SANDOWN Park is several kilometres from the shoreline of Port Phillip Bay, but that hasn’t stopped several cars from finding themselves up to the axles – or further – in a body of water.
The venue is split by the Mile Creek, which the Melbourne Racing Club taps to help keep the horse racing course lush year-round.
The original version of the motor racing circuit featured far less barriers around its length, while the early layout also put cars at much greater risk of winding up in the drink.
Lex Davison was the first racer to come close to taking a mid-race swim.
The grandfather of Supercars racers Will and Alex shared a hulking 7-litre Ford Galaxie with aristocratic British racer Sir Gawaine Baillie in the 1964 Sandown Six Hour, the first edition of what eventually became the Sandown 500 enduro.
While the big American Ford went like the clappers down the straights, the corners at each end proved problematic for the brakes.
Nevertheless, Davison put the car on pole with an almost 10-second margin, and had the field over two laps down early in the second hour, only for brake troubles to rear their head.
First, Davison spun gently backwards into the barrier at the corner leading onto the back straight after the car’s first set of brake pads had worn through both the friction material and the backing plates.
With most of the car’s spares stranded on a delayed cargo ship and only a single set of pads left in their arsenal, the second set was fitted for Baillie to resume the race.
The Englishman drove at a conservative pace, as did Davison upon his return to the cockpit, but it wasn’t enough.
Just past the halfway mark, the Galaxie’s rear brakes failed passing the old pits, prompting Davison to slam down through the gears to try and slow down.
But he missed the shift to first, and the white machine crashed nose-first through the fence and wound up perched on the edge of a cliff face above the reservoir.
Or, as Davison famously explained upon his return to the pits: “The big bitch nearly killed me!”
While Davison didn’t quite make it into the briny deep of the dammed section of the creek, Wayne Negus did over a decade later.
The Western Australian was sharing Bob Forbes’ L34 Torana in the 1975 Sandown 250 enduro when he too had a brake failure.
Unlike Davison, whose Galaxie ate through wooden sleepers on its way out of the ballpark, Negus punched a Holden-shaped hole through the armco, tore through the foliage and came to rest in the water.
Negus emerged unhurt, but the Torana was a complete write-off.
“Wayne was lucky to be alive from that,” Forbes told Australian Muscle Car Magazine in recent years. “It was a pretty big shunt, even the fuel tank was wrecked.”
It’s not just one end of the old Sandown circuit that featured a water hazard.
Causeway corner, which led onto the front straight, was so named because it ran over the Mile Creek.
While the water crossing was straight, it immediately led into a high-speed left-hander under a bridge, making it one of the trickiest sections of the circuit.
This is where Alan Hamilton sustained a horror crash during the 1978 Australian Grand Prix, and where Kevin Bartlett broke an arm and a leg aboard an F5000 a year later.
Neither ended up in the drink, unlike their open-wheel rival John Walker several years earlier.
The future F5000 ace was piloting a Holden Torana XU-1 in the 1971 Sandown 250 when he found himself off the road in the early laps.
Missing the barriers, his orange Torana plunged down the embankment and became bogged sill-deep in the creek below.
But perhaps the most serious water-related accident happened during the circuit’s 1974 ATCC round, when Gordon Dickson’s little Honda Civic crashed on the second lap of the race.
“The car half-spun going into the Causeway and a little over-correction sent him towards the inside of the circuit,” Auto Action explained in its race report.
“He managed to miss the end of the concrete wall but clipped the hay bale protecting it and flipped into the slimy creek below.
“The car came to rest on its roof and under water, which filled the car immediately and made it impossible for Dickson to breathe.
“Somehow he managed to extract himself through a window and was soon being treated by doctors.
“Artificial respiration had to be applied by doctors as he had so much water in his lungs.”
It proved Dickson’s sole ATCC/SC start…
Kai Allen crosses the Causeway during Friday Supercars practice. Pic: Mark Walker.
The circuit was extensively renovated in 1984, and among the changes was a chicane added prior to the final corner in order to make for a straighter, slower and safer run across the causeway.