Drag Racing At Castlereagh

Early NSW drag racing photos from the Ian Liddell collection...

- Al O'toole

As a teenager growing up in Sydney’s north shore region, Ian Liddell became interested in roaring V8 engines and hot rods through attending meetings at the old Speedway Royale. It was there he heard about this crazy drag racing thing and decided to trek out to Castlereagh, some 40 miles from the city, to check it out. Luckily for hot rod and drag racing enthusiasts everywhere, Ian took his camera with him and snapped over 550 colour photos of drag racing from the mid to late-sixties. Apart from Ian uploading his collection to social media pages, these photographs have not been seen or published anywhere ever before.

He can’t remember the type of camera he used but Ian does recall it having a high-quality Zeiss lens and having to manually set the focus, light, aperture and speed settings when taking photographs. That’s something few people fully appreciate with today’s “point and shoot” digital SLR cameras that store images on memory cards capable of holding thousands of photos. Back then, Ian would take one or two rolls of film to each meeting, send them off for processing and wait a fortnight before even seeing if any of the pictures he’d taken had worked. For a teenager using sixties equipment, Ian really did a remarkable job of capturing these memories.