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Full Tilt by Colin Bond, with John Smailes
At Historic Vehicles we’ve got to know several Australian racing car drivers, over many years, but only a very few stand out as top racers, while also being good blokes. Colin Bond is one such star, whose modesty kept his light mostly hidden behind the hay bales.
Ranking competition drivers always causes argument, because there are many great drivers – male and female – and fans’ opinions vary wildly. However, if we make flexibility a criterion – the ability to win at the top level in hill climbs, rally cars, sports cars, open-wheelers and tin-tops – the field narrows considerably.
An international example is Stirling Moss – widely recognised as the greatest driver never to have won an F1 championship – who was a winner in all types of racing cars; likewise Jim Clark. (Also, how would you rank John Surtees, the only driver to win world championships on two and four wheels?)
Full Tilt is Colin Bond’s story, covering 40 years of motor racing with his bug-eyed Sprite in 1963, to his last competitive event, in the Tassie Targa, with Murray Walker, in 2003. But it’s much more than the typical racer’s biography, because Colin Bond wasn’t a ‘big-head’: pushed by a giant ego into a self-centred view of events.
Colin’s wider views of racing and the many people involved make compelling reading – boosted by inputs from John Smailes. ‘Smailesy’ was a motor sport journalist and commentator throughout Bondy’s career, with access to behind the scenes corporate info that’s hard to source.
The last 60 years have seen a dramatic change in motor sport, in Australia and around the world. Colin Bond was in the thick of it, from club event beginnings to top-level success in rallying and the Great Race.
Full Tilt traces the performances and the corporate manoeuvring throughout this changing scene and does so fearlessly.
The tone is set by F1 champion Alan Jones’ preface: “Brock and Moffat became icons, the pillars on which modern-day motor racing is built. Bond, arguably the most naturally talented of the trio, suffered subjugation, born of the others’ ambition”.
And there’s plenty more where that came from.
At Historic Vehicles we reckon that Full Tilt belongs on every motor sport enthusiast’s bookshelf: Allen & Unwin, ISBN 978 1 76147 227 5.
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