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Information supplied by Neil Burston.Speedway was conducted at Roxby Downs from 1999 to 2002. Only bikes were raced there. The Roxby Downs Speedway started life in 1998 when another former sidecar rider, Chris Fraser and myself put on a couple of demonstrations at the local Car Club. Chris rode his late model 1000cc Yamaha and I rode my old ex Dennis Nash Honda 750. We also had a couple of Solo riders, Shannon Wearne & Ben Turner to do their thing on the car club track which has bends in both directions and is not suitable for speedway. At Roxby Downs, the Car Club and the Go Kart clubs have tracks on either side of a sandhill in close proximity to each other. The Kart track has lights on the infield so we thought it was not suitable for speedway particularly sidecars. I looked at building a track on the infield of the Car Club and also the horse racing track, so we invited Ivan Golding from MASA to come up to have a look and give us some recommendation's. Ivan liked the Car Club for short circuit racing, but not speedway, so I showed him the Kart track thinking it would be no good due to the lights, but he loved it and said he would licence it with a few modifications. That was the summer of 1998 . I got together with the Motocross & Kart club and came up with a proposal to run a speedway meeting in Feb 1999 . We had sponsorship from Universal Fasteners and ran the "Sandhill Shootout" for Solos and Sidecars .We ran a very successful meeting drawing riders from Adelaide, Mildura, Broken Hill & Tony Primmer from Sydney, who stayed for about eight months working in the area .The winner of the solos was won by Rusty Harrison from Tony Primmer and the Sidecars by Wayne Herne.
The Motocross club folded in 2000 so bike activity was nil. I started the Roxby Downs Motor Cycle Club with a group of about 12 others and it took us a while to get organised. At that stage I was the President of the Motor Cycle Club and we decided to run another meeting in 2002 which we was held in May of that year. This time we had sponsorship from the Eyre Auto Group in Whyalla. Again we had riders come from Adelaide, Broken Hill & Mildura for the "Eyre Auto Group Sandhill Shootout" for Solos and Sidecars. The winner of the solos was Mathew Wethers from Joel Parsons and Arlo Bujea and the Sidecars was won by Troy Davies from Colin Lyall and Shane Evans. In June 2002, I was offered another job on a 3 week on & 3 week off fly in fly out basis, which meant I was no longer in Roxby Downs, so I had to give up the Presidents position. The club was then controlled by mainly trail bike & motocross riders, who decided not to affiliate with MASA any more due to the insurance costs which = NO SPEEDWAY. The track was 323 metres long and made out of local sand, watered and rolled .
Photos that were taken by Tony Weber of the first and last meetings. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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