THE winner of the first major car race at Mount Panorama has played a starring role in the Historic Monaco Grand Prix, with Peter Whitehead’s 1938 Australian Grand Prix-winning ERA finishing second in the prewar Grand Prix Cars and Voiturettes race.
Whitehead acquired the 1.5-litre supercharged 6-cylinder ERA in 1936 and used it effectively in its native Great Britain, plus France and Italy, before the car headed Downunder.
With the Whitehead family involved in the wool industry, the business trip to Australia featured multiple side quests to venues such as Victoria’s Rob Roy Hillclimb, where he claimed the inaugural Australian Hillclimb Championship, Aspendale in bayside Melbourne, Canberra, 90-mile Beach, 7-mile Beach and Gerringong Beach for an Australian land speed record attempts, Parramatta Park and the inaugural meet at Mount Panorama.
With the event sharing track time with motorcycles, which had moved their Easter events from the nearby Vale Circuit, practice for the AGP was held from 6 to 8am on Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday, with evening practice contested at 4 to 6pm on Wednesday and Friday!
On race day, Whitehead started from scratch, some 34 minutes adrift of the first of 39 to depart the start line for the 40-lap, 150-mile race, and battling a heavily rutted gravel track surface, he ultimately claimed victory by nearly 90 seconds.
Beyond being the first event contested on the famed circuit, it was the first AGP held in New South Wales.
After being enlisted as a pilot in the Royal Air Force, Whitehead continued to achieve significant results in the post-war period.
After finishing third in the 1950 French Grand Prix, he won the 1951 24 Hours of Le Mans with Peter Walker in Jaguar C-Type, later returning to race in Australia and New Zealand, claiming significant finishes throughout.
Sadly, Whitehead died in a rallying accident in 1958.
The ERA, meanwhile, has passed through multiple hands in the subsequent decades, including Nick Mason from Pink Floyd, who was its custodian from 1980 through 2005.
The car, chassis R10B, actually returned to Australia twice: in 1978 to celebrate the original 1928 AGP on Phillip Island, and in 2015 for the Phillip Island Classic.
Brad Baker acquired the machine in 2022, and drove it to the podium placing over the weekend, gaining a position in sight of the line when race leader Richard Bradley parked at the final corner.
