Originally Posted by Amlin
The Newcastle Showground track was indeed like Wayville, in fact the same circumference 550yds, Dad and I trained on the Showground back in the 70's and early eighties, as did many participants that are still in the game today, the current Newcastle club President Jim Bell, Cheryl and Dally Atkins, Steve Allars and Brian Elder, just to name a few, the Showground had something like 120 boxes and they were all mostly full. If you couldn't get a horse away from a standing start or shoe them well in those days you couldn't win a race.
The original track at Tamworth was even more difficult to negotiate, it was 502 yards around with an eleven foot drop ( approximately 3.3 metres) from the winning post to the commencement of the back straight, needless to say if there was a prang it was a good chance it was on the turn out of the home straight. I drove my first two winners there on Easter weekend 1975, I had just turned 17 and was lucky to be driving a horse that was a) better than those he was up against, and b) not only handled the track but thrived on it, he eventually had 5 starts on the track for 3 wins, 1 third and an unlucky 4th in the Tamworth Cup a couple of years later.
I made enquiries about the Wayville meeting as I was keen to take a couple of horses down just to relive some of the old stuff, but they told me they were restricting the driving to a group of "Professionals", the excuse being it would make the racing safer. No way I'm going all that way to let someone else drive my horses so I'm holding off a few months and going to WA, in particular Busselton for it's track and standing starts and also Broken Hill and others along the way and way back.
Thanks for sharing the clip Kyle, the old track was still pulling good crowds in '87 but still about half the people were getting in the late 60's and 70's, you could not fire a shotgun and hit nobody like you can today.
cheers,
Danno
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