Held over the weekend of the 3rd and 4th of May, 2014, the inaugural Sydney Retro Speedfest was a huge success, putting on an excellent weekend of historic racing and a brilliant event for an impressive crowd of historic motorsport fans.
Now that we’re back it’s time to take a look back at the weekend, reminisce, and check out some photos.
Practice kicked off on Friday, with the impressive field of historic sports and racing cars gathering at Sydney Motorsport Park and entrants settling in, catching up with friends, preparing machinery and putting in a few sighting runs around the circuit.
When the event proper kicked off on Saturday morning we were greeted by cold and rain, which produced some tricky conditions for drivers. Thankfully the weather turned around for Sunday and we were rewarded with a warm and sunny day for spectators and great conditions for racing.
The quality of racing was, as usual, excellent – especially in Saturday’s tricky conditions.
Sunday saw a few racing incidents and technical malfunctions interrupt proceedings, but overall the event ran smoothly thanks to the tireless efforts of our volunteers and courteous driving from entrants, and drivers kept everyone entertained throughout the weekend with back-to-back events that had the track buzzing throughout both days.
We’d like to thank all of our entrants for your safe and responsible driving, the endless hours of work that go into preparing, maintaining and racing your cars and for getting involved!
Historic motorsport offers unrivalled access to the pits and paddock, and the cars and drivers that fill them, and Sydney Retro Speedfest was no exception to this!
This weekend saw the entirety of Sydney Motorsport Park filled with immaculately-prepared historic racing and sports cars of all kinds, much to the joy of everyone involved. The event attracted some unusual and very special machinery from the past eight decades of motorsport history, often with a friendly owner/driver nearby ready for a chat, and it’s lovely to see these cars at a racetrack, enjoy them being tinkered with, maintained, repaired and prepared, and experience them at full-tilt.
The great selection of machinery and friendly, buzzy atmosphere made the pits and paddock a pleasure to explore and chat one’s way through, and we’d like to thank everyone for making this the case!
Most importantly we, and I’m sure everyone involved, would like to send our most sincere and heartfelt thanks to the many selfless and tireless volunteers who apply their skills, energy, time and love to our events. Without you there would be no historic motorsport, and we can’t thank you enough. THANK YOU!
We would also like to send our congratulations to Randall Bezuidenhout, who won the “Win a Hot Lap at the Sydney Retro Speedfest” competition conducted on Radio 2GB’s Sportzone program. Randall collected four weekend entry tickets to the Speedfest, four Sydney Motorsport Park caps, and scored a hot lap in a Porsche 911 racecar.”
We currently have five photo galleries of the weekend’s action online on the ‘Gallery‘ page of the site, with more on their way very soon. Make sure to hit the links below to check each gallery out, and check back often over the coming days and weeks as we upload more content from the event.
Sydney Retro Speedfest 2014: Jeremy Braithwaite. Hit this link to Jeremy’s website for more.
Sydney Retro Speedfest 2014: Sylvain Hauser. Head to Sylvain’s website here for more.
Sydney Retro Speedfest 2014: Rod Mackenzie. Head to Rod’s website here for more.
Sydney Retro Speedfest 2014: Brent Murray. Join Brent on Facebook here
Sydney Retro Speedfest 2014: Seth Reinhardt. Send seth@hsrca.com an email if you’re looking for anything from Seth.
Photography by Jeremy Braithwaite, Sylvain Hauser, Rod Mackenzie, Brent Murray and Seth Reinhardt.
We love to promote the work of our many talented mates, so if you have photos, video, or stories from the weekend and would like to share them on the club website, send an email to seth@hsrca.com, or drop by the club Facebook page and say hi.
Up next we head to Wakefield Park over the 27th and 28th of September for our Historic Spring event, and we can’t wait to get out there and do it all again!
