

Working long hours can really play tricks on your mind. Comparing experiences with a Formula One mechanic fresh from the UK, he told me he’d worked many, many all-nighters, some of which left him barely functioning. One story saw him working with another guy on a race car early in the morning when he tripped on something, turned around and apologised. He thought he’d kicked his mate as he lay on the ground, but as his eyes cleared he realised he was talking to a floor jack!

My longest stint without sleep was two-and-a-half days, working on an FE Holden racer at Queensland’s Lowood circuit. I finally fixed the problems during a break in racing and decided to go home, which was a three-hour drive away. In an effort to wake myself up, I took a handful of painkillers and washed them down with a hot bottle of Coke. Luckily my first wife was there to drive, as it wasn’t long before I was seeing giant spiders and snakes in the car, and tight corners in roads that were actually dead-straight! But I survived all of that and I’d do it all over again, because I’m hooked on screaming race cars.